DJ Dubble8

Erik Spangler does a lot within the Baltimore experimental music community while maintaining a rather low profile: working with Mobtown Modern, which he co-founded; co-hosting monthly hip-hop exploration series the Boom Bap Project; performing as DJ Dubble8; and teaching a class in sound at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The Oberlin- and Harvard-educated composer/DJ/producer/educator works hard at removing, or at least lowering, the walls between his classroom and the thriving Baltimore music culture surrounding it, and this weekend’s Vigil all-night music festival is a remarkable example, 13 hours of a mixture of students and outside guest musicians... - Baltimore Sun

...the typically “experimental” baggage of free improv suggests that it shouldn’t lead to dope beats.

Spangler, aka DJ Dubble8, thought it could. The idea for the Boom Bap Society first came to him after he met Patrick in 2011, when they played in the same installment of Out of Your Head, the jazz-leaning free improvisation events that bassist Adam Hopkins and guitarist Matt Frazao started in 2009. A few months later Spangler ran into Patrick at Artscape, they got to talking, discovered they both loved hip-hop, and wondered if the Out of Your Head model could be adapted to suit producers, MCs, and musicians.

“I found that format really inspiring, people being put in to different combinations and improvising together,” Spangler says. “I felt like it would be great to have a context to explore that side of music-making to sustain grooves. One of the things that led me to talking to [Patrick] about it was just being surprised at how there are amazingly talented hip-hop artists in Baltimore who didn’t really know each other. It would be to have something that would put people in connection with each other, start building a community that focused on experimentation in hip-hop.”
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Spangler says that simply listening is one of the skills participating in a Society session sharpens, and that he and Patrick often tell Boom Bap newbies that sometimes the most valuable way they can contribute is by sitting back, be very intentional about when they come in, and have something to add. That thoughtfulness isn’t only good for the vibe in the moment; it plays a role in helping to inform what a local music community might look and sound like. Wanna be a part of the scene? Show up, pay attention, listen to what people are doing and saying, and find a constructive way to add yourself to the mix.

Boom Bap Society sessions are “an opportunity to model what do we want our musical culture to look like, one that’s a very inclusive culture that people from all different music backgrounds can find a common ground in,” Spangler says. “That’s something that was definitely one of my goals when we were first coming up with the idea. Hip-hop, through sampling, is so open to so many different sounds. Just the idea that you can take that as the premise for live music-making that’s completely spontaneous without a road map of how it’s going to go, that people can find common ground even when they haven’t met before.”

That starting point means that every Boom Bap Society session is different. That also means that every session might be something you’ve never even imagined before. “What they do here is unheard of,” says Tislam, a veteran local producer and MC. “The sounds and the instrumentation that come together on the fly is mind boggling, sometimes you get mad because why isn’t this being recorded and put out? This is phenomenal music.”

Unstated in that assessment is that phenomenal music is made phenomenal musicians, and artists show up to Society sessions with expectations set pretty high. They don’t know what’s gonna happen, they might not even know who they’re going to be doing it with, but they’re all trying to find that fleetingly sublime moment and stay there, together, as one. If you’ve ever followed a band from its very early days on you can probably remember that night you saw them become who they are onstage, that moment where the young band went from awkwardly walking tender foal to grown-ass beast at full gallop. Boom Bap Society shows cycle through many of those moments nearly every session.

And being a part of some fleeting brilliance, a lighting strike that just as quickly evaporates, might be one of the reasons why so many musicians were willing to drag themselves to a grassy city lot so that Wendel Patrick could take their picture. The sun officially rose at 7:17 a.m. on Oct. 17, and by 7:30 a.m. Patrick had both his stationary camera set up and the drone working. He had flown the drone around a bit found the right height and flight path for it. He looked at the assembled musicians from the camera’s point of view on a tablet and then did some impromptu art direction: some people move more this way, some move more that way, turn the harp a little this way, one bass move over to the other side. And then he he told everybody he was going to start taking a few shots. The drone hummed, idling in the air, and Patrick, hands on the controls, added one final thing: “OK, everyone, look straight up.” - Baltimore Sun

A composer with a PhD from Harvard, a hip-hop DJ, and a banjo enthusiast walk into a bar. No, this is not the set-up for a bad joke. It’s a night alone for Erik Spangler. Spangler is co-founder of the post-classical institution Mobtown Modern and of the Boom Bap Society,
CP‘s “Best New Hip-Hop Night.”
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"Cloudsplitter" may be the most complete expression of Spangler’s aesthetic obsessions. With it, he has managed to locate the sweet spot that connects contemporary classical music, mountain music, and hip-hop. The so-called “mountain modal” tunings of banjo players like Dock Boggs blend perfectly into the atonal sounds of 20th century classical music; and the banjo’s drone-y sound and the fiddle’s rhythmic squawl mirror much electronica and DJ music, providing someone like Spangler an especially fertile terrain.

Spangler played banjo riffs and then sampled and mixed them with hip-hop beats. On the first track, “What We Need Is Here,” Berry’s words are sung in a high and lonesome mountain tenor accompanied by a banjo for about 30 seconds before a traditional hip-hop scratching sound subtly breaks through underneath. The drone rises electronically rather than from the banjo itself as its modal clawhammer plucking stays steady, giving the whole thing the sense of a prayer.

The second song, “Baltimore to Shenandoah,” continues in the same subdued, almost ominously quiet vein, until a steady, more recognizably hip-hop beat interrupts, energizing the whole track.

“Dirge for the Holler,” perhaps the most successful mixture of the elements in Spangler’s repertoire, could easily have won the titular prize in Guy Maddin’s 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World with its gorgeous, lonesome lament that somehow transcends its own emotion and location to become something universal.

“P.O.V. Appalachia” seems to comment in an equally melancholy way on the desire for authenticity, i.e., poverty, that dominates the reception of both hip-hop and mountain music, using the tropes of each genre to set the other in a stark contrast. We want our rappers and our banjo-pickers to come from backgrounds we never want to experience ourselves, because it makes a better story.

Though hill-hop began as an experiment and, in its early days, was almost entirely artificial, with Appalshop bringing together hip-hop and mountain artists to create the music, Spangler shows that the genre has the ability to rise above the almost-novelty quality of its origins and become an independent artform in its own right. If anyone can make this happen, it is probably the banjo-picking DJ doctor of composition. - Baltimore Sun