Band: The Field
Album: The Field
Genre: Hip-Hop
RIYL: Bob Dylan, Atmosphere, Joe Budden

The Field CD Release
Feb. 25, 9 p.m.
Billy's Lounge, Grand Rapids
$5

The Field is a collaborative project, formed in only a handful of studio sessions, totaling 20 hours. Rapper Nixon was making beats when rapper Rick Chyme (Southpaw Players) paid him a visit.

"It was my birthday," Chyme said. "I should never be there when Nixon makes beats because I want to take every one. He gave [one beat] to me as a birthday present. We recorded it, then we made another. We thought, ‘that was easy, we should just keep this going and see what comes if we just keep working.'"

The pair gave themselves some parameters: the beats had to come from a crate of vinyl Nixon had, all the lyrics had to be written right then, and none of the work could be taken home. They called up Bassist Coe Lacey (Southpaw Players) and had him play through the songs on a single take, and then created the rule that Lacey would take all the bass parts, and no other instruments would be included.

"It was the most fluid process I'd ever had in the studio," Chyme said. "It was almost like racing: He'd pick the sample, he'd start his process making the beat, I'd start tapping away with the iTouch. Sometimes, I'd be done with the words before the beat was done."

Chyme, who with Southpaw Players has talked about writing "truth" music, latched onto the spontaneity of the process.

"There was zero thought put into what do we want to say and it made it easier, almost," Chyme said. "The beat is telling me to write this right now. Some of them are stories that I'm narrating and some of them I put myself in the story and tell it in first-person, with aspects directly from drawn from experiences."

As far as the beats, the vinyl was simply what Nixon had brought into the studio to work with on his own the night Chyme stopped by.

"I'd grab a whole bunch and just start dropping the needle," Nixon said. "80 percent of this album was made from Partridge Family and Bee Gees albums. After a few songs, you start getting an idea of what it sounds like, so you're just using stuff that would fit in. It all fits together pretty well."