Tilted, Sampled, and Scored: Producer Ben Rubin on the Analog Players Society’s Exploration of Hip-Hop’s Golden Age

It is no secret that 2020 has been a year of landmark change. The music community hangs on as tectonic plates shift beneath our feet and disturbed sediment seeks new settling places. It is fitting then that the music of TILTED (Ropeadope Records, 2020) constitutes both a sideways glance at the tumult and a rebirth for Brooklyn-based recording collective Analog Players Society (APS).  APS has been dormant since 2014, in large part due to producer/founder Amon Drum being preoccupied with another project, the design and construction of The Bridge Studio in Williamsburg, New York. The studio marks the culmination of years of work for Amon and his wife/COO Mona Kayhan after their relocation from The Hook Studios where APS was originally born.

The first release in a two-part series, TILTED documents a three-hour live session between a power quartet of tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin, pianist Orrin Evans, bassist Dezron Douglas, and drummer Eric McPherson. Producers Amon Drum and Ben Rubin worked to capture live, improvised takes on two standards, Monk’s “Epistrophy” and Jobim’s “One Note Samba”. The session also generated raw sample material for a subsequent release slated for October, Soundtrack for a Nonexistent Film (Ropeadope Records, 2020), an homage to golden-era hip-hop that promises “cinematic, loop-based, instrumental, beat-driven fractal art”. For now, what we have is a spontaneous and exploratory session balancing edginess and playfulness grounded in a seriously head-nod-worthy foundation. 

The two standards and a third, looser original: “Freedom is, But a Fraction of Humanity!” are a testament to the ears and imaginations of the performers and engineers alike. Douglas and McPherson combine essential, bottom-heavy grooves with an intelligent sense of shading and dynamics in a way befitting one of the most in-demand drum/bass duos on the New York scene. These are ideal conditions for McCaslin and Evans to explore. Both vets approach the situation with a profound sense of melody and thematic development. Evans assumes a textural and supportive role on “One Note Samba”, and beneath the tenor, the piano trio evokes the kind of 70s Ahmad Jamal loop you might find sampled on a 90s hip-hop classic. On “Epistrophy,” Evans becomes more conversational, speaking in monophonic loops in tenor counterpoint to the base, and doubling them on toy piano. Meanwhile, McCaslin explores the full timbral range of the saxophone. A toy piano jangles pleasantly with a range of cymbal textures from McPherson. The harmonic release of the bridge is given extra weight when the piano explodes into a full voicing, sending the tenor flying in new melodic directions.

As Amon explains, “Freedom is, But a Fraction of Humanity!” was a spur of the moment event. “Orrin was working something out on the piano while we were having a conversation. And then the other guys hopped in. With our motto at The Bridge Studio being ‘always rollin,’ it really paid off in this session.” The track is the most open of the three and presents edgier developments on the ethos of the first two tracks. The texture is also more ambitious, with the toy piano returning and different reverbs adding subtle hues to the vibe. Evans stretches out fully on this track with Don Pullen-esque flurries that urge McPherson to let off steam, but no intensity is sacrificed when the tune settles into a lower dynamic. The falling action runs down a loop recalling Makaya McCraven’s Universal Beings or a low-key Glasper interlude, a kind of segue into the more loop-based paradigm of part two.

Producer Ben Rubin sat down with PostGenre to discuss the project’s backstory, optimal MCs for future remixes, and the sociopolitical charge behind the project and his concurrent releases with McCaslin. 

PostGenre: I would love to get the backstory about how you linked up with Amon Drum and the rebirth of the Analog Players Society. 

Ben Rubin: Yeah! Amon and I were introduced by a mutual friend about five or six years ago. When I met him, he was between studios. I think I went to his birthday party with this friend of ours, who used to manage Mudville, a band I had about ten or fifteen years ago. We became friends and he started building this studio, The Bridge. Because he was building it more or less by himself with one other dude, it took about 3 years. During that time, it went from a gray concrete former bean sprout factory to an insanely beautiful sounding and looking recording studio with the only Harrison 4032 that I know of in New York City –  the same desk model that Thriller (Epic Records, 1982) was made on. The studio was really needed because a lot of studios have closed, but also kind of, you know, I’ll say daring! 

Overtime, Amon and I became friends and decided we needed to record something together. It turned into an idea to just get some cats into the studio, give them not too much guidance, roll some tape, and see what happens. I’ll supremely admit I stole the idea from De La Soul, who made their last record that way. They put some cats in the studio for like 3 weeks and just let them play.  We cut that down to three hours! [chuckles]. Of course, this meant we needed the highest level of musicians we could find.

PG: Right, and the concept particularly resonates now against the backdrop of the pandemic because we’re all trying to figure out how to splice up what we have and make new functional ways of sharing and creating things.

BR: Yeah I love that concept. It’s funny because we started it – we tracked it April 2019 but Amon’s studio got so busy that it wasn’t until the pandemic came along that he had any time to work on it.

PG:  What can you tell us about the session?

BR: Basically, I made 4 phone calls and got each of them to agree to come to our studio and work on this record with us. I was in such a position that I was able to get everyone in the room and I picked a couple of tunes that I thought would lend themselves to possible chopping up later, harmonically and/or rhythmically. That’s why I chose “Epistrophy” and “One Note Samba,” both of which are on TILTED obviously. I picked those two tunes first because they had some sonic aspects I was looking for and secondly because I knew everyone would know them.

PG: And that familiarity would allow them to be freer in their approach, too.

BR: Exactly. Even though this wasn’t an actual band – like, I put this band together, they’ve all played together in various combinations, but not as a formal group of the four of them. For the future, I want this to be an ongoing series, I am interested in generating different results by working with different cats or even the same cats every time but taking different approaches. 

PG: I know you and Amon each produced a side of Soundtrack. Was there much back and forth in that production process, or if you kind of surprise each other?

BR: We mostly surprised each other, but that was largely because of the circumstances. The albums weren’t made the way we originally intended  – Amon ended up mixing TILTED and did a fantastic job, but we originally planned to be in the room and mix it together like we usually do when we make records. Of course, with the pandemic, we couldn’t do that. So there wasn’t as much of a more direct dialogue. So, the ideas for the sides are a little different and not as unified as they otherwise could be. The soundtrack idea was Amon’s, he came up with the title, and his is more like a movie soundtrack. 

As for mine, I was just going for the idea of a  “hip-hop record.” I still hope to get some MCs on these tracks sometime soon.

PG: Who would you put on these?

BR: Well, it needs to be not just someone I want but also someone who will fit in the APS vibe. My first choice would be someone like Del, Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), or Pharoahe Monch. I’m old, so that’s my era. I also love the idea of someone adding some socially conscious lyrics to it. 

PG: Speaking of golden-era kind of hip-hop sampling; that idiom to me – the mystique of how you choose and manipulate the sample obviously is so huge. I’m curious to hear when you were combing through this raw live session what were you listening for in terms of picking those chops and things?

BR: The only direction I gave the band besides asking them to play those two songs was that I told Eric to just play boom-bap. And that pretty much gave us – after that, you know, we were looking to make loop-based records. 

PG: Yours is definitely more grounded in that beat tape kind of vibe. It almost makes me think of Speakerboxxx/Love Below (Arista, 2003) in terms of that conceptual dichotomy.

BR: Interesting, I like that! Yeah so the plan on my side is to eventually release some singles, and I don’t know if we’ll get somebody. I haven’t gotten that together yet, but that is coming. Since I’ve kept that in mind, a lot of my tracks are probably emptier than they would have been otherwise. There was a lot more performance by Donny that I could have used, for example. But  I’m also glad it was a short session because, with dudes like that, everything could have been used! 

Amon and I both separately listened to the session at home and then got together to listen to it and look for cool little loops and beats. We knew we wanted a boom-bappish DJ Premier vibe. So, we had some back and forth about which loops to use. But we also wanted to keep them separate because I just think it’s interesting how many different kinds of sounds and vibes we got out of the same two hours of music. We got those two great takes of those standards. The third tune,  “Freedom is but a Fraction of Humanity,” was just an improvisation that Dezron Douglas named.

PG: In some ways, TILTED is a testament to capturing the raw material as best you can and not really even having to do – only kind of doing more subtle stuff in the box. How do you see your role as a producer?

BR: My job was just to kind of set it up and and get the floodgates open. I’ve done enough sessions that I know that I don’t want the musicians thinking about much of anything if possible, but certainly, I want them to know that it’s going down on tape perfectly. Amon is a fantastic engineer, so that part is easy. 

PG: The mixes sound amazing! Opening the floodgates… I like that you guys used the whole flood, you know? Like sometimes you find Premier using an Ahmad Jamal sample or something and you hear the original record and you’re like damn, I wish he used this whole thing!

BR: Well, that’s why I kind of wanted to release TILTED after Soundtrack but there were a few reasons we changed it. I kind of wanted people to hear the Soundtrack stuff first and get used to it and then hear the source material and be like “oh!”, kind of along the lines of what you’re saying. That probably will happen naturally as I suspect Soundtrack will probably reach more people. I like the idea of people hearing how the same sample is used on both sides but to very different effect. I think there are a few examples of that where we use the same part.

PG: You also recently produced McCaslin’s single “Reckoning,” which has a similar vibe to Soundtrack. Do you feel the work on Soundtrack influenced it?

BR: Yeah. “Reckoning” fed off of that directly because we were really working hard on it in May and June, right in the thick of things on Soundtrack. But “Reckoning” was built off of a midi file Donny sent me of the whole arrangement. The file had piano chords, that riff going through the whole thing, and a bass part which I more or less kept. There was maybe one other thing with no sounds attached to it. I  just put sounds on it and went from there. Once I put that delay on that piano, it was done. The samples are from an incident in Fort Lauderdale where this black female lieutenant is stopping her subordinate white police officers from kicking the shit out of somebody for no reason. It was a few months ago now but that’s where that came from and that gave it a lot of energy. “Reckoning” was a standalone single but there will be more.

The Analog Players Society’s TILTED is now available on Ropeadope Records. Soundtrack to a Nonexistent Film will be released on October 30, 2020.

More information on The Bridge Studio can be found here.

Additional information on Ben Rubin is available here.