You are the Music in MCLA

SmART Commons Blog Co-Editor, Mannie McBride, interviews up-and-coming MCLA artist Camdyn Reed about their current project. 

M: What inspired you to create this album in the first place? 

C: Well first off, hi! I am Camdyn Reed and I am working with my Advanced Studio Recording class of six members to create an album in which we are each creating one track, along with playing different engineering and producing roles for each other. The album is decidedly hip hop, and each artist is taking that theme/genre and creating a track to coalesce to the completed release. 

M: What artists have you taken inspiration from to create this album? 

C: Musical artists that have inspired my song for the album are; electronic art rock including Thom Yorke and Radiohead, electronic artists including Boards of Canada, hip hop including Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, and MF DOOM, electro-industrial including Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails, and krautrock including Kraftwerk and Neu. 

M: Who was your childhood musical influence and can we see them bleeding into this album? 

C: My track, along with the hip hop theme of our whole album, is an electro-industrial, heavily percussive song with a driving, dry beat. It has a staticky, nineties sound and is warmly nostalgic whilst being full of headbanging, blown out distortion. I grew up listening to a lot of stuff from 60s and 70s classic rock like Beatles, The Doors, and Janis Joplin to 90s grunge rock like Nirvana and Alice in Chains, and rap and hip hop such as Eminem, Cypress Hill, and Beastie Boys. Nirvana, Eminem, and Rob Zombie were what I banged on heavy rotation during my early teenage years which were hugely formative to my ever-expanding music taste and pool of influence. From there, in my mid-teens I got really into indie rock like Mac Demarco, Attic Abasement, Neutral Milk Hotel, Paul Baribeau, and Daniel Johnston, among many others.  

M: Is there an overall theme for the album? 

C: The project for this class is the album for which each of the students will be the artist for one track. We decided organically to have a theme to tie it all together and constrict our choice a bit. Hip hop was an easily agreed-upon theme because of the heterogeneity that the genre can have within one piece of art and we all have affinities for different hip hop music. 

M: What instruments did you use in the creation of this album?  

C: I used a midi keyboard, a drum set, microphones, a synth plugin on my computer, and a bunch of sampling to create this track. Each of my classmates’ songs are rather varied visions for hip-hop tracks, from smooth lo-fi chill jazz to harder synthy pounding beats. Some have rapping, others are lyric-less. With the exemplified variety and talent of the class headed by Brian Cook, the release is sure to house sounds you’ll love!