Black Hoodie Folk

Photo by: Erick Anderson

Hi everyone! Just wanted to say a big THANK YOU for coming out to support our first weekend show at The Basement. I received a personal text from Grimey today thanking us for “killing it!” We are so happy that the southeast is responding to our experimentation and that you like what you hear! It gives us the courage and inspiration to keep exploring this new project and record an album as soon as we can. For those of you that haven’t seen Black Hoodie Folk yet, I’ll give you a little background into how the band works.

My mother was a passionate lover of original local music. She raised four children that all play in bands, produce, write and record. After her death, I discovered several huge boxes of cassette tapes. They were recordings she had made of things that were important to her–music lessons, baby talk, a sound sampling of our kitchen while we made cookies, and songs we wrote as children. Benjarvis and I started playing with the IPad sampling function on garageband and sampling from the cassettes. We now create tracks to play our songs to with these samples.

The Process:

First, I write a song on acoustic guitar and record it to the IPad.

Second, I might place a few key whole samples of a child talking or my dad talking or some musical instrument, etc.

Third, Benjarvis comes in and puts on headphones and gets to work creating a rhythmic structure. He speeds up the samples to slice them and make hat piffs out of baby’s squeeks and lowers them to make bass drums out of tuned-down dog barks, etc.

At that point, I’ll come back in and tweak what works and doesn’t work for me, and maybe add more stuff.

Then back to Benjarvis to start putting in keys, sub bass, and other bells and whistles.

We continue to trade the IPad back and forth over a few days until we have what we feel is a soundscape that is weird enough to please us, but not so busy that it doesn’t do the song a service.

We draw a lot of our inspiration for these tracks from the underground rappers and beat-makers on soundcloud and bandcamp that we listen to. Black Hoodie Folk is about mixing that druggy, synthy cloud with lots of intricate rhythm, the organic warmth of live percussion and cassette tape samples, the harsh grind of an electric guitar and the smoothness of a female vocal to create something cohesive, yet sonically lush and interesting.

We are having a really wonderful time making these tunes and we look forward to seeing all of you at a Black Hoodie Folk show.

Much love!

Tish