No Static by Unseen Legion-The Beats
When we were trying to make beats in 1992, we knew that the future of music was in computers, and really it was already here. My man Barry, who I worked with at John's Grocery, showed me this program called SoundEdit on his Apple computer. When I took Prose over there to see how to use it, we both saw the amazing potential, but we didn't have a computer. I had Barry give me a hard disc copy and the plan was set in motion...to become digital.
When we finally did get a computer, it had no monitor, so the homie Dawit used his student discount and charge card to hook it up. Dawit was a student from Kenya who lived across the street from the house where most of the crew, and their homies, and some cousins lived, at 112 E. Davenport. That crib was always crackin, with at least 13 people living in the 6 bedroom house. Their are too many stories from this house to sum it up here, so we will leave that for another time.
"No Static" is the first beat I made with the computer and program on a fall afternoon in a basement room of that house. The drums were sampled from a beat on our Alesis SR-16 drum machine called "What Can U DO?"- programmed by Prose. The rest was samples from records- I think Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Jean-Luc Ponty, and Steely Dan. The vocal sample has many meanings behind it, but none more intentional than a tongue-in-cheek shout out to the 8-bit sound that we were working with that was based in a foundation of static. Also giving a nod to the record static pops, as well as trying to make a song that was just fun to listen to with the crew, with no static at all.
-DJ Earl-E
