This month’s mix comes courtesy of MSSNGLYPH (formerly Nard Inc), a founding member of MG Productions, a collective and diy studio out of Portland. I caught up with MSSNGLYPH to find out more.
N: How did MG Productions come about?
M: MG Productions is the culmination of a life long friendship between me, MSSNGLYPH, and Forrest Carder-Wynn, aka A$HITAKA. We have been in bands together since grade school, and messing around with sequencers and drum machines independently since High School. Music has always been a very important and crucial aspect of our lives, and in the last year or so have really manifested our own style and feel. The music coming out of MG is as diverse as our influences. With a great admiration with beat maker giants such as J-Dilla and Madlib, but also more contemporary producer like Chuck Inglish and Harry Fraud, the instrumentals range from soulful, maybe sampling some Anita baker, to trap, with immaculate 808 compression. The production from MG is not solely hip-hop oriented, but also electronic with influences like Dark0 and Suicide Year. We love good music of all genres, meaning anything could come out of our studio, just as long as it’s good
N: Tell us more about your studio, I heard you just built it in your basement and started a local collaborative process from there?
M: The main purpose of building a studio was to create a space of shared creativity, a home base for squad to smoke their blunts and create their own sound. Creating a studio was as much as an attempt to explore music as it was an excuse to appease the nerdy gear head inside me. On the surface, there is little difference between the studio and my physics lab, a group of people collaborating over oscillators and other equipment, but one has more of a weed haze to it. Similar to a lab, he main purpose of building the studio was to create a space of shared creativity, a home base for squad to smoke their blunts and create their own sound. Recording sessions are a group activity, so almost everything is a collab. A$HITAKA is by any measure is prolific right now in the amount of work he’s putting out, both instrumentals and verses. With all this raw and new material, we have multiple MCs getting opportunity to a wide variety of quality instrumentals and features.
N: How important is keeping local scenes alive in this digital age?
M: The “hip-hop scene” as an abstraction doesn’t really exist in Portland. That being said, with DAWs like Ableton and FL studios being so easily available {*torrents*} to any kid with a laptop beat-making, from grime to vaporwave to hip-hop, does exist here. The music scene in Portland isn’t big enough to support separated scenes. Interestingly, we are most associated with the rock and punk scene. The guys at Oligopolis Records have been an inspiration for other locals looking to help create a scene here. Music was meant to be shared, both in the creative process and in listening, so we at MG productions all make an effort to be apart of and support the local music community.
N: Who are the local artists ou’re particularly excited by right now?
M: Shouts out to all the people that helped make this music, MCs Golim, Moblin God, and Harvee Bird have all been spitting fire. DJ CPLUSPLUS has been invaluable help in all my audio pursuits. Also check out HYPERION, we are about to drop a collab project with him and he’s been holding down physicist-producer game with me.
N: Can you tell us a bit more about the mix?
The mix you are listening to is meant to be a sampler of what goes on in the studio at MG production. It has a diverse set of genres, but was created to emulate the weed and yerba mate fueled studio sessions. A taste of all the artists in our core squad is represented here.
Find us at https://soundcloud.com/mygoonspdx
Neoterika 