THE GRIND: Juicy The Emissary – Attention Kmart Choppers (Side A)
A new instrumental hip-hop beat tape from Street Corner Music that’s definitely worth your attention! (audio)
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In sort of a similar vein to Thes One’s underrated instrumental hip-hop album, Lifestyle Marketing, Juicy The Emissary focus on one bizarre sample source and uses it to create some new music from it. In this case, Juicy used old tapes from K-Mart in order to construct this surprisingly moody and effective instrumental beat tape. To make matters even more interesting, he strung all of the tracks together for a seamless listen, split only by sides of the cassette or record. Here’s the backstory behind this unique little project according to Street Corner Music:
On Thanksgiving 1989, Kmart employee and audio enthusiast Mark Davis wandered behind the customer service desk to check out the store’s sound system, which looped muzak and top 40 plus ads and announcements under the banner of “KMRT, The Kmart Radio Network.” When he found last month’s tape hadn’t been thrown out yet, he pocketed it and made a habit of doing this, collecting 56 tapes from 1989-1992. In September 2015, Davis uploaded the tapes to archive.org with the humble intention of preserving them. But within a few weeks he became an internet celebrity among obscure media fans and supplemented the collection with reel-to-reel tapes from the 70s and 80s thanks to Tom Schwarzrock, who acquired them serendipitously along with a deck he purchased. The tapes are like a consumerist time capsule, a vaporwave trove of eerily familiar corporate ephemera extracted from its original context and purpose. Similarly, Attention Kmart Choppers is composed of pieces from this collection chopped up, resculpted, and mosaicked together by Juicy The Emissary, forming a new, distinctly contemporary sound while inheriting a haunting nostalgia that provokes memories burrowed deep in the subconscious.
Juicy The Emissary’s Attention Kmart Choppers is available for over at Street Corner Music’s bandcamp now!