Maw-

From the unknown, unlikely and definitely underground location of Jyväskylä, Finland, a young artist going by the name of Maw is turning out to be an interesting addition to the hip hop scene of both his homeland and the more well-known american environment. His crackly breakbeats and chopped up soul have a lot more to do with a punchy homebrewn approach devoid of any conventional attraction of your average popular music, than the safe kick-clap the most popular hip hop has become. See, Maw hails from the school of thought and craft which places importance on the hip hop beat that hits hard and has a rich, sampled sound, yet gives the listener a multitude of grooves and vibes to grab a hold of. A hard-worker with an infinite musical wanderlust, Maw touches on old records, video games, obscure found sounds and whatever source he can find and chops it all up into one hot soup.“My style is like raw loops and chops basically, I concentrate on the essence of small things, fragments of music and like, off-kilter grooves. Sometimes it’s super complex with a lot of tracks piled up and mixed together, and sometimes it’s some obscure record looped with with some drums. It always depends on the source(s), which can be anything. I take a lot of sounds and mesh them together, using whatever. Often it’s some old affordable software, sometimes keys, sometimes like digital tape-edits collaging. Most of the time I’m just chopping and sequencing samples, trying to get a... like a SP1200 sound. My gear is really nothing special, nothing different from these kids flipping beats on their laptops. I’m just trying to keep the vintage sound alive, definitely. Even though I might not use an MPC as of now or anything *laughs* ”-----These dusty mechanics can be heard in full effect on his first solo album Concrete Preservation . Made with extremely minimal gear due to domestic issues(and a quasi-homelessness following all that), lack of money, and on the other hand a deliberate will to work with limited means, the sound of the record is certainly grimy, yet incredibly fresh and bouncy. Akin to all of his influences, but interestingly enough also distant from all your Rjd2’s and DJ Shadows out there. From the first track onwards it’s quite clear that Maw’s knack is this kind of daring with the format of a song and a firm grasp on a bumping groove. Maw sends in unexpected samples of leftfield, yet harmonious sources, and drops the beat, throws in a skit or loops things up whenever he feels like it. Totally disregarding most “rules” all of his elders hinted at him. He had to do it all by himself and alone, which might be the inspiration behind a sort of audible stubborn hermit that you can hear in his beats.“I didn’t grow up in a musical household, but I was never restricted from working on music. I never got any genuine support from anyone but I guess I was just unlucky. I learned it all by myself, how to listen to music, how to play the piano, how to chop up samples, how to rap... It wasn’t really systematic ‘til I actually started putting stuff out, in the late 2000’s. That’s when my daily regime was like, wake up, make music, eat, sleep. Everything else felt out of place.”