SETTING UP SHOP
Rapper Lost Art might be taking the name from the way he grew up—born in Long Beach and from then on split-second stints every single city in Orange County that kept him perpetually disoriented till the age of majority. “How it affected me? Shit—I don’t have any friends I really grew up with,” he says. “All my friendships are established since I was 18. I know so many people without knowing them, you know?” As constants come, he had a grandmother in Santa Ana and a hip-hop collection that started with gangsta rap he’d buy at various Towers and—after he heard “Can I Kick It?”—reassembled itself around every golden-era bona-fide each coast would produce. And so his new second album Lost Articles: Escape From La La Land grants a little salute to each: thirteen tracks of heartfelt verses and a kid’s-eye-view of the Santa Ana water tower on the cover. Maybe you could call it a homecoming. Or—though it’s his second full-length—an introduction.
Articles—another respectable entry in local hip-hop collective Technicali’s discography, sitting nicely alongside fellow travelers LD and Ariano, LMNO, 2MEX and Hochii—was finished by inches, Art says now as he’s preparing the Long Beach release party for an album whose first single (“I Gotta Rhyme”) was sliding out in August of 2006 but which won’t be completely official until this weekend. In between—and with a break when Art had a daughter—he and principal producer LD cut and recut about 40 tracks, sifting weekly to make Lost Articles what Art calls “an emotional rollercoaster!” The two years of woodshedding—like taping reference freestyles in LD’s living room when the usual garage studio was temporarily out of commission—led to a little luxurious experimentation, Art says.
LD yanked everything but the Sedaka sample from “I Gotta Rhyme” and replaced it with live instrumentation, a Roots-y move matched by the 70-plus bar freestyle (also inspired by Black Thought, says Art, though it sounds closer to Organized Konfusion) re-recorded as the “Dynamic Bullies” after a few tiny corrections. With LD, says Art, “we can go in with nothing—a blank canvas—and he’ll find a sample he likes and tailor it to the keys, and then produce around it and remove it, and while he’s doing that I’m writing. And then we can record it.”
LD’s production—already preternaturally accomplished enough to rank production work with GZA, Kool G Rap, Black Milk and Prince Po—climbs up a level on Lost Articles, especially on the inside-outted “Gotta Rhyme,” which approaches vintage Dre with its persistent melody and g-funk low end. Technicali associate Trek Life turns in a standout cameo—agile offbeat/onbeat verses like prime Masta Ace or Sadat X—and Lost Art tests out a few different styles on songs like the rattling competition-speed “Life is a Battle,” the spaced-out spiel “Dynamic Bullies” and the why-we-fight anthem “Rhyme,” which lays out some of the self-analysis that Technicali has never been shy about. Songs like “Settin Up Shop,” “Rhyme” and “Lab Meditations”—with Ariano unrolling his usual especially weathered sort of authority—dissect the inner and outer life of the hip-hop MC; it’s a topic that can be as big or as small as the author makes it, but Lost Articles matches soul to the solipsism.
He hopes—he says humbly—to be as much poet as B-boy, but he wants to pace himself, too. There are large parts of his life that aren’t on this album of songs about writing songs, he says—but that’s because this is just a first step. He’s still thinking about the next place he’ll settle down for a while: “For now, I just want them used to me—what I bring lyrically,” he says. “Then we’ll start making people cry!”
The Lost Art:Escape from LaLa Land
THE NEW SINGLE, "I GOTTA RHYME", TAKEN FROM THE FULL LENGTH LP, "LOST ARTICLES: Escape From La La Land". THE "ARTICLES" WILL BE OUT July 08'. CLICK ON THE LINK TO DOWNLOAD FOR FREE GET THE BONUS TRACK, "DYNAMIC BULLIES"!
CLICK ON THE LINK TO DOWNLOAD3 FREE SONGS TAKEN FROM THE LOST ARTICLES: ESCAPE FROM LA LA LAND
Technicali hip-hop crew gets another one out into the world: nimble MC the Lost Art, whose “I Gotta Rhyme” (produced by HB’s unstoppable LD) gets a video with a pretty iconic moment that finds Lost Art bouncing thought verse after verse from one (admittedly supportive) kid in what looks like a Starbucks courtyard – you know, you take the place you get and make something with it, right? “Gotta Rhyme” is one of the statement-of-identity/state of the art songs, but Lost Art puts it through with obvious heartfelt honesty and on-point percussive delivery that pins a hard consonant to every snare hit- its got a sparks-on-the-rails freestyle momentum (underscored especially by LD’s understated beat), but Lost Arts got it plotted down to the punctuation marks, making “Rhyme: a song that doesn’t ever give itself enough of a break to get boring, Flip “Find the Strength” (featuring LMNO and Ariano) and find the soul searcher.
Fans of flagship locals like the Visionaries will already find a lot to like about the Lost Art – He’s got the humor, the humility and the agility that give a good MC something to say.
