The Micro-Chop Daily X #17 — Dibia$e’s Guest Selections
A Micro-Chop playlist featuring 10 hand-picked instrumentals — every single day for an entire year.
I don’t know if Dibia$e knows this or not, but he played a key role in the formation of Micro-Chop. The story goes a little something like this: In 2010 my sister heard me talking about how I wanted a sampler, but since I was in grad school, I was hesitant about purchasing one. Being a kind and thoughtful older sister, she decided to gift me an SP-303 for Christmas. It’s another story for another day, but the 303 was later traded in for an SP-555 — with my sister’s blessing of course.
During my final months of grad school I started looking up YouTube tutorials to help me learn the ropes of the 555 and stumbled upon Nick Tha 1da. Most of Nick’s videos were of him using the 303, but they were so interesting and inspiring that I watched all of them in the span of a day or two. That was a pivotal moment in transforming my interest in production into an obsession.
Flash forward to the summer of 2012 when I ended up interviewing Nick Tha 1da for my old blog/website. He put me on to Dibia$e, telling me that Dibi was unreal on the SP-303 and 404. I watched some live performances of him on YouTube, we got in touch, and I interviewed him in 2013.
Dibia$e and Nick gave me an introductory crash course on the beat scene by introducing my ears to people like 14KT and his upcoming release Nickel & Dimed. It wasn’t long before I was reading and watching every producer interview I could get my hands on while simultaneously absorbing the intricacies of different DAWs, drum machines, samplers, and synths.
My first blog/website went through a Micro-Chop-esque phase, but I did’t have to focus or know-how at the time to sustain it. I went through a burst of interviewing and writing in the spring/summer of 2013, but I lost my drive and focus when the school year started and my teaching job went back into full swing. It wasn’t until the summer of 2016 that I really dove back into writing head first.
When I created Micro-Chop as a way to organize my music articles and interviews, one of the first things I did was re-publish an edited version of my interview with Dibia$e. It quickly became one of the most-read articles on the site. 500+ articles later, it remains one of Micro-Chop’s most popular articles of all-time.
Through all of this, Dibia$e and I stayed in touch over the years. He remained a tireless advocate of other people’s music and champion of my written work. He really loves this beat shit more than most and constantly seeks out and shouts out undiscovered talent — a rarity for someone who is a long-revered part of an ultra-competitive subculture. Any time we catch up on the phone he’s always thinking of ways to help people with less reach than him and often seems to prioritize the greater good over his personal gain. These are noble traits in the modern music industry.
When I first thought of having different artists and writers guest-curate my Micro-Chop Daily X playlists, Dibia$e was one of the first people to come to mind. Given how much he has taught me over the years, it only seemed right to have his guest-curated playlist run first.
In typical Dibia$e fashion, he went above and beyond — putting together his playlist within an hour of being asked for one. The playlist is a great mix of familiar producers and ones who I’m just discovering now like Sndtrak, Zenan, and Theory Hazit. It seems that even long sessions mixing down his upcoming album can’t stop Dibi from shouting out other worthy producers and helping out a friend.
The seventeenth playlist in this series features the following artists, with each name hyperlinked to bring you directly to their Bandcamp, SoundCloud, or website: STLNDRMS, AshTreJenkins, Sndtrak, Zenan, DJ Spinna, Dibia$e, Dakim, ILLingsworth, P.U.D.G.E., Theory Hazit.
Be on the lookout for The Micro-Chop Daily X #18 dropping tomorrow.
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