This album was my first foray into instrumental hip-hop, and if you listen to it with ears primed for that, it's a pretty bad record...it would take an absolutely monstrous MC to save some of this shit (I obviously got much better...which is of course why I'm comfortable panning this now). On the other hand, I realized that if I put this record on and pretend I'm listening to some weird post-rock record it's really not that bad...it's kinda just on some OTHER shit. I thought I was making hip-hop, and it came out like this...so what is "this"?

This was recorded between 2000-2002 using legions of cassettes and a 4-track that I toted around to a bunch of friend's houses and recorded little bits of stuff on whatever instruments they had laying around. Then I would just take the tapes of whatever I got home and try to turn it into something. A massive contributor to this process was Paul Kahlil Saab, who lent his drum work to a large portion of this.

Anyway, when I thought I had a full album ready Paul and I packed up the tapes and 4-track and did the 10-hour I-70 snoozer to Velvet Recording in Boulder, CO where Tom was working at the time and bestowed the horrible job of mixing this thing onto him. It was a nightmare because every time we'd play one of the 4 tracks of each song into Pro Tools there would be tape stretch and nothing would line up when we put it all together...it was incalculably awful and tedious. But Tom made it sound amazing, as is his custom (love you bro). After that, I got some wicked artwork knocked out by Travis Tillberg and the disasterpiece hit the streets in a (very, very) limited run in the summer of '02.

As much as I wince at this record now, there are some pretty amazing moments where I'm like, "Oooooh...I should snip that little bit out and make something even better with it", but then I'm reminded that if this is truly hip-hop, that's someone else's job...but again, pretty sure this isn't truly hip-hop.

So for no particular reason other than Bandcamp making it easy to do, here it is!..Natty D phase I... whatever it is.