The highly anticipated collaboration between Fat Jon (Five Deez) and Morr Music artist Styrofoam. It could be the first collaborative album in history between a Belgian electro-pop artist and an underground MC from Cincinnati!
Two in a room. Surrounded by buttons and cables, by guitars, synthesizers, microphones. Fat Jon (Five Deez) and Arne van Petegem (Styrofoam) have recorded The Same Channel over the course of just a few weeks. Through days and nights, interrupted only by short coffee breaks and longer walks. In Arne’s studio in Antwerp, the two docked their soundships:
Fat Jon, the EmCee and DJ, Arne van Petegem, the guitarist and laptop-artist. They share a passion for their machines’ soul. All around the world. Cincinnati, Antwerp, Berlin. The two got to know each other five years ago.
In 2001 Arne van Petegem invited Fat Jon, still living in Cincinnati, Ohio at that time, to a workshop in Antwerp. What followed this first encounter was great respect for the music of the other and a deep, lasting friendship – as well as the idea of a common album. The Same Channel has grown out of this. A musical encounter indeed, but far away from crossover of the indieboy-meetshomeboy-clichés. This album drinks of a common cup, it thinks musical schools, worlds and last but not least passions together: the onomatopoeic guitars of Styrofoam, Fat Jon’s repetitive idiom, his talent for laconic stories. The klicks’n’cuts are carefully and intricately interwoven, and a production that – without laying it on thick – makes clear that two well-versed producers are at work.
“Scream It Out” is a nimble, catchy track, enticing and tricky in its alterations and modulations. “Space Gangsta” is a creeping track, Dub, smoothly cruising. “Upgrade” a nonchalant speechstaccato, surrounded by one of those enticing refrains by Styrofoam.
Fat Jon moved from Cincinnati to Berlin because of love. He is still part of the Cincinnati-based, progressive-Hip-Hop-collective Five Deez that releases on the Berlin-based label K7!. Small world, isn’t it? Fat Jon recently released the album Afterthought on Ample Soul/Libyus Music.
Arne van Petegem enlarged his indie-guitar background in the late 1990s by means of a sampler and a Roland Juno synthesizer – in order to combine the joys of guitar-songwriting and elektronika as Styrofoam. Since theoe days he has released four records on Morr Music, the most recent being Nothing’s Lost (2004).
Street date: Oct. 17, 2006.
Fat Jon & Styrofoam – The Same Channel track list:
Acid Rain Robot Repair
Bleed
Runnin Circles
Space Gangsta
Nervous Inaction
Upgrade
Scream It Out
The Middle
Generic Genes
Upgrade (Grace Period Mix)
The duo are streaming two tracks on their MySpace page:
www.myspace.com/fatjonstyrofoam
also check out the Video for “Space Gangsta” here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABHiZJMiVsI
for high-res photos, cover art and more info. please visit:
www.morrmusic.com/press-desk/