
The Micro-Chop Daily X #10 — Street Corner Music Edition
A Micro-Chop playlist featuring 10 hand-picked instrumentals — every single day for an entire year.
I forget exactly when Street Corner Music founder House Shoes and I first connected, but we’d interacted on Twitter a few times over the years before I launched Micro-Chop in the summer of 2016. Shoes was one of the site’s earliest supporters when it still had zero visibility and he — along with Easy Mo Bee —kindly helped me launch the producer interviews that have helped the site grow to where it is today.
Since founding Street Corner Music in 2013 to pay homage to a record store he used to work for, Shoes has used his platform to curate and share a remarkable catalog of mostly-instrumental releases. Always demonstrating a keen ear and a keen eye for producers who deserve far more attention than they’re getting, Shoes’ Street Corner roster has a list of impressive accomplishments under their belt since the formation of the label. Among other feats, Stro Elliot was named as an official member of the legendary Roots crew, D.R.U.G.S Beats earned himself a Grammy nomination for his work with Dr. Dre after Dre heard The Gift: Volume Ten, and ILLingsworth produced a track on Phonte’s latest project.
I also dig the work habits of the Street Corner Music producers, the stories behind many of their releases, and the general aesthetic of the label. D.R.U.G.S BEATS made a 50-instrumental beat tape with his MPC, a VHS tape, and his VCR.
Juicy The Emissary composed an entire album out of 59 Kmart-issued cassette tapes from the 80s and 90s.
14KT taught himself how to make beats with pause-tapes and Cool Edit Pro while spitting his earliest raps through a busted pair of headphones.
And Stro Elliot made “Soul II Stro” — his most-famous song — by accident while he was messing around with the features of his ASR-X sampler.
Whether you want to do a deep Street Corner Music dive and read all of these articles, or you’re just here for some new music, I strongly recommend today’s Micro-Chop Daily X. If you find yourself digging it, I also made a 104-beat Street Corner Music playlist this summer.
The tenth playlist in the Micro-Chop Daily X series features the following artists, with each name hyperlinked to bring you directly to their Bandcamp, SoundCloud, or website: 14KT, Denmark Vessey, ILLingsworth, Foisey., Swarvy, Nameless, D.R.U.G.S Beats, Tuamie, House Shoes, Stro Elliot.
Be on the lookout for The Micro-Chop Daily X #11 dropping tomorrow.
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