Last Thursday, HipHopDX sat down with producer and emcee Tekneek. The Philadelphia-born artist is set to release a collaborative album with west coast Hip Hop legends and brothers Kurupt [click to read] and Roscoe [click to read] called Tha Tekneek Files, available September 22 on All Day Music. Tekneek discussed how a mutual contact led to first working with the duo.
“About five or six years ago, I actually was doing some work with [Kurupt’s] cousin Jermaine,” Tek explained. “One thing led to another and he played a beat CD of mine in a session that Kurupt and Roscoe were in when they were in Philly. They ended up making a record to one of my tracks and word got back to me, said that they wanted to hook up [and] we got together…and we just recorded some records with them while they were out here. They went back to Cali, and all the while, Kurupt was telling me, ‘Yo, Tek, man you’ve got them beats. You make west coast classics but you’re from Philly. You need to be out west, homie’…so I ended up going out there and getting to work with Kurupt and Roscoe. I got to work with Daz [Dillinger], just the whole camp.”
Tekneek noted that a number of songs featured on Tha Tekneek Files were created very much in the moment. He says that Kurupt and Roscoe work together in a wholly organic manner, allowing them to effortlessly ping-pong ideas off of each other.
“[Roscoe and Kurupt] bounce off each other,” he said. “They create off of each other, like what might have a certain bop to something, or something might come on and it strikes them a certain way. [They] might be vibing and freestyling and coming up with something and once [Kurupt] gets a hold of something, it turns into something else. That’s how a lot of those records got made…from scratch in the moment.”
Tekneek also spoke about his production, describing how he keeps it in grounded in the stylings of the old school. From working with only “…a ASR-X [sampler]…and Pro Tools,” Tek relishes digging through countless samples to originate his decidedly golden era-inspired sound.
“Me, I’m old school,” Tek noted. “I just love old records. I collect a lot of old samples, you know, the ‘Money, Power, Respect’ sample and the ‘Dead Presidents’ sample, I’ve got them all. I just amass a lot of them, and sometimes, you might different piece, flip them a different way, or sometimes, you’ll just take one little piece, one little blunt, one little tenth of a second of it, just to get one little noise…I just love digging and finding obscure things and just going to work.”
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The Philadelphia native also discussed the City of Brotherly Love’s place in Hip Hop history, indicating that the city was the de facto birthplace of the modern deejay. While the art of deejaying may not have originally came from Philly, Tek feels that without a doubt, his hometown was the place where it was revolutionized.
“I think Philly needs to get more praise…for the deejay,” explained Tekneek. “I think more deejays have come out of Philly than anywhere in the world, and California’s real big on deejays, too…but I really think that Philly was [like] the birthplace of Hip Hop for just birthing so many deejays and just the art of the deejay. It really was innovated [in Philly]. I don’t know if it was totally birthed there, but it was innovated there. It was re-born in Hip Hop.”
