manger on mcnichols

In the year 2000, I moved to Chalmers on the eastside of Detroit. With an Esonic EPS, and a Roland VS 1880, I started a studio in my mother’s basement just a block from the Detroit River. The first order of business was engineering a compilation my boy Murf was producing. One day he had a session with Idol. The song was taking longer than usual for Idol to lay. We attributed this to the fact that his attention was divided between the song and the woman he brought along with him. He also brought along his little brother and his friend who were both about 17, 18 years old. As the beat was playing, Murf heard his brother’s friend rapping under his breath and asked to hear what he was saying. Murf turns to Idol for the green light, one take and 5 minutes later, Boldy had his first song. From this point, Boldy was in my basement recording or in the streets.

For the next 5 years or so, he would come and record to beats he brought while I was working on the Resurget Cineribus album. When I finished Resurget, with all of it’s wild composition,  I was interested in just making some “beats” again. By 2007, I had some in the stash and Boldy asked to rap to them. We recorded the first song “Die Young” and thought lets keep going. Him and I both were people that did not create music to be in the industry, or for an audience. We created for ourselves solely, and still do. We are not careerists with music, but culturalists documenting the Detroit experiences that we have absorbed from it’s deepest of trenches, sometimes converting personal trauma into collective catharsis. This catharsis is what we shared with loved ones with similar symptoms, and we were good with that.