Broken Wax: Slum Villiage “Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 1″
I like looking for unreleased albums or albums made before an artist rose to cult status/hit mainstream. These albums show the roots (no ?uestlove) of an artist usually. It displays a lot of influences from other artist.
I wasn’t big on Slum Villiage until I heard A Tribe Called Quest’s “The Love Movement Lp”. I found out Dilla helped with the production and I had to track down everything he has ever made. The first thing that came up was Slum Village “Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 2″. Me being me, I had to hear the first one so I went searching for that.
Surprisingly, it didn’t take that long. I downloaded it and burned it onto a cd. I was working at CitiFinancial on an internship doing coding. Everyday I would listen to a new cd.
I popped in “Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 1″ and didn’t listen to another cd until my internship ended there.
The beats on “Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 1″ are sample heavy. The way Dilla chose to chop his samples into weird orchastrations still amazes me. The drums on here still make me nod.
Slum Village brings the pain on the lyrics too. T3, Baatin, and Dilla are were not the most lyric but they all managed to say a lot of real shit. The cd is mainly about love and it helped me cope with the hoes I was dealing with at the time. “You got to estimate yo fate”
I think the best song on there besides all of the Fantastic Interludes is the remix to “Look of Love”. That looped piano sample along with a fresh vocal sample + cracked drums = a win.
I had my Boss Sp 505 for a while when I heard this but I still couldn’t get my snares to crack like that. I always envied the drum programming on the cd. The sounds and the placement are perfect.
I tried to emulate a lot of the basslines from this cd too. I was filtering like a mad man I tell you! Even now I look at this cd when I can’t get drum ideas or basslines.
I heard that Dilla made the entire cd on a MPC 2000. I also heard that they rapped into the MPC. Don’t hold me to it just something I heard.
But Slum Village “Fan-Tas-Tic, Vol. 1″ is nuts. Straight Planters, god.
