Lo-Fi Hip Hop from Disneyland, Oregon

Just like our physical world of interconnected realities, the internet lends itself to synchronicity and serendipity, if you happen to have the open space of perception to realize such things. I was looking at some obscure tape labels the other day and came across a label/collective page that sounded vaugely familiar, though I was not sure why. Turns out that Grand Cooley hosts a ton of music including some made by a Portland homie who I know exclusively through random occurrence/coincidence. I first met Bangs in 2007, either at the clinton st brewpub (now the shangri-la with awesome vegan indian food) or the langano lounge back when i was hosting shows with moose knuckle (who went solo as Daps (Nightcrawlers) and Gepetto). I am fairly certain that he and a friend asked to get on the mic in between sets, and then freestyled some of the more amusing rhymes that night. Since then we have run into each other at parties, street cyphers and open mics in and around Portland about once every three months. Scrolling through the albums at Grand Cooley I saw his name and the image of his handmade cardboard cd sleeve and had to smile. A click later I run into his smiling face, from another timezone, somehow still in the same loop, still glad for the randomness.

Bangs makes lo-fi dissonant breakbeat driven hip hop that is rapid fire and stacked with funny rhymes, tripped out scenarios and his stoked perspective on reality. He is the guy who crashes your party with a boombox strapped to his bike freestyling, who will climb two stories to break into a closed door session and his record sounds like it: live and raw, loose, fun and determined.

download "way to win" and
check out the rest of his record at grandcooley.com