Publishing: Melissa MacMaster and 902HipHop

Story by Stuart Berman | Friday May 4th, 2018

In this day and age, the words “anonymous Twitter account” conjure all sorts of nefarious associations involving egg-avatar photo trolls and #fakenews-spewing spambots. But when Melissa MacMaster started surreptitiously posting about the Halifax hip-hop scene under the @902HipHop handle back in October of 2014, it was with the intent of mobilizing a community, not dividing it.

Quake Matthews

Quake Matthews

Most music-industry workers begin as fans first, before acquiring the business skills that allow them to transform their passion into a viable career. MacMaster took the opposite route. While working as a consultant at Nova Scotia’s Centre for Entrepeneurship, Education, and Development, the Antiginosh native partnered with a local not-for-profit youth organization to teach small-business skills to aspiring creatives. Though the program was open to everyone from visual artists to jewelry makers, MacMaster noticed something peculiar about the participants: the vast majority were hip-hop MCs or producers.

Despite having a deep history with rap music that dates back to the ‘80s, and despite producing the odd breakout star (Buck 65, Classified) in the ensuing years, Halifax has traditionally lacked the sort of centralized infrastructure that would both allow local artists to have sustainable careers and promote the scene internationally. MacMaster realized she had an opportunity to help build it. But there was just one problem with her plan: At the time, she knew absolutely nothing about Halifax hip-hop.

As she recalls, “Somebody said to me, ‘You have a lot of knowledge and you have a lot of business skills, but you don’t know anything about the music industry. Where’s your credibility when it comes to being an artist manager?’ But I fell in love with the hip-hop scene at the time, so I decided to start this Twitter account, @902HipHop, and really start going crazy, promoting everything that was going on locally in hip-hop. And that started a buzz: ‘Who is @902HipHop?’ ‘Did you see this on social media, they’re promoting our show!’ For six months, no one really knew who I was. I just hid behind this Twitter account, and then I started engaging and working more with artists. Quake Matthews became my first official client, and I transitioned into artist management.”

902 Hip Hop Roster
Ben G
Corey Writes
Devontée
Grant Keddy
Haviah Mighty
Jay Mayne
Kayo
MAJE
Matty Galaxy
Nicole Ariana
Quake Matthews
Shevy Price
Thrillah

For the next two years, MacMaster hit the international conference circuit, partnering up with export programs that took 902 Hip Hop’s growing roster of artists to showcases everywhere from Utah to Europe. But the experience also clued her in to a pervasive problem in the hip-hop industry: the chronic logistical hurdles faced by music supervisors who want to license rap-oriented tracks to TV and film.

As MacMaster explains, “The main issue of placing hip-hop music is, there are often samples within the instrumental, or there are too many co-writers on the track, and the supervisors can’t get proper clearance. Or the artist doesn’t have any of the files! There might be a dope track, and I’ll be like, ‘I need those instrumentals to do a placement,’ and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, that’s a YouTube beat,’ or ‘I can’t reach that producer, I can’t get that file.’ I kept hearing about these issues over and over at music conferences around the world.”

But these were problems that 902 Hip Hop was in a unique position to remedy, thanks in large part to the geographically isolated – and therefore, tight-knit – nature of the local scene.

“I manage a number of Halifax hip-hop artists,” says MacMaster, “and I know that a majority of their music is being produced locally as well. So there’s no issue: I can call up Dylan Guthro, or whoever’s producing and ask, ‘Hey are there any samples on any of these tracks by Quake?’ No one else was really providing a one-stop shop for clearable hip-hop music… and that’s when the light bulb went on.”

The result of that eureka moment is now live at 902hiphop.sourceaudio.com, where music supervisors can easily access (as of this writing) a catalog of nearly 400 tracks by 12 different Nova Scotian artists, all cleared and ready to be licensed. The music can be searched according to criteria like BPM, genre, and mood, and many are available in instrumental and a cappella versions as well. The centralized database negates the need to trade files via Dropbox or Google Drive, while the intuitive user interface will minimize the amount of back-and-forth correspondence required to seal the deal. If a supervisor likes what they hear, they can just click “License Now” and away they go.

Matty Galaxy

Matty Galaxy

“This is what I actively do now on a daily basis,” MacMaster says of 902 Hip Hop’s licensing efforts, which, through a partnership with U.K. publishing house Split Music, recently landed a track by producer Matty Galaxy in a campaign for voice app Trainline, featuring renowned U.K. mock-MC Big Shaq. And given that the new site streamlines a lot of the administrative tasks involved with securing a placement, MacMaster can now focus more on building new relationships, be it with the show Atlanta, or in the actual city of Atlanta, where TV and film production is currently booming. But throughout 902 Hip Hop’s evolution from mysterious Twitter handle to music-licensing machine, MacMaster has stuck to the same guiding principle: just figure it out as you go.

“For the past year, it’s really been about building the catalogue for the site and being very diligent in working with music supervisors – because this was a whole new world for me,” she says. “I learned about artist management working with Quake, and now here’s another opportunity – something I knew nothing about, and now I’m learning all about it!”

In the Spotlight: FRIGS

Story by Melody Lau | Tuesday May 8th, 2018

A full-length album has been years in the making for Toronto post-punk band FRIGS. The five-year-old act, who once went by the name Dirty Frigs, spent their early years brewing up a storm of noise in small venues like the recently-closed Silver Dollar. (The band credits the venue’s booker Dan Burke with helping to launch their career when they first moved to Toronto from Montréal.) With a couple of EPs under their belt, time finally came for a proper album last year, but the band was faced with a conundrum: How do they fuse their raucous past with a newer, more refined sound?

“While we were confident in the material we had, there was some concern about whether the songs produced from these two separate sessions could come together to form a unified work,” says guitarist Duncan Hay Jennings. He’s talking about piecing together songs recorded at their home studio in 2015-2016, and those captured in their time with producer Ian Gomes (Greys, Odonis Odonis) at Union Sound Company.

When FRIGS first started, they were buzzing with an untamed fervour for sludgy reverb and experimental sounds that drew comparisons to early Sonic Youth. But Jennings admits that the band began to expand their sonic interests, especially “exploring the use of tension a lot more than our previous records. It’s a big part of our live show – dissonance, drastic dynamic shifts – so naturally, it worked its way into the overall vibe of the album.”

That album, Basic Behaviour, found its balance through Holy F__k’s Graham Walsh, who mixed all the tracks. Says Jennings, “He did a wonderful job, providing the right amount of glue to piece it all together.”

Now that FRIGS can tick an album off their checklist, they’re already setting their sights on the next record, aiming to head back into the studio this summer. “We’ve already got roughly five or six songs finished for the next record,” says Jennings. “Almost all of them have been played regularly on tour, if not every night, so we’re feeling comfortable with them. We’re excited about the material and getting it down to tape.”

Photo by Visually Tasteful

High Klassified: Maintaining Control

Story by Olivier Boisvert-Magnen | Thursday May 3rd, 2018

With a foot in the door of the U.S. hip-hop industry, producer High Klassified begins a new chapter of his career with the release of Kanvaz, his fifth, more eclectic and accessible, EP.

Things have changed lately for Kevin Vincent, a 25-year-old resident of Montréal’s Laval neighbourhood, who goes by the name High Klassified since he began producing in 2011.

Highly aware of the impact of “Comin Out Strong,” the huge hit by American rapper Future and Canadian pop star The Weeknd, which he co-wrote, the producer has now understood the importance of voices and lyrics. “I suddenly got a lot more public attention,” he says. “The thing is, a lot of people liked this collab, but didn’t necessarily like the rest of my repertoire, which is mostly instrumental. To them, the absence of lyrics is a damper.”

Far from thinking of himself as an avid music lover, High Klassified still wanted to pursue his own musical curiosity, if only to make his music catchier. Without wanting to please the Top 40 crowd at all costs, he nevertheless opened his musical horizons to the likes of Drake, Migos, and other heavy hitters of the genre. That appealed to him motre than diving blindly ahead into songwriting sessions sandwiched in between gaming, his favourite hobby.

“It’s mostly thanks to my friends and my girlfriend that I discovered a lot of new music,” says High Klassified. “I’m on the road a lot lately, so I like listening to other people’s Spotify playlists. I wanted my music to be featured on playlists, and shared by word of mouth, things like that.”

Hence the idea of asking New York-based singer and Fool’s Gold label-mate Leaf, and Montréal-based rapper Zach Zoya, to collaborate on two of Kanvaz’s songs. “Initially, I wanted to work with big names, but it’s just too much work chasing them. I didn’t want to wait three months for a single verse that I might end up finding so-so,” says High Klassified. Prior to this EP, he’d only once collaborated with a rapper (Mick Jenkins) on one of his solo projects. “I chose to work with people closer to me, and have more control over the creative process. My goal was to make the best possible music with what I have. But I mostly wanted to surf on the success of ‘Comin Out Strong’ as soon as I could.”

High Klassified

Photo: Benoit Rousseau

He gave himself a little over a year to come up with what he felt was his best material to date. Initially known for the dark, bass-heavy trap aesthetics of his first EP, Flexury (2012), High Klassified later demonstrated that he’s also a master of ethereal-yet-danceable atmospheres on his subsequent projects, notably on  Kronostasis, which earned him the Electronic Music SOCAN Award in 2016. Therein lies the diversity of musical directions he wanted to explore on his fifth release. “Kanvaz is a painting, a representation of all the canvasses I can paint on,” he says. “It’s 100% my art. I wanted to show I can adapt to a whole range of BPMs, from trap to house.”

Despite a hard drive theft that hindered the pace of his work in early 2017, High Klassified clearly enjoyed going back to this a more intimate method of songwriting. Especially after 2016, where he put his art to the service of others, frequently travelling to Toronto to build a relationship with The Weeknd, whom he now sends tracks to directly via SMS.

“I much prefer working on personal projects, because all the credit is mine,” he says. “[Collaborations with big-name artists] is mostly good for my portfolio. It also boosts my credibility in the biz,” says the producer, who’s also created tracks for esteemed France-based rappers such as Nekfeu and Joke.

Of course, this acquired credibility comes with a certain amount of pressure, and High Klassifed feels it more and more.  “As soon as you do a music placement with a big name, all eyes are on you, so you need to feed that hype,” he says. “I’m constantly stressed out about sending beats to people, not knowing if they’ll use them or not. But you know what? I won’t get into that too much, because the more I talk about it, the less it happens…”

Highly secretive about his upcoming projects, he’s currently planning his next tour, which hits Europe for a few weeks at the end of the summer. But more often than not, this proud Laval homeboy ends up homesick. “After three weeks of touring Asia, recently, I just couldn’t take it anymore,” he says. “All I wanted to do was come home!” laughs the young man, who still lives with his mom, and has built a professional studio in the basement of their house.

Yet High Klassified wants to spend a few months in Los Angeles, soon, to participate in some recording sessions. He doesn’t close any doors, except those of Montréal. “My girlfriend lives in the Canadiens tower, and that’s a real headache to me,” he says. “All that noise and entertainment bothers me. In Laval, I can concentrate on music and think about nothing else. That’s how I manage to create.”