The zeitgeist is an odd thing; it’s possible to simultaneously be a part of it and disconnected from it. Milwaukee producer SammyJams found himself in that position in the mid to late ’00s, when he ran a local rap label called ShutDemDown. That label specialized in contemporary rap in its most popular iterations: beat-heavy commercial rap and rowdy club bangers inspired by the dirty South—mass appeal sounds that, ironically, had very little appeal in Milwaukee at the time.
“I was more into mainstream stuff, and I didn’t seem to fit in with anybody who was doing hip-hop around here,” recalls SammyJams, who was producing under the moniker Sam Winters back then. “Everybody I knew in the scene was almost exclusively focused on underground, ’90s-oriented hip-hop. I really felt like an outsider.”
These days the Milwaukee rap scene is a lot less myopic, but SammyJams grew tired of producing straightforward rap. He explains that it began to feel too derivative, producing for artists who constantly requested beats modeled after someone else’s work.
“If you’ve been on Soundcloud, you’ve seen that there are producers who are only interested in marketing their beats or selling beats that sound like something else,” he explains. “They’ll name the beat ‘A Timbaland-Type Beat’ or ‘A Neptunes-Type Beat,’ and a lot of artists I was working with at the time were asking for that, requesting, ‘Can you do a song that sounds like this?’ I wasn’t interested in just copying other people’s beats. It began to feel like my creativity and my creative control were fading away.”
So the producer retired the label and took a few years to himself, recording unreleased music just for the fun of it. He dropped his old moniker and completely changed his approach to beat-making, swapping his high-tech gear for a Teenage Engineering OP-1, a relatively streamlined synthesizer and sampler and station that he credits for his new approach. “With ShutDemDown I never used samples,” he explains, “but when I got the OP-1 I started playing around with sampling and started discovering what I could do with this really limiting platform.”
SammyJams describes his new sound as more experimental, which is technically true, though it’s not experimental in the euphemistic “hard to listen to” sense. Instead, on SammyJams’ debut album Hot Science, the beats are looser, dreamier, more expansive and also more whimsical, drawing from the punchiness of contemporary trap music, the free-association drift of vaporwave and the bombast of big beat. It’s not pop music, by any stretch, but it’s not all that far removed from popular trends in electronic music, either. You could probably slide a track like “Business Girls” or “So Raw” into a Certified Clubtapes mix without alienating the dance floor. That latter track is one drop away from sounding like it could be a legit club hit.
Hot Science is the first release on Milwaukee synth artist Dashcam’s new label NiceFM; SammyJams repaid the favor by co-producing Dashcam’s upcoming cassette tape for Gloss Records. The producer says it’s a shift being on somebody else’s label after spending years running his own, but he prefers it this way.
“Before I had to do all the coordinating and logistical work by myself, in addition to the creative work,” he says. “So it’s kind of nice being able to just kick back and be an artist now.”
SammyJams’ Hot Science is available for streaming and free download at soundcloud.com/nicefm.
