In the single year that Atlanta beatsmith Alec Owen, otherwise known as AyOh, has been releasing music, he’s managed to pull together three releases. His unique approach to sampling has resulted in a hazy, chilled-out brand of instrumental hip-hop that’s full of feel-good moments and easy listening. Earlier this month, he dropped the III EP, a vibrant collection of eight beats that the producer managed to complete mere months after releasing his sophomore LP, Millennial Comic Book.
III feels more like an epilogue to Millennial Comic Book, rather than a full, standalone release. It’s what Kendrick Lamar’s untitled unmastered. is to To Pimp a Butterfly — an amalgamation of songs that could have appeared on its predecessor. You can easily listen to the EP in its entirety in one sitting due to the brevity that’s typical of Owen’s style. He keeps his songs succinct and concise, allowing the listener to get straight to the point. No frills. No digressions.
I recently sat down with the producer on the roof of his Sampson Street loft overlooking the Beltline to talk about sampling, his influences, and the difficulty of monetization, among other things.
How did you get into producing beats? With bands it’s pretty typical that some dude picked up a guitar when he was nine or ten. Sampling and beats are pretty different.
Doing the sampling thing stemmed from me pretty much not wanting to merge ideas with other people. Like, I didn’t want to be in a band. And it’s not even that I don’t like working with people or collaborating, but for a first project I just wanted to feel out my ideas, and I felt like sampling would be the best way to get to do that. Because, obviously, I don’t know how to play every instrument, but I have a good sense of music theory that I think I can apply well.
So while friends were playing in bands in high school, I was just honing my skill, trying to do my thing. But I do still want to “band” stuff eventually.
Was it just you sitting down at a computer, playing around in Ableton? What was the learning process like?
It took me a couple years. About the time that I was about to graduate high school, I had been playing drums, and I wanted to start making songs and stuff. So I started looking up how I could do that and I found Ableton. Yeah, I just messed around and tried out every fucking thing I possibly could to see how it worked. I started looking up lessons on how to do the most fundamental things. And then, yeah, it was basically trial and error. I think that now, even still, if people looked at the way I produced, they’d be like, “How? What the fuck is this? This is so confusing!” [laughs] I’ve still got a ways to go with my production stuff, but trial and error helps to get your feet down.
Talk about who your influences are and what you like about them.
I guess the direct influence… are just straight-up Madlib and J. Dilla. I feel like they opened the doors to how instrumental beats could stand on their own. I feel like old school beats need someone to ride on top of them, but their beats have such unique sampling and a really weird approach. Most people wouldn’t be like, “Whoa, this is hip-hop?” when they hear it. It just showed how much depth hip-hop could have — especially instrumental hip-hop. I definitely took a lot of influence from them, just from their instrumental works.
Then, the atmospheric, ambient shit. Like Boards of Canada or Aphex Twin. Stuff like that. They have a real sense of atmosphere to their music. You’re not paying attention to the actual, technical thing, you’re just captured in the zone, and it’s pretty dope. I know my music doesn’t necessarily sound like that, but I like the atmosphere they build. Definitely Flying Lotus as well. He’s like a mesh of both of those things. He keeps himself in a hip-hop realm, but at the same time he’s throwing in weird things and creating a whole environment that people are like, “Okay, I guess you can do this with hip-hop.”
What’s your process like? When you sit down to make a beat, what do you look for? Where are you pulling from? How do you know where to look?
When I’m making a beat, I don’t think about it that much. It kind of comes off as an end result of my attitude within the past couple days. I could be having a really good time and hanging out with friends and come up with this really cool vibe when I’m on my own. Essentially, when I make the music, it shares that.
Other times I might want to make a colder sounding beat, with a feeling of isolation or something like that. It’s definitely the main drive of it, my attitude and how I’m feeling. When I’m in those kinds of zones, I’ll make like three or four tracks and pick-and-choose the parts that I like from each song and collide them together. I don’t know. It’s always different. It’s just whatever works, man.
In less than a year, you’ve had three releases. Congratulations.
Awesome.
That’s a lot of material. Is that a testament to the volume of work you do and your work ethic, or to the ease of the process (not to imply that it is easy)?
It’s a little of both. To the latter point, instrumental hip-hop is as easy as you want it to be. You can have it as skeletal or as loaded as you want. And I like my stuff to be pretty skeletal. I don’t like adding all this extra stuff to it, because, a.) I don’t really feel comfortable doing that yet, and b.) the end result is never as satisfying as the skeletal version. I feel like if it’s stripped back then your mind can fill in the rest of that skeleton.
Also, this is all I’ve been doing for the past year almost. In August it will have been a whole year since I started releasing music. It’s a comment on both. Even with the ease of the project, I think most people would only have one album or something within this time. But since I came out with it and felt so good about it and was so committed, I just decided, “Okay, this is what I’m gonna do for a while.”
“I feed off the envy of the success of other people. I just look out for it. I’ll say, ‘Fuck it. I can make shit cooler than that.'”
How do you keep from getting stale? When people put out that much stuff, they can get burnt out. How do you keep yourself fresh and progressing?
Just knowing when to step away is a good thing. You can lose the energy and feel gassed out. When that happens, I’ll step out and meet up with other people. I’ll try to meet with other people doing music so I can get a feel for what they’re trying to do. I just dig into other peoples’ minds.
Or I’ll get a visual inspiration. I’ll see or watch something and think it’s pretty cool, and my creative juices get flowing because I’m envious of the cool shit other people are doing. I feed off the envy of the success of other people. I just look out for it. I’ll say, “Fuck it. I can make shit cooler than that.” [laughs]
I was talking to someone before this and he saw sampling as a kind of street art. You’re taking pieces from what other people have done to make your own thing. Do you have a philosophy when it comes to that?
I don’t know. I think my biggest pet peeve with sampling is finding an overused sample. You find people who keep cutting the same groove. Which is fine because there’s usually a variation on it, but I like to find something that I know for a fact that no one else has touched. I’ll look it up and everything. That feels really good and it inspires me a lot.
I’m trying to think of a philosophy I have because I mainly just try to not overthink it. When I was doing Dot Cotton I was doing it for two years. And most of the songs were done way before that. But just trying not to let your mind get drowned in the technical jargon of it all. Let your creative side flow.
If you know how to play the guitar, you’re not learning it all over again. You can sit down and let it flow without even thinking about what you’re doing with your fingers. Yeah, I think that’s when the best results come out.
Where do you get gratification from in your music? Because the things you’re pulling from already exist and you don’t “own” the sounds. Where do you get satisfaction?
The gratification can come from showing it to a person for the first time. They might have their headphones on and start nodding their head without even really noticing. That feels great. It makes me feel like I’m doing the same things as the artists I love. When I listen to their music, I have the same reaction as people who listen to mine.
At the same time, since it’s not all your original work, you have those moments that are like, “Shoutout to those guys,” you know? I want to give them a high-five and hope they dig what I did to the music.
How does monetization work? Because the songs don’t belong to you in a traditional sense, you can’t really go sell them. How do you intend to move forward and make it work?
The way I have my music set up now is it’s all for free. It’s all available. The money they give me is basically a donation. I don’t know, that’s actually something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. I’m trying to get up on all these different platforms and they all have disclaimers and stuff telling you to make sure you have the consent of all these people. A lot of artists on Stones Throw, I know for a fact don’t get their samples cleared, because they’re so obscure. If they find me, okay, awesome. They have some really good lawyers.
I kind of just try to keep that out of my mind because I don’t want it to dilute the whole process. Like you were saying, it’s a new kind of art. So when you think, oh well, these guys could try to take it down, it’ll get you down in the dumps. Like, shit.
But you’re totally right. Down the road, hopefully I’ll have lawyers that can help me out with that shit.
So what are the next moves?
I’m doing a lot more collaborative stuff. I’ve been talking to a lot of other fellow beat producers around here. I have a couple rappers that are jumping on some tracks. One of them might turn into a little EP, five or six songs. I’m just trying to feel out people who are down with my sound. I’m in Atlanta, it’s trap-heavy, and that’s understandable. So trying to get people into some chilled-out stuff — the opposite of what trap’s trying to do — it’s hard. It’s a hard business.
But people are way more receptive than I thought they were gonna be when I started this project. I thought they’d brush it off, but people are so down with it and talking to me about that kind of stuff. The fact that people would want to collaborate with me is the most humbling and awesome thing ever. The next move is collaboration and trying to pump out more and more music. Try to keep it fresh and keep the growth going.
More Info
Bandcamp: ayyohh.bandcamp.com
Facebook: @AyOhBeats
SoundCloud: @awomusic
Twitter: @AyOh____