Sadistik – The Art of Dying
Aug 12, 2010 Opinion, Vincent dePaul
Let’s just put this up front: I’ve been mixing music for a long time. Back when I was a full-time engineer, I mixed audio simply for sustenance and rent. I was forced to listen to a wide variety of talent all compete to operate within the same narrow range of genre branding. This self-imposed compartmentalization was the most prevalent with hip-hop artists. The fear of emotional confidence or embracing an authentic presence overwhelmed a good 99% of the talent I’ve worked with over the span of fifteen years. The result was a dogmatic adherence to DASS Syndrome. (Different Artist, Same Shit) It is the Cult of the Genre and it’s a difficult conditioning to break. I held out hope for ten years against this flood of inanity, hoping that people would no longer be afraid of creative experimentation and emotional expression, but alas, the mob of plainness was too strong. I gave up on achieving fulfillment in the career of audio engineering and began down a road where such conformity and predictability were rewarded: computer programming. I could honestly tell you that after that experience, I genuinely hate music.
Now that my money woes are mostly solved, I can now stick to a strict policy of only working with artists that move me. Let me state that again: I will only work with creative individuals who boldly step down a road that has not been traveled before and do so in a powerful and convincing fashion. In other words, 99% of you self-styled “artists” need to pay close attention to the passion, fire, and the nuances of whatever internal chemical furnace that powers you. If you do this, it will be obvious and the world will resonate with you. If you don’t do this, it will be obvious and you will tempt the wrath and ire of those who don’t appreciate having their time wasted by the insecurities of others.
With that self-aggrandizing rant as the preface, you now have a context of why I chose to work with Sadistik on his newest album “The Art of Dying“. I’ve worked with Sadistik before on his mixtape from nearly a decade ago. It was called “The Return of Hip-Hop” and when I first heard him,. I honestly wasn’t all that impressed. As a freshman release, I could respect that he assembled a solid cast of rappers and producers to use their momentum to project himself forward. But, again, as a novice, his presence was muted and his performance was not synchronized with the courage of his passion. None the less, it was a fun album to work on, but my money was on Sadistik fading off into obscurity like so many before him.
Years later, he contacted me for his current project “The Art of Dying”. He sent me “Bed of Flowers” and “Black Rose” to do some preliminary mastering on. I fired up the ol’ HS-80’s and was struck silent as this beautiful music poured into my soul. There was no fucking way this was Sadistik. What the hell did I miss? I try to keep a decent tab on the emotional evolution of people I’ve done work with, but Sadistik literally came out of the void with the force of a freight train. As soon as the songs were done playing, I pleaded with him and demanded the right to work on his project. The songs started to come in and each one affected me in a new and unexpected way. The movement in “Divas De Los Muertos” was stunning. Kid Called Computer’s compositions were absolutely phenomenal. Sadistik found his furnace in this album and controlled it with an inspiring bravery.
He sent me hundreds of vocal files, most of which were punch-ins. Such obsession with detail and perfection are the signs of a person who is truly driven. I ran the whole album through my super-secret vocal shimmering contraptions. (20khz boost ran through an peak compressor) To emphasize the emotional barrage of these pieces, I applied a transparent AutoTune to his rapping performance to be in the key of each composition. While you cannot hear the AutoTune artifacts at all, an A/B between his original performance and the AutoTuned version adds a fulfilling musicality to everything. I did almost half of the strange and eerie vocal effects for the album. We even tried to add my penchant for screaming and Mike Omni’s bass line habit onto the album. We basically threw kitchen sinks from other dimensions at this project until everyone was equally moved. Precision. Passion. Rage. Creativity. These aspects are all captured on “The Art of Dying”.
I’m an extremely difficult person to impress, so if I’m begging you to be a part of your next project, then you’ve done something right.
Go review the masterpiece at SadistikMusic.com
Tags: art of dying, balancing act, Engineering, kid called computer, mixing, sadistik
The S-Word is not the new N-Word
Jan 17, 2009 Opinion
Christopher J. Lee, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, had an article about the racist undertones of the word “Socialist” published by the Christian Science Monitor. In it, he attempts to enforce the growing myth that “Socialist” is really code word for “Nigger” and that any disagreement with this perception automatically makes you racist. Never one to standby and watch history be expediently rewritten for the sake of Federally-dictated morality, I had contacted him about his bout of intellectual dishonesty.
The Email
The problem with history specialists is the problem with all specialism: Adaptation renders models obsolete. When new data is discovered, the specialist seeks to reshape the information within the context of his field. The specialist then becomes dependant upon such results. Therefore, when new events occur that are outside the realm of specialist’s interpretation, the event becomes the foundation of mangled predictions. Outsiders then question the reliability of the specialist. The specialist then has to make a choice: continue along the comfortable lines of established protocol and doctrine regardless of what results it may generate or begin the long, annoying process of refactoring to stay relevant.
Our History with Socialism
Most Leftwing historians are either wildly ignorant to the Venona Project or viciously opposed to it. The Project reveals the names, acts, and dates of nearly 49% of White House interactions with the Soviets since the our involvement in World War II. The most important of these people is an economist named Harry Dexter White. He was the senior U.S. Treasury department official under the Roosevelt administration. White was also a Keynesian. No, I stand corrected, he was more than a Keynesian. If you look up any picture of John Maynard Keynes, chances are, you will find the picture of the rather tall Keynes hunching over with a wry overly-expressed smile facing a man in glasses with his arms folded. The man in glasses is Harry Dexter White. Both men pulled serious influence at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. White also had an overarching hand in the creation of the IMF and the World Bank serving as a director. (Appointed by Truman after being warned that White was a Communist agent) If you are unfamiliar with Keynes, this little snippet from his End of Laissez-Faire from 1926 (http://www.panarchy.org/keynes/laissezfaire.1926.html) should help put his objectives into perspective. This document serves as the klaxon call for a unified front designed to promote the ideals of Keynesian policy… the same policies we call “Socialism” today.
White had been in direct contact with the Soviets before, during, and after WWII. White had managed to issue the Morgenthau Plan to the Soviets before issuing it to his own subordinates, appoint all sorts of pro-Soviet sympathizers into positions of power without ever having to answer to anyone for approval, and even stopped Chiang Kai-Shek’s request for a $200 million dollar loan to help the Nationalists take on the Soviet-funded Marxists in China. This isn’t Right-Wing neoconservative nonsense. Time Magazine did a report on him back in 1953. (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,860101,00.html)
Comintern was very real, very effective, and managed to infiltrate the highest levels of not only our government, but served as the foundations of the international governing bodies that we live under today. The same governing bodies that your specialist field of African history should hopefully be fully versed in. (specifically the IMF, the World Bank, and the trillions in foreign aid Africa has received since that 1950s)
How Socialism was inflicted on others
The Soviet’s favorite method was to provide funding and material support to those at the lowest rung of a social order within a state they aimed to subvert. (Maoist China being the most successful result of this doctrine) By 1955, Khrushchev managed to take advantage of the African Independence movement and merged the perception that post-colonialism and Marxism are naturally sympathetic with one another. As a result, the Soviets had lavishly provided military support and aid for African nations. (Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa as the crown jewels of Soviet intervention) Institutional artifacts of this effort still remain, such as the People’s Friendship University of Russia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peoples%27_Friendship_University_of_Russia)
Combine this with the African-American addiction to voting for the then highly-suspect and very pro-Stalin Democrat (80% of the African American vote since 1933 and still holding!) and it’s not hard to make the conclusion to see how modern African-American unrest could be attributed to long-term and highly-successful Soviet agitation. (I’m sure it didn’t help that the Black Panthers were running around with Mao’s Little Red Book in hand)
A Request to Refactor
To say that a person of your learning can single-handedly attribute all relationships between African-American unrest and Socialism as nothing more than “racism” calls your ability to research your own field into severe question. To continue to whine about Joe McCarthy without so much as mentioning Alger Hiss or Harry Dexter White reveals how heavily your political bias influences your conclusions. If you’d rather manufacture pseudo-psychological conditions such as “racial entitlement” as your method of integrating new data in your specialist logic instead of refactoring your logic to properly represent the data, then help me understand your preferences.
Tags: african liberation, history, leftwing, liberal, liberation theology, pravda, pro-russian, revisionism, socialist