Veteran L.A. producer Kenny Segal has already been behind one of the year’s best hip hop releases, thanks to Maps, his second collaboration with New York rapper, billy woods. Now he’s set to score another win with his upcoming album with Ruby Yacht artist, Pink Navel. GingerSlim recently spoke with him to discuss the two albums, as well as his roots in the L.A. scene, his early love for drum & bass and his work with Jefferson Park Boys.
How you doing, man? How’s everything going?
Things are good. Had a bit of a hectic morning but I’m here and we’re finally making this happen after many tries.
I know, yeah. You seem to be in a perpetual state of activity whenever we exchange emails.
Yeeah, summer’s been very busy and abnormally so for me because I don’t usually tour that much, especially not since the pandemic. And you’ve seen how on this tour we’re on little short runs, so instead of it being one big chunk where I’m gone for a month, it’s been three months where I’ve gone for a week, then home for a week…
Is that harder to manage?
Well on one hand I like it, in that being on a long, gruelling tour… and gruelling is the operative word, I’ve been on a tour where we’ve done 30 gigs in a row, which definitely wears on you physically. But I’m not that great at hopping back into regular life. Like my homie Mr Carmack, from the Jefferson Park Boys, he’s perpetually on tour every weekend. He doesn’t go on long tours but he goes out of town almost every weekend for a gig. I don’t know how he does that shit. He comes home and just jumps right back into life, takes care of shit and then heads out of town again. For me, when I get back, it takes me a few days just to get back into the flow of things.
Do you like touring, aside from that element?
Yes and no. I’m more of a homebody, I would probably rather be at home making music and doing my own thing. But that being said, it’s undoubtedly fun. I mean touring – and it’s funny cos Maps is all about this – ultimately the majority is not fun, but then the parts that are fun are so awesome that it kinda makes up for all the other stuff.
And do you enjoy being in the spotlight like that? Are you that sort of performer, or do you prefer to be anonymous in the background?
I’m not a natural performer. I have grown over the years to be better at being a performer and to accept it and enjoy it more. If you’d asked me that a decade ago, I would have told you that I absolutely do not enjoy being on stage, or being in the spotlight whatsoever. I’ve got better at it from repetition and just from being a part of it, you start to enjoy it and cosy up to it more. In my head, if Flying Lotus had never happened and turned producers into artists… back when I first started, producers were not artists. Producers were just part of the people making the record. But over the last two decades that has completely switched, to the point where sometimes producers are bigger than the artists themselves. I was maybe being a little cheeky in my reference, but to me Flying Lotus was kinda like the person who made that shift back when he first became popular. If that had never happened, I would have been perfectly happy as a background player, toiling away and making stuff in the studio – knowing that I did a good job, but no one else knowing about it. But that’s just not the reality we live in anymore.
I wanted to go back to the beginning, because I know you’re from the East Coast originally and that a lot of the rap you listened to back then was East Coast. Do you feel like your music would have been a lot different if you had stayed there instead of moving to L.A.?
Hmmm not necessarily because I was always into being experimental. Definitely as far as hip hop goes my original references were mainly East Coast. Although very early on I had a dubbed copy of AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, but I was totally unaware of Project Blowed or any of that. I was more into Gang Starr and all the DJ Premier stuff, like Group Home and Jeru Tha Damaja. Then when Wu-Tang happened, I was into Wu-Tang. But the music I was making, which I was already doing when I was in high school, well I was more into the rave scene than hip hop back then. I was much more into electronic music. I was into early drum & bass and minimal techno, like Plastikman and the Detroit stuff where it was really minimal. So the music I was making at the time was more like rave music. I was making experimental breakbeat tracks and some techno tracks. So early on I was into weird stuff. Yes I was listening to Gang Starr but I don’t think that was a big influence on me. If anything, it wasn’t until I moved to L.A. for college and met the Project Blowed rappers at Konkrete Jungle, that was when hip hop started being more of a musical influence on me, as opposed to just being something I listened to for fun.
Okay and so when you did transition into hip hop, was it easy for you? Did it feel like a natural fit?
Yes but more because I didn’t look at it as a transition at the time. I just made beats and I didn’t look at them as techno beats, or drum & bass beats, I just made all sorts of beats. So to me, making a hip hop was just me making a slower beat. And at the time – I think I’ve told this in some other interviews – my roommate was selling weed and a lot of the rappers from Project Blowed would hang out at Konkrete Jungle, which was Daddy Kev’s club before Low End Theory. Some of them started coming over to my dorm to buy weed from my roommate and Peace – who I think Daddy Kev actually bought over to my dorm – he heard me making a beat that wasn’t a drum & bass beat and he’s like, “Let me rap on that”. And that actually became the song “FakinDaFunk” on the album Megabite. That was literally the first time anyone had ever rapped on my beats and that was the first time that I ever thought that I was trying to make something for someone to rap on. For quite a while after that I wasn’t ever really making a hip hop beat, I was just making beats that weren’t as fast. It wasn’t until a bit later that I thought, alright now I’m making hip hop beats, so now I’ve got to think about that aspect of it a little bit more. So it was kind of a natural transition, brought about by the people I was around at the time. P.E.A.C.E. is arguably one of the best freestylers of all time, so to have someone like that just hanging round your house, smoking weed and freestyling, it rubs off on you.
Yeah, it must be infectious. Just going back to what you said about early drum & bass. I’m from Bristol in the UK, which was one of the major cities in its development, but at the time it felt like a very British thing. Was it a very big scene in L.A.?
So definitely in L.A. and even in D.C. When I was growing up and in high school in D.C., it was basically progressive house and drum & bass. There was no happy hardcore or any of the other type of rave genres at the time. There was a club called Buzz that was pretty seminal in D.C. at the time and they would bring out all the UK DJs, like Roni Size, the Renegade Hardware dudes, so all of that was happening. But then when I got to L.A., it was a weird shift for me because it was all happy hardcore and drum & bass, and it was much more ‘ravey’ at first. But because of people like DJ Hive and Daddy Kev himself, with their label Celestial, I really feel like at the time – I mean, you’re more of an expert than me – L.A. was really the centre of drum & bass outside of the UK. Or that’s what it felt like for quite a while. Then when Konkrete Jungle got established, that completely solidified the fact that drum & bass lived in Los Angeles and all the big dudes were coming out there too at the time. Then we had Respect as well, which was another big drum & bass club that still goes on to this day. So between Respect and Konkrete Jungle, every big UK act was playing in L.A. very regularly at the time.
That’s mad. So what year was this?
I moved to L.A. in ‘97. I think Konkrete Jungle started in ‘99, so it would’ve been from then until around 2002.
Yeah, so I would’ve been 18-19 when that started. I was going to raves but I think because this was early internet days, everything still felt quite insular, it was very local. So I had no idea about what was going on in L.A. beyond the hip hop I was exposed to.
Well similar to how when Low End Theory was happening, it felt like the entire world was paying attention to what was happening in L.A., and at the time we were all paying attention to what was happening in Bristol, London and Manchester [laughs]. Cos Roni Size is from Bristol right? His music was very influential to me when I was fooling around with drum & bass, because he was one of the ones who started putting jazz into the music and his approach even had more of a hip hop feel. I was also really into Danny Breaks back in the day and he was doing this sort of hip hop / drum & bass hybrid stuff as well early on.
Yeah, well obviously in Bristol before Roni Size blew up, we had Portishead and Massive Attack, so there had always been that sort of fusion of genres.
Totally. At the time I was also into Portishead and Tricky, all of that. And in fact, bringing it full circle, me and woods are opening up for Unkle in a couple of weeks.
Oh wow.
I don’t really know what James Lavelle is up to at this moment if I’m honest, but back when he was doing the stuff with DJ Shadow, that was very formative for me with my production ideas.
I still think that’s some of Shadow’s best work on Psyence Fiction. And who else was putting Kool G Rap and Richard Ashcroft on the same album?
[laughs]
Just talking about Low End Theory, how much has the musical landscape in L.A. changed since then? Is there still that same sense of community?
Yes, I mean one thing that I will say that Daddy Kev is the master of is building communities. He did that with Konkrete Jungle originally, he did that with Low End Theory for something like 12 years and now he has this new club, Scenario. Although it’s a different thing from Low End Theory, it’s a much smaller space that it’s held at, it has a very similar sense of community. And if anything, I think he’s really dialled in to the early days of Low End Theory. It had a number of phases over those 12 years but in the early days, one of the coolest things to me was that you never knew what you were going to get there. You’d go there and one week there would be a band playing and another week there would be a rapper and then another week it would be just straight electronic music. Then there might be someone playing trap music in between all of this stuff as the DJ. It was just such a melting pot. And there was definitely music that I didn’t think I was into, that I would hear and be like, oh shit I actually really like this. Like trap, I never would have been into that at all if it wasn’t for Low End Theory. And now Scenario similarly is back into those days. It’s very different week to week the music they play there and everyone is just down to come along for the ride and be exposed to stuff. Which I think is a very cool thing.
Yeah, that sounds cool. I’m glad to hear there’s still stuff going on. Obviously you’ve been interested in music since a young age, so where do that first come from? Were your parents musical at all?
I wish I could say I was from some cool musical family but not really. My dad was a personal injury attorney and my mom was a housewife… I mean certainly my dad had a record collection; he was into 70’s rock but it’s not even like I grew up in a house where he was playing a lot of music. My mom played oldies on the radio when we were in the car… that being said, my parents really encouraged me in elementary school to take piano lessons and then I started playing cello in middle school in the school orchestra. I don’t know if I would have gone on those musical journeys if they hadn’t encouraged me to do that. But very early on, at least the way my parents tell it, I was more interested in making original music than learning the instrument. When I got my cello for instance, I was never super good and I never liked to practise. Instead of practising I would write songs and record them. At the time my parents had a very early Tandy computer with a Sound Blaster sound card and I had some tiny sort of Radio Shack mic. Then I had his kids walkie-talkie that I disassembled and turned into a pickup for my cello. I would record into this program I had called Cool Edit, which was like an early Windows program that let you multitrack. Then we got the internet shortly after that and I discovered FastTracker, which is when I really started making beats, in maybe 11th grade or something like that. And the funny thing is that some of that came out of the fact was that I had this friend and we were really nerdy computer guys. Like we loved the Doom, if you remember that game? And we had this Doom level editor, where you could make your own levels. So we were really into that and then I think you could add music as well. This was before MP3s were invented, so music files were ginormous. But trackers let you have the sequence and the samples in a small package, so a lot of video games used them. I think I got FastTracker originally because I was trying to write a song for one of our Doom levels, but then once I had this playground where I could record audio, then sample it and play it back at different pitches, that just opened everything up. It’s literally 30 years later and I’m still tripping off how much fun that is.
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Now just coming back to Maps for a moment, was it liberating being able to make a second album with woods, that deliberately didn’t follow on from the first album?
I don’t know if liberating is the right word. I’m cosying up to the idea now because I’ve done it successfully a few times, but originally I was very not into the idea of doing follow-ups for anything. Like after me and R.A.P. Ferreira did So the Flies Don’t Come, we kept on working with one another, but the idea of making a whole album together, it took like five years before we did Purple Moonlight Pages. To me, as a fan, I know how I view these things. You’re always going to be comparing it to what the person did last and it just seems like a losing proposition a lot of the time – doing a follow-up to something that people really love. So I don’t know if liberating is the right word but I’ve now discovered that I get a sense of when it’s the right time… obviously it’s not just me – it’s woods, or R.A.P. Ferreira or whoever I’m working with – we get a sense that we’ve grown enough and we have new stuff to say. I think that’s the real pitfall that people can sometimes fall into: going back to the same well that you were just drawing from. Sometimes it can happen very quickly that you have new inspiration, but you have to wait until you have new life experience, new things to draw upon. I dunno, maybe I’m generalising this and I should just talk for myself, but to me it’s not fun to do the same thing again. Part of the fun of making art to me is constantly exploring new stuff. So making the same album, or just trying to find a new twist of what you’ve already done, that’s not very fun to me. So I’m always trying to do something new. With that being said, Maps was super fun in that we already had a rapport and a friendship. When you have a deep rapport, it always makes it into more of a shared journey, rather than a personal struggle [laughs]. So yes, we had a lot of fun making Maps but ‘liberating’ would probably be the wrong adjective.
Okay yeah, that makes sense. Now the album, along with a lot of your production, has quite a heavy jazz influence. Was that a genre you were interested in before you started making beats?
Yeah, I like listening to jazz and I certainly went through a period in my life where I was pretty obsessed with it. But I would also say that it’s a specific type of jazz that I like to sample. It’s not like all jazz. I’m not a big Wynton Marsalis kind of dude. I’m definitely more in the Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, spiritual school of jazz. I just enjoy interesting forms of music, where things are unexpected. Where there are harmonies or melodies that you don’t expect, or tonalities that you don’t expect, or timbres that are being matched together unexpectedly, and jazz has a lot of that. Now there’s plenty of jazz that doesn’t have that and that stuff is boring to me… I will say though, that people tend to think I sample a lot of jazz but I think I sample all sorts of things. I certainly don’t go around thinking I only sample jazz records, in fact sometimes I specifically try not to sample jazz and do something different.
Oh it’s definitely only one element of your overall sound, but it felt quite dominant on Maps.
On Maps it certainly skewed towards it, but it just kind of evolved that way. Some of the initial songs that worked out really good were like that and I so I started pursuing that kind of sound. I would say that Maps is probably my most sample-heavy album. I mean all of my music is samples-based, but Maps is a lot more traditional – actually I don’t know if that is the right word because I don’t think anything is very traditional sounding about my beats… I dunno, it’s hard to talk about yourself like that. I’ll just quit while I’m ahead on that one.
[laughs] So is that your normal approach to making an album, you find the direction it will take as it progresses?
I mean there is always a little bit of a plan. With Maps the plan was just not to do Hiding Places! But usually albums just start with me sending a whole bunch of random beats to someone, throwing shit up against the wall and seeing what sticks. Then we usually see some things as they work out… in fact, one thing I’ll correct that I’ve stated in previous interviews, is that the beat pack that I originally sent to woods for Maps – which had about 15 beats in it – I think in another interview I said that only one of those beats ended up being on the album. Well I went back recently and listened to that beat pack and actually four of them ended up as songs. The beats for “Rapper Weed”, “Soft Landing”, “Bad Dreams Are Only Dreams” and “The Layover”. Now “The Layover” and “Bad Dreams Are Only Dreams” we didn’t use until much later on, but “Soft Landing” and “Rapper Weed” were some of the first songs we did. Then each beat pack after that we used much more of the contents because I was a lot more dialled in by that point. But it was really “Soft Landing” and “Rapper Weed” that made me hear a sound emerging and also to see a new synergy with the way woods sounded on my music that was very different from Hiding Places. It’s funny because I was just talking to woods about this in Vancouver, when we were trying to remember why it was we had originally decided to do Hiding Places. We couldn’t quite remember, but I was telling him the one thing that I could remember is that when I first started wanting to work with him, it was after I had given ELUCID the beat that became “Pergamum” on Rome. The second half is just like this very minimal beat and woods’ verse just sounds so dope on it, that to me was like the thesis statement originally where I was like, holy shit this dude’s voice sounds amazing on this beat, we’ve gotta do more of this! And so I think “Rapper Weed” was that moment for me with Maps, where I thought his voice sounded really different to how it had in other situations and I really wanted to explore it more.
We mentioned it briefly before, but I’m a big fan of your work with The Jefferson Parks Boys. How did you guys first come together?
Back in 2011 or 2012, there was a group called Team Supreme that I was a part of. Team Supreme, for those who don’t know, was basically like a beat cypher. It was a bunch of kids who were originally friends from a music making class, at a college in California. They started having a weekly beat cypher, where one person would choose a sample and then send it to his friends. Now at the time I still had a day job at a studio doing music for TV shows. I was going to Low End Theory a lot and I was good friends with DJ Nobody, who was one of the residents there. He somehow got on to the email invite for the Team Supreme cypher no. 1 or 2 and I’m pretty sure he posted his beat on Facebook or something. I was like, oh shit this sounds like fun, I want to do that. So I literally just sent Team Supreme a message to their Facebook page, like, “Hey my name’s Kenny, I make beats and I would love to be a part of this”. Great Dane, who was in charge of it at the time, he wrote back immediately and said sorry but it was only for friends, like an invite only thing. But then I think he Googled me and at that time I had already done stuff with Abstract Rude and I had already put out the album with P.E.A.C.E., so he was like, “Oh dude we’d be so honoured if you’d be a part of it!” – They were all just kids back then who had no credits at all. So I started making beats for their weekly cyphers and we didn’t know each other, but then they decided to do a show and that was the first time I met them. Mr. Carmack and Mike Parvisi were members of Team Supreme at the time and so that’s how we initially became friends. Then there was this moment, because I had just bought a house – which was a big milestone – and everyone else were college kids so they all started crashing at my house a lot. We’d go out and party, or we’d have a show, a lot of people would crash at my house. And Mr. Carmack, who lived in San Francisco at the time, when he would come to town for a Team Supreme event, he would crash at my crib for a couple of days. The neighbourhood was called Jefferson Park and they all loved it so much, so when they started to graduate they all rented a house right down the street from me. Then that was kinda like a gateway, because then Mr. Carmack moved out and got a different house in the neighbourhood, then Mike Parvisi did the same thing. So Jefferson Park Boys came out of a time in 2017, 2018, when me, Mike and Mr. Carmack were hanging out together all the time. We each had studios in our houses, so we’d make beats for the first part of the day and then just graze around the different studios, adding stuff to each other’s beats, smoking weed and having fun. That was what Jefferson Park Boys was all about.
And so, will we hear more from you guys in the future? Have you got anything else planned?
I mean we’re still all best friends. Unfortunately, Mike has now moved out of the neighbourhood so he lived about an hour away from us and then just last week he moved to Boston, so now he’s on the other side of the country. But me and Mr. Carmack still live down the street from each other… in fact, we’ve had half of another project done for like a year and a half now, so we will definitely have more stuff. And we’ve been looking for another artist to work with, because I’m even more excited about producing an album for an artist than I am about doing an instrumental project, like the way we did for R.A.P. Ferreira. There are little seeds being planted for that at the moment, so I’d say within the next year you will hear something. Also, Jefferson Park Boys are always doing stuff, like on the new Pink Navel album Mike Parvisi’s on a song, Carmack’s on a song. Even on Maps, with “As the Crow Flies”, it’s basically a Jefferson Park Boys beat. So it’s inevitable that there is always music being made by the three of us, just because we’re all friends and we’re constantly working together. But as far as a formal project, that’s definitely in the works, just with no actual timeline at the moment.
Okay, well good to know. And what about the more immediate future? I know you’ve got the Pink Navel album coming…
Yeah, I’m very excited about that. It’s coming out on Ruby Yacht. This album was made concurrently with Maps – in fact I made like four albums concurrently in 2022… this will be the second one to come out. There’s still an Abstract Rude one that may come out by the end of the year, or the beginning of next year, and an album with a singer named Benjamin Booker, the guy who sings on “Baby Steps”. We have a whole project which is also fairly complete that we’re shopping around. But back to Pink Navel – this album’s amazing is all I have to say. I think beat-wise it is as exciting as Maps. It has a lot of cool experimental beats that I’m very proud of. And Pink Navel was already an amazing rapper, but they have stepped up their game in every way on this album. The reason I wanted to work them in the first place, I mean not only are we friends and we have a rapport, but also although they make music that is nerdy and appeals to a certain type of hip hop fan – and I think this is true of R.A.P. Ferreira also – they have bars! On just an objective level, he is a very good rapper and I don’t think people have recognised that as much because it’s hidden beneath so many layers of different aesthetics of nerdiness. But this album really lets Pink Navel shine and will show that not only do they have really cool ideas and artistry, they’ve also got bars. So I’m very excited for people to hear it. Also, one last thing I’m going to plug is that I have a video game that I’ve created myself and that I coded, that’s coming out with the album. I’m really excited to have people play it because I legit think it’s a fun video game. It’s already an interesting thing when you put music out and you get to see other people enjoy it and react to it. But music is something that’s a very personal enjoyment, so it’s going to be interesting seeing people playing the video game. I feel that’s another aspect of seeing people react to something that’ll be unique, that I’m looking forward to.
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Gingerslim has been a hip-hop fan since 1994 and has written for various blogs and websites since around 2006. During that time he has contributed to The Wire, style43, Think Zebra, Headsknow, Front Magazine and more. His main interests in rap are UK hip-hop and the underground movement in America, with a focus on Rhymesayers Entertainment and the once mighty Def Jux label. He lives in Bristol and has a beard. All other details are sketchy at best. Read his own hip-hop blog and follow him here.