He bought me a guitar when I was grounded. "I always looked up to my dad, and the best way to get my family's attention was by playing music," Kenny says. The living quarters were so small that every night after he finished practicing, Kenny had to break down the entire drum kit and store it in a crawl space. Cramped inside a 550-square foot apartment, father would put on headphones to watch TV while son cracked snares. A couple years later, when Kenny wanted to pick up the drums, his dad worked two jobs and scrimped to pay for lessons. He bought Kenny his first guitar at nine. But it's a singular work that couldn't exist without the life-altering circumstances that led to its genesis.Īfter all, music was the principal bond that tethered Kenneth II to his son. A sepia valentine lost somewhere in the haunted ether between Madlib's Beat Konducta tribute to Dilla, the late Detroit legend's own Donuts, and the crystalline vapor of Aphex Twin's Drukqs. It felt like the start of something different."īest known for producing full-length albums with Vince Staples, Denzel Curry, Key!, Hoodrich Pablo Juan, Rico Nasty, Freddie Gibbs, and 03 Greedo, LOUIE heralds another innovative left-turn for the Connecticutraised producer, who Pitchfork once proclaimed "hip-hop's prodigal son." If conventional expectations called for a star-stuffed ensemble album in the vein of DJ Khaled, this is the opposite: a lean, poignant meditation on the fragility of life, the passage of time, and ineffable transmissions between generations. "It was the first time I had something to say as a songwriter and artist, rather than trying to uplift a collaborator. "It's opened up a voice that had been unused since I began making music at 9," Kenny says. The soundtrack to the maze of your own memory. These are mournful headphone burners that never feel mawkish. The kick-door aggression of loops from JPEGMAFIA and Slowthai inject adrenaline to ensure that things never remotely approach a lull. Spliced vocals are sampled from the seraphic falsettos of '70s adolescent funk singers. Just 17 songs and 33 minutes, LOUIE is a hypnotic odyssey of wounded, teardrop soul. Only after sharing it with a few close friends - who mentioned the elegiac pathos it evoked - did Kenny become convinced to release it for public consumption. Released on XL Recordings, the first solo album from Kenny Beats was a spontaneous burst of creativity spurred by an avalanche of despair and imagination. LOUIE was never meant for the world's ears. This album encapsulated the feeling of that one month." "Something dark turned into something beautiful. "I always said that I wouldn't do a solo album because I didn't have anything to say. The result was LOUIE, an almost entirely instrumental album indicative of the unremitting love felt from child-to-parent - a heart-on-sleeve appreciation for his dad's sacrifices and willingness to nurture his son's talent. He resolved to create a gift for his ailing father. On a London interlude during the month-long IDLES sessions, a friend pointed out what appeared obvious the emotional vicissitudes affecting Kenny triggered a wellspring of inspiration. The mixes didn't merely offer reassuring anthems, they transported him back to times that felt simpler - before the turbulence of the last two decades took its toll. When news of his father's illness hit Kenny, he found himself constantly returning to these tapes to process his grief and feel familial connectivity in a remote locale. While his broadcasting dreams never came to fruition, Kenneth made mixtapes for friends and family, offering DJ-style interludes between the eclectic curation: Sade melting into Willie Nelson gliding into Dr. Toiling in a series of blue-collar jobs, the elder Blume weathered a divorce and eventually suffered the afflictions of substance abuse. After a stint playing overseas in Sweden, he returned to the northeast to start a family. The former University of Connecticut basketball player struggled to find his bearings in the post-athletic world. The relationship between Kenneth Blume II and his son and namesake - best known to the world as Kenny Beats - had long been loving but fraught. Then came the call that his father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A UK trip to produce for IDLES offered an escape: the opportunity to produce for his favorite rock band and find respite in art and unfamiliar surroundings. The sorrow of a breakup had been compounded by the isolation of COVID. Quarantined in Bath, England, thousands of miles from home, Kenny Beats received cataclysmic news. In the permanent midnight of the pandemic, things grew darker.
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