Elemental Zazen told me today that he planned on never having a guest appearance from another rapper on one of his records. We had 4 guest vocal appearances on Gnotes' 2007 album Rhymes and Beans: Noni Kai, Afro DZ ak, Kabir, and Elemental Zazen. We'd already worked with Afro and Kabir on Gnotes' previous album Inthrumental, and we knew Noni through Afro's affiliation with the Eclectic Collective. We knew of Zazen since back in 2004, when he and Gnotes both released their debut albums, The Adolescent Weapon and Broken Spoke.
The first time Gnotes and Zazen actually started politricking was at Kabir's birthday party in 2006, when Zazen said he was planning on starting a live band for his shows. At the time, Zazen was in re-building mode, trying to get his sophomore album back on track after his house burned down. Gnotes ended up playing guitar in Zazen's band, which also featured Eric Hagland on drums, Todd Thurheimer on bass, and DJ Slipwax. Though Zazen's record(ed) music is breakbeat boombap oldschool hip-hop, his concerts are bloody-nose moshpit bangers, like this one from the Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge, MA:
The fist time I met Zazen was in March 2007 at the Gnotes/Glue show in Brighton, right near my old Boston College stomping grounds. I was in town for a few weeks to finish-up Rhymes and Beats with Gnotes, who had just made a new beat he wanted to collabo with Zazen. They ended up recording the song ("Nemesis") during a Somerville power outage (apagón), racing to record Zazen's verse before they ran out of phantom power from the Mac's battery.
Between recording "Nemesis" in June and the song's release in October, Zazen was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumor which required immediate surgery. After losing most his worldly possessions in the house fire, Zazen was confronting his own imminent death at 24 years old. He survived the surgery and came home with an urgent appreciation of life, and a gnarly dome scar:
After his recovery, Zazen went back on tour with his band and back into the studio with his engineer/producer J.Ferra to finish the album, The Glass Should Be Full, which is being released through Gnawledge Records on May 22, 2008. Gnotes plays guitar and/or bass on 3 of the 11 tracks, as well as producing one of the beats, with the others coming from Kno (from the Cunninlynguists), Maker (from Glue), Joe Beats (from Non-Prophets), Scroll, J.Ferra, Confidence and Elemental Zazen.
Today I missed out on one of my favorite things in life: Zazen went to Framingham and picked up the first 1,000 CDs, which will get sent out to press and radio stations (and given to Mom). With our previous 4 releases, I rolled out to Nimbit with Gnotes and came home with a trunk kinda low with digipacks. But, alas, I'm stuck in Granada . . .
0 comments:
Post a Comment