Download the Divinity EP now exclusively at SoundClick.com! The latest and greatest form the midwest's most slept-upon lyricist, MC Epic. Featuring Robby Crook, Breon Warwick, Mercury/Threshold, DJ Strictnine, and Frees Fame Fabrications. Don't miss out on the best truly independent hip hop release of 2008. Real lyrics and beats for real heads. This is not the same old rap bullshit that you hear everywhere else. This is Divinity.
Mentality Flow started when I was in high school with a buddy of mine, K-Otic, and this old school producer and DJ who was kind of a South Bend legend in our eyes, DJ Strictnine. I still have no idea how we got hooked up with him, but he was the only cat in SB with a record deal, and his production was completely on another level than anything I had ever heard. We recorded an EP called "Hip Hop for the Senses" and sold a few hundred copies. I was more into it than K-Otic, so we parted ways so I could hook up with some emcees who were a bit more on my level.
In comes Breon Warwick and he had this crazy lyrical and production style that I had never heard before. So we record an album right off the bat. The production was ghetto, straight basement style - real time through a crossfader into a Type II tape deck (thus the title, "The $2.00 Project", a reference to the cost of the tape that it was mastered on). The album sucked (mostly due to the limitations of our equipment), but the chemistry was good, so we started recording with Strictnine again, and this emcee Todd Frozt who we had done a couple of collabos with, both on the last track we recorded for that album, and the first track on the Hip Hop for the Senses EP.
We recorded an album "Soundscape" around 2000-2001, and for that time period it was SICK. That's when we adopted Mentality as our group's name. Every time we went to Strictnine's for a session, he would just crank out these dark, psychedelic beats while we sat on the couch and wrote lyrics. Frozt had this kind of gothic lyrical style, and when he was on point it brought a lot of depth to the group dynamic. Check out the track "Audio Meditation" for a good example of what I'm talking about. But Frozt moved to DC and that incarnation of the group left with him.
Almost at the same time though, we (Breon and I) had started working with another South Bend emcee, Mercury Threshold. Again, he had this unique style and he said some of the craziest shit lyrically that I had ever heard. We recorded a bunch of tracks with him, and a bunch with this other cat, Robby Crook, who Breon knew through work. Crook had this slick-as-oil flow and his delivery was always tight. Even his early shit that he thought was wack still had that three-dimensional vocal delivery to it. We took all of our favorite stuff from those sessions and made a fourth album "Liquid Mastery".
Now we have all kind of branched out. We do a bunch of shows, and that's really cool. Anything big that comes through South Bend has at least one of the groups from our crew on the bill. That's a good feeling. Even though we are all kind of doing our own things with our music and various solo projects, grouops, and collaborations, we still have a lot of respect on the SB scene as Mentality.
I've got two projects that I'm working on right now. The first one is an album called "Divinity". That is just a good lyrical hip hop record. The production is all tight (DJ Strictnine, Breon Warwick, Frees Fame Fabrications, and myself) and you can still hear guest appearances from all the members of Mentality. The focus is more on my personal blend of emotionally deep, hard-hitting, gutter-style hip hop. This one is for the heads that still have love for this hip hop music the way that its supposed to be.
The other one is just me trying to flip the rap game on its ear. The stuff that I've been doing for that one (I'm calling it "The Evolution of [Hip Hop]") is analog synthesizers and live instrumentation and all type of things that are a departure from what I've done and what a lot of industry types are doing right now. A lot of the stuff that I'm trying is pretty outside the box - maybe even ghetto. I'm just trying to get back to the spirit of ingenuity that people had back when, where they were trying to accomplish what they could musically with what they had. Now its like everybody has an MPC and Pro Tools, and I think the music had suffered because no one has to really stretch too far to get where they're going. It seems that everybody is doing it the same - and it sounds the same. Hopefully I can do something a little different. But I'm trying to get that album pretty well completed before I post anything from it, though. So I guess you'll have to wait...
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