Sep 2010 21

What’s up world…this is my first offering up on what is sure to be the illest blog on the planet next week (really?!), followed up by what is sure to be the illest label on the planet the week after that (oh word?!).  I’m just playin, I’ve never been one for egos and bragging, but I am excited about what my boys and I are up to here at 119 Sound.

A quick word about me though since none of you know who I am…I’m an old man named Josh Swissman and I am a junkie music digger who has been trying to figure out these turntables since the mid 80’s.  I’ve amassed thousands upon thousands of CD’s and at least three times as many records that span a ton of genres (look for some more specifics about the collection in later posts).  The cool part about being down with music that is all over the map is that you can select a little bit of the best from a lot of different styles and you can create something that is better than the sum of its parts.

That brings me to what OB, King, J.Paul and I want to accomplish with 119 Sound.  If we do this right, we will be taking a little bit of what we think is the best from a lot of different genres and putting them together in a collection of beats that hopefully make you move.  This isn’t a new idea…many have done it before.  In fact, let’s go back to 1982 for a minute to talk about six guys that did the same thing and ended up making one of my favorite tracks of all time.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “Rockin’ It” by The Fearless Four (yes there were six members in The Fearless Four).  Hip Hop was in an interesting spot back in the early 80’s and there was a ton of experimentation going on with the style as many artists tried to shed the disco image and sound that had come to characterize the music in the preceding years.  These guys went all the way across the Atlantic to liberate an unlikely sample from the seminal Kraftwerk tune “The Man-Machine” to define a new sound that was disparate in its ingredients, but couldn’t sound more put together in its result.

Fearless Four – Rockin’ It

Sometimes you gotta look backward before you make plans to go forward…look for us to build on this idea that The Fearless Four and others like them set forth many years ago with 119 Sound.

Josh Swissman