SIMIAH – THE ALCHEMY FILES 12″

Simiah has an impressive selection of releases under his belt already, and has worked tirelessly for years to create his own world of deep, soulful instrumental Hip Hop. His style is based around dusty jazz and latin sounds, reinforced by chasmic bass and swung percussion played with effortless skill on the MPC.

The Alchemy Files represents Simiah’s first (but long-overdue) foray into scratch records. He put together 4 beats on Side A that would stand out on their own as an EP, but left enough space in each of them to allow for some freestyle instrumentation if the moment calls for it. That’s where Side B comes in… raw audio from Simiah’s MPC was given to Symatic from Cut & Paste to arrange into skip-proof scratch tools – drums, bass, horns, keys and more, all arranged for ease of use by a DJ to compliment the
tracks on the flipside, or to become entirely new compositions of their own.

Also included are some of Cut & Paste’s trademark skip-proof vocal samples, for any DJ wanting to stand out with original style and cuts. They’re all arranged at the same BPM with the instrumental samples, at 83.33 BPM. This tempo was chosen as it is a close match to the type of beats featured on Side A, and works well for regular turntables with +/- 8% pitch. (Many of our other records are specifically aimed at users of turntables with Ultrapitch of +/- 50%).

Another feature of the skip-proof side is that the sounds are configured in loops with 5 beats per rotation, like a 5-point star or a pentagon. When scratching over regular 4/4 beats, this can lead to some interesting results as the irregular patterns are manipulated into new sequences.

There are also 2 Lock-grooves at the end of Side B, with tones designed to be played with the pitch adjustment on a turntable. Both tones are played in the same key for ease of use when switching between them.

“Alchemy” – to purify, mature, and perfect certain objects.