“My friend Jeff and I were fourteen years old when we first started creating music from samples. This would be the beginning of a never-ending quest for sounds.”
“We would sample from anything, tapes, CDs, records, VHS—it didn’t matter. It helped that most of my friends and I could find stacks of vinyl in our attics or basements. There were a couple of used record stores on an avenue between our two houses. We dug exclusively in the dollar bins, buying records purely based on cover art.
I noticed that vinyl sounded different right away from looping break beats and riffs. I’d hear the space between each instrument, the dynamic range in the whole mix, the thumpy low end and scratchy highs.
Because we only bought the cheap records, they sounded like shit. We learned to embrace the crackles, even using them in the mix. The pops and clicks would add their own percussion to a short loop.
Later on, during my punk years in high school I found myself digging through a different flavor of vinyl. I loved 7”s for the DIY factor. Mail ordering from indie labels and sometimes buying straight from bands themselves made being an actual ‘published’ musician seem so much more attainable.
A local record shop called Mother Records would pretty much press up a single for any Tacoma band that had at least two cool songs. To this day I keep this grassroots approach to releasing music, recalling how important that connection is.”
—Eliot Lipp
Eliot Lipp’s ninth studio album, Come to Life is in stores now.
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