Nicolay Music

By Kate Magoc. Source: JenesisMagazine.com. The hip-hop paradigm has come to reflect omnivorous tastes and polycultural trafficking. One of the best examples of this paradigmatic shift from the basic elements to ethnic and cultural transgression can be heard in the many collaborative efforts of Dutch producer Nicolay. Over the span of his career, Nicolay has worked with the likes of Little Brother, Supastition, Masta Ace, Strange Fruit Project and Zion I and he has remixed tracks for Roy Ayers, Bob James, and Cindy Dulfer. He is best known however, for being the producing half of The Foreign Exchange (with Phonte Coleman of Little Brother). His most recent project is called TIME:LINE, which is the first full-length release on Nicolay's label, Nicolay Music.

Dutch Soul singer Moon Baker, who's 2007 critically acclaimed debut album ABC of Romance is largely produced by Nicolay and features renowned Dutch artists such as Candy Dulfer, Alain Clarke and Pete Philly of Pete Philly & Perquisite, has been asked to join the aforementioned Candy Dulfer's upcoming tour of Europe and Japan. Moon will have the opportunity to perform at least 4 of her own songs, of which 2 are confirmed: the singles ABC of Romance and Shot Deep, both produced by Nicolay. Check out Candy's website for tourdates, and if they come to your area make sure you go see them. Keep your eye on Nicolay Music, too, as you'll soon be able to purchase your import copy of ABC of Romance right here through our online store!

Congratulations, Moon, and knock 'em dead out there!

The internet is truly a wonderful thing. In addition to seemingly having an endless wealth of information at your fingertips, it has also been responsible for bringing people together. Not in a creepy eHarmony sense per se, but the web united North Carolina-based producer Nicolay and Houston-based MC Kay. The two met in 2003 on the OkayPlayer message boards. Being mutual fans of each other’s work, they began to exchange ideas, concepts and eventually music, setting the stage for what would become their newly released project Time:Line, which dropped in late April. Utilizing the web to create what Kay feels is a “new-school classic,” the two are set on giving hungry hip-hop fans more than enough food for thought.

“He’s always been extremely polished to me,” says Kay of his musical partner. “He pays a lot of attention to detail.” Creating a perfect match for his substance-over-style delivery, Kay found a home on Nicolay’s layered productions, creating a sonic relationship that oozes through the speakers.

“I always do best with people that have a lot of musicality about them,” says Nicolay. “A lot of MCs are just concerned with their verse, but people that can think conceptually – hooks/verses, not just tracks – those are the people I like working with, and Kay definitely has that.”

Used to creating music beyond geographical barriers from his 2004 Foreign Exchange project with Little Brother’s Phonte in which the Dutch-born Nicolay sent beats from the Netherlands to a North Carolina residing Phonte, the seemingly minor gap between Carolina and H-Town was no problem.

“It never played a part as far as I’m concerned. I’ve never really did it any other way,” explains Nicolay.

“Even though we weren’t in the same space, I talked to him a lot about what I wanted to do conceptually before we started,” adds Kay. “When I got the production, how they were styled and could hear all of the influences, as a writer I just wrote, no frills. I’m not into saying things in the most complex way they can be said. I’m into saying it in a way people can understand and touch on things average people can relate to.”

The result is a sound that Nicolay coins “millennium soul,” a type of music that is hard to categorize and even harder to deny. A hybrid of new era hip-hop infused with ‘60s and ‘70s soul-influenced backdrops have helped the group create a fresh, yet vintage sound.

“It sounds honest. I always try to come across as an extension of the music we both like and if you sit down and ask us the things we think are important in life, you’ll hear that in the music,” says Kay.

“It’s hard to put a tag on it,” says Nicolay. “ We just tried to be creative. Hip-hop is the foundation of what we’re doing but we never wanna restrict ourselves to what we can do.”

The complete instrumentals for TIME:LINE are available through iTunes! Click the link below to purchase.

iTunes US

The instrumentals are also available through all international iTunes versions.

It may be cliché, but it still rings true, good music is timeless. In addition, the music we create is a reflection of the times, sonically conveying the social and political atmosphere of the era in which it was created. While those atmospheres are prone to shifts and changes, the human elements remain constant. While musical norms change and current events shape the world in new and exciting ways, the same concerns, desires, hopes, and struggles of humanity continued to be reflected in music now, just as they were going back to the first recordings.

The human element and its relation to music is front and center on Time:Line, the recent release by producer Nicolay and emcee Kay. The duo crafted an LP that follows the progression of music and the artists that created it. In this exclusive Ruby Hornet interview, Nicolay and Kay talk about the creation of Time:Line, their knowledge of music’s past, and vision of its future.

RubyHornet: I’ve been listening to Time:Line a lot. Springtime is coming, it’s starting to get warm, and when I listen to your album I actually feel warmer. Even the track “Blizzard” gets a warm feeling. I don’t know if you’re ever listening to it, and just get warmer?

Nicolay: Yeah, definitely I do. You kind of, in a funny way, said more or less what we’re about. That’s one of the things that I definitely try to do. A lot of people always associate it with spring or summer. It’s got that vibe to it I guess.

RubyHornet: So, the album is called Time:Line, and I’m familiar with the concept, how you guys went back and put this story to music and went back to different eras of music and different sounds. When you were creating the music, did it impact your relationship with music at all? Did going back and creating that audio Time:Live give you a different sense of where music came from, and allow you to see its progression in a different way at all?

Kay: We’re doing that now. It’s funny, before you called we just had a 45 minute conversation on the Beatles. That’s the thing, making the album pulled a lot out of us, but it also made us re-discover why we do the things that we do, the things that we like…we really learned a lot about music just studying classics.

Nicolay: Basically since the whole period of last year, the end of 2006 and last year included, I’ve been on, I don’t want to call it a search or anything, but I really got inspired to a point where I really was able to let whatever inhibitions that were still there, to let that go and let the music do its thing. It’s been really cool ever since because a lot of that has to do with the music that you listen to on a regular basis. All of the people, especially all of the people that I work with personally, we’re all really students of music. We always try to get better and get more knowledge about what it is that we do. A really concrete example is “I’ve Seen Rivers” where I was really kind of listening to those Burt Bacharach recordings just trying to get that vibe and see what made that special. It definitely even made us appreciate it a lot more I guess.

RubyHornet: On that track, Kay, you say, “They’re all smiles till you say something.” You talk about how people will get away with as much as they can before getting caught. My question for you is: is the blame on them for doing those things, or is it partly on us also for not saying something sooner?

Kay: It’s kind of ironic that now they’re getting ready for the elections, it’s so much rhetoric and talking and you get swung away from the point and the issues that we need to deal with. At the end of the day when somebody says, ‘hey, wait a minute. I can’t pay for my house…Hey, wait minute. What’s going on with our schools?’ Once you start doing that the smiles are gone, they start stuttering. Just like I say, they shift like Peyton Manning. Everything changes up then. It’s like, ‘Ok. You were going to solve the world’s problems, you were going to protect us. But on the same note, what about educating our seeds and our seeds’ seeds?’ How are you going to handle that? A lot of it is true like you say, somebody’s got to bring attention to the facts so that we as a people stop paying attention to more trivial things, and focus on what’s really important for our future worldwide, not just here in the States, but everywhere period.

RubyHornet: I watched the behind the scenes stuff that you put up on your MySpace page. You talk about the track “The Lights” and remembering where we came from, and why it is that we choose to do what we do. What is it that brings both of you guys back to remembering that at the end of the day it is about the music, and the reasons why you choose to create music? What brings you back and gets you grounded again?

Nicolay: Obviously were in it because we love and enjoy music, and we feel like we’ve got something unique to offer. It’s a situation where you don’t even really know how much of an impact you can have on people’s lives until you’ve heard in-person or through emails and MySpace messages. I think that even when you’re an independent musician and you’re really trying to fight for what it is that you’re doing on the really, really practical level in the sense that you got to eat, you got to pay your bills, you’ve got all these things. It gets more difficult as time progresses, especially for that group of musicians, just for the fact that the music industry is not forgiving for people that are already on the lower spectrum of the market. It’s really the people that appreciate the music that keep you going like that. If you do a show and people come up to you and tell you, ‘yo, your record helped me through a rough patch.’ Or people that are currently stationed in Iraq listening to our stuff and it kind of takes them away from the madness a little bit. Those are all real examples of people that you come across and that makes every hardship, or every challenge worth it.

Kay: For me, I’d say I always talk about the feeling I used to have, you know when you we’re younger and the internet wasn’t so crazy, and you’d go to the store and were just like, ‘ahhhh. Midnight Marauders,’ and you just couldn’t think for a couple days cause it just hit you so hard? I think that’s where I’m at as far as how I feel about music. When me and Nic sit together and we think about stuff, we just want to give people music that is throwback in that sense. I think we’re forward thinking, but in that sense we really try to focus on giving people a full product from beginning to end. Make sure it flows, people start thinking of work that we do in context of albums vs. ‘I’m going to do this single, this single, this single.’

RubyHornet: Also in that behind the scenes piece, you were talking about how when you recorded "The Lights", you chose to step away vocally in the interest of the track and let the other artists have more of the spotlight...A lot of artists have trouble sacrificing their individual part for the betterment of the whole, what role has that kind of patience and being able to see the bigger picture played in your success and your approach to music?

Kay: At the end of the day I think it’s all about putting out the best project that you can. A lot of times I think, as I’ve gotten older and the more writing I’ve done as an emcee, a lot of times I realize that the situations where groups of five people and every emcee has to be on every song, that takes away from the album vs. just listening to the music. My approach is, do what you can with the track and just roll with it. When I heard Strange Fruit’s verses, the way it was sequenced, the way Nic had it, I was just like ‘man, if I add a verse it will just be overkill. At the end of the day I just want people to enjoy.’ I liked it. Nic will tell you I’m not really an attention type dude. That’s not me.

RubyHornet: One thing that came up across the album, and going back to the Time:Line concept, is that the emotions and things people go through on a human level are the same, maybe just the surrounding circumstances and the times change, but the human condition is still the human condition and that comes across when I listen to the music. Did you guys go in with that, or did it just come out?

Nicolay: That’s something that really has to do with the album being a combination of our personalities. We were actually talking about this before we talked to you and we were like, ‘it’s funny how even though we’re from very different backgrounds, obviously, even if it’s just the ocean, but at the same time we keep finding out that we’ve got a lot in common and we live kind of similar lifestyles and the more and more we get to know each other we find that we have a lot of common. Especially when it comes to social-political awareness, I think that we very much think alike, and that really is reflected throughout the album. I think even if we don’t necessarily say anything in words, we make it a point of saying it with music.

When it comes to that, there’s a straight parallel between this album and the Foreign Exchange because we talk about situations that people are actually going through. It’s a very different concept than being the type of artist that people look up to in a sense that the artist has a materialistic appeal. If you look at an artist and say, ‘I wish I was them because they got money, cars, jewelry, clothes…’ It’s a very different perspective than seeing somebody and saying, ‘damn. They go through the same s**t I do.’ And we notice that people really get affected by that music on a very real level because of that. That makes it really, really cool. We may not have that mass exposure, but we may have infinite connections with the people that really listen to our s**t.

RubyHornet: What you just touched on, linking this with Foreign Exchange…Fans really like to categorize things and I’m wondering if when you were making this project did you think that people would view this as Foreign Exchange II and Kay just taking the place of Phonte rather than seeing this as a separate and unique situation? Have you come across that, or did that cross your mind when you were making the album?

Nicolay: Yeah. I mean, I was aware of it. It’s a situation where, and I don’t mean this in any kind of way of bigging up myself, but for some reason, people that I work with always get measured with higher standards than anybody else. It’s really weird, but it’s a simple fact. When Connected came out it really hit people straight in the heart. Everything you do after that, even if it’s only 5% of the people, always gets put against that. We were very aware of it, but at no point did it really worry us or influence what we were doing. One of the things that was really clear to us was that we were doing something that may have a lot of similarities, but can very much stand on its own. Even in the press you hear this is the follow-up to the Foreign Exchange album but this time Nicolay’s working with Kay. I’m thinking, ‘listen. We did a new Foreign Exchange album as well. It’s not out yet, but don’t jump the gun. Everything is cool. It’s two completely different people.’ Like I said, we were aware of it. Kay was aware of it. But we never let it influence anything that we were doing.

Kay: That’s kind of why we did the documentary. I know for me, I really just wanted people to know the type of person that I was, that I was normal. There’s no way I would even try to fit in that space as far as the Foreign Exchange. You don’t really follow records like that. But if people understood that I’m just a guy, a normal dude trying to say his little piece, his little story and let it be that, and take the music for that. I think once people listen to the album and get to know us, us as a unit, and me as a person, hopefully that will come across and Time:Line can stand on its own.

RubyHornet: If you go back and listen to music from the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, there’s a certain quality level that makes you able to go back and still listen to it. You were even talking about the Beatles earlier, they’re a group where their music will last forever. Could you visualize someone 20 years from now doing what you did and recreating from 2004? Do you think the music that’s coming out now will lend itself to the Time:Line concept in 20-30 years?

Kay: I don’t know…

Nicolay: That’s a good question

Kay: Wow…

Nicolay: You know what the funny part is? I think that because of the fact that mass media has really taken over music as a branding thing rather than art, I think it really has spread the interesting music real thin. In the 60’s and 70’s I think that progressive music had much more of a chance to get appreciated by a lot of people than we would ever have now for the simple fact that you wouldn’t even get between it. There’s just a very strong divide between money and art. That’s a simple fact. Anyone that tries to deny that is either dumb or they just don’t know it yet. It’s just a fact. Every now and then somebody gets through the door. Luckily, a group like Gnarls Barkley, they were kind of able to do what they do, and make that do what it will do. That was one of the great examples of how you can still get in between it, but I think it’s far and few between. Somebody 20 years from now very well may be able to find a lot of music from the current time period, but I don’t know if they’re going to be as enamored or infatuated by it as we can be of stuff from 30 years ago, because of the simple fact that it’s going to be hard for them to find stuff. But you never know, it may be a situation where in 30 years from now you’ll have a database in your head with pretty much every song ever recorded, you can just call them up as you demand it so to speak. Maybe the craziest stuff will be possible.

Kay: I don’t know. I don’t see it. I don’t see people redoing stuff that’s out now. It’s not profound. The way I look at it, with Gnarls and Amy Winehouse, all of that music that you hear, a lot of it is really throwback. It’s a throwback sound. I look at it like if you're doing something, just as Nic says, that is really based on the art or the music, those people win Grammys and stuff like that. You would think the labels would be like, ‘hmmm, Ok. So they’re actually using instruments? They’re actually talking about things? They won a Grammy! Wow, let’s try that again.’ I think a lot of it has to do with the cost of doing that kind of stuff as far as producing the album and recording Electric Lady style versus having a computer program and just using Garage Band presets in recording your album. Actually doing that type of music costs more and the labels aren’t really trying to invest the money in it, but the people that do it are successful. The way me and Nic talk, we’re just like, ‘let’s keep pushing back and try to create music in a musical way, use instruments. I know that sounds real simple…

Nicolay: Isn’t that funny that there would ever be a time where if you say you use instruments in your music people are looking at you like, ‘wow…really.?!?1’ It’s really ironic that music went through a development period where the s**t had to come to a complete stop, and I don’t want to say anything negative about anybody because I respect anybody that’s doing whatever they’re doing in the music business hustling, it’s one of the toughest industries out there, but it’s just always funny to me when there’s an emphasis-even when it comes to me it’s like the most normal thing in the world that I use a lot of instruments, but there are people that are in awe of it. I think it’s cool, but it’s music, the most normal thing in the world. It really makes you think, playing an instrument, expressing yourself that way, having certain skills even it makes me wonder how much of a dying thing that is in itself.

RubyHornet: Right, it’s like, ‘oh wow, you played instruments on this record, tell me about that.’

Nicolay: Yeah…It’s just what I do. Those are musical instruments, and I make music. It makes a lot of sense to me. I realize that Hip Hop is an art form where it developed from kind of a counter movement in the sense that people didn’t have any means, and all they could do was loop certain breaks and make music that way. I think that Hip Hop has always been that kind of music where a lot of it has been based on looping repetitive stuff and it’s always interesting to me that people that are trying to break out of that always have a lot of resistance or are met with a lot of resistance, even the Roots or someone like that, like it’s the most exotic thing ever. It’s really just people going back to what it’s all about. It’s always funny to me and a weird thing.

By Roosevelt Treasurechest. Source: Rubyhornet.com

Dutch producer Nicolay should be the official poster boy for the successful Internet match-up. An exchange with Little Brother’s Phonte Coleman on the notorious Okayplayer message boards led to 2004’s Connected, a border-bending soul collaboration that garnered praise in the underground circuit for its kinetic ingenuity and technological experimentation (Nicolay crafted beats from the Netherlands and Phonte laced them from North Carolina). Four years and two solo projects later, Nicolay once again found himself working the boards, this time striking a partnership with Houston-based emcee Kay of the group the Foundation.

In round two of the Nicolay-and-friends cyberfusions, Phonte’s animated eloquence is replaced by Kay’s southern-fried monotone, adding an element of lethargy to Nicolay's electric compositions. Our introduction to this tag team begins with the title track, a boisterous jam that uses stinging crash cymbals to announce the duo’s arrival. The album simmers with the glittering harmonies of “The Lights,” and maintains a synth-heavy coast until “The Gunshot” which juxtaposes a waist-winding dancehall beat with lamentations on unnecessary gun violence.

Nicolay pulls a handful of gems from his sonic grab bag, toying with raucous horns, birdcalls and heavy keyboard sequences while Kay thumbs through the pages of his life, reflecting on birth, the temptations of fame, love and untimely death. His delivery isn’t mind-blowing, but he has a knack for gripping Nicolay’s rhythms and riding them out to careful completion.

By: Andrea Boston. Source: eMusic

First of all, hats off to everyone that sent us their "TIME:LINE moment"!

Honorable mentions:

Wynton Kelly Bannister ("My TIME:LINE")

Fredo Tan ("TIME:LINE dish")

DJ Cipher ("TIME:LINE skateboard")

The three honorable mentions will receive a 'surprise-pack' from Nicolay Music!

Runners-up:

Cyrille 'Kami' Nguyen ("Good nite with TIME:LINE")

Joe White ("I Never Go Anywhere Without My Copy of TIME:LINE 2")

The two runners-up will receive Nicolay's entire catalogue and Kay's The Talkshow on CD, signed and all.

Winner:

Sharif Brown ("Special Kay")

All winners will be contacted shortly. Congratulations!

Nicolay Music

Dear friends,

Let me cut right to the chase... the new FOREIGN EXCHANGE record is almost finished! We are currently working on one of the last tracks, which is the title track, 'Leave It All Behind', already one of my personal favourites. Some other songtitles that I can confirm at this point are 'Sweeter Than You' and 'House Of Cards'.

We first started working on this record back in 2006, and it feels good knowing that the finish line is finally in sight. It's been quite a journey! We are both very proud of the record and can't wait for you to hear it. And while you'll have to wait a little while longer, you now know that it is indeed on the way. Keep an eye on our MySpace page(s) for more information coming soon.

One love, and thanks for your support,
Nicolay

Courtesy of our good friend DJ Low Key, here's a report including some great pictures of the Nicolay & Kay show in Denver, Colorado. Thanks to everyone that came out!

Quick, name a hip-hop producer from the Netherlands. If you can�t, shame on you. Because that means great music like Here, Dutch Masters and City Lights are not in your collection. Definitely your loss. The rest of you who shun life under a rock know Nic from his 2004 collaborative effort with Phonte of Little Brother, Connected. Traditionally known as the land of clogs and windmills Nicolay has single-handedly put the Kingdom of The Netherlands on the hip-hop map with a lush sound full of dusty samples and live instruments. Currently on tour promoting his project with Kay of the Foundation, Time:Line, Nic took a few minutes to chat it up with Nodfactor.com.

NF: I know there is a making of �Time:Line� video series out there, but give me the quick and ugly version of how you hooked up with Kay to do this CD.

Nicolay: We originally �met� very similar to how I got in touch with Phonte, it was on Okayplayer around 2003/2004� he was a big fan of Connected and he was down with Ali Shaheed Muhammad�s camp� so the first things we did together was �My Story� and another track, both intended for his solo album The Talk Show. However, that album got shelved, so I put �My Story� on my Here album to at least have it out and it turned out to be one of people�s favourites. So at point, we were like� we should consider doing a full project together. thats it in a nutshell�.

NF: As a producer, do you approach your instrumental projects like City Lights differently from the Connected and Time:line projects?

Nicolay: Yeah, in all realness the choices made during instrumental projects are mine and mine alone, whereas the projects I have done with people together are much more a symbiosis. Ultimately you try to match what the other one is doing but there could potentially be a situation where a vocalist is not feeling a track that I might consider releasing as an instrumental. Thats the comprise you need to make doing a project together with someone.

NF: Can u give me an example of a beat someone didn�t think was right for themthat you just kept for yourself?

Nicolay: Yeah there�s a couple of tracks on City Lights that fall under that like �memory lane��in that particular example, it wasn�t a matter of �not feeling� but simply not happening. I remember Phonte liking that beat real early on, but it�s just one of those things that� a better track took its place I guess. And there�s also tracks that people might feel and might demo on, but I may feel they work better as instrumentals�

NF: They have their own voice�

Nicolay: Yeah, honestly sometimes it�s almost as though any vocals would take it over the top�Just because usually my tracks are musically real dense and sometimes� they are just fine the way they are. And then sometimes there�s tracks that come to life when the vocals are written to them..

NF: like �Fantastic� to me is a great stand alone instrumental can u tell me what went into making that one? the melody is amazing.

Nicolay: That one was one of the very first [beats], like early �02. I was skipping through some rotary connection records and I heard something I liked�. however, since I was conscious of the potential �obviousness� of the sample, I chopped it up and re-arranged itand then later on, I put a snippet from Minnie Riperton on top and filtered that�that�s the sine like reverb-y melody on top. That�s one of the first�. 10

NF: ever? that you made?

Nicolay: Yeah

NF: damn, shun! You don�t wanna hear my first 10 then�

Nicolay: It�s funny because we are working on this compilation of 5 years �produced by nicolay� and so we were researching some shit and dates and shit and yeah a lot of those early ones ended up on albums. Like �Come Around� was the actual first�

NF: WOW!

Nicolay: �Light it Up� and �Be All Right� were also in that first 10.

NF: What were you drum programming on?

Nicolay: I used what I use to this day for drum programming. It�s a tracker called Modplug a free program� with the most precise timing ever (www.modplug.com) Hardly anyone knows about it but its nothing short of amazing. The learning curve is ridiculous though. Thats one of the secret weapons�. lol

NF: I swore you were banging on pads of something. Does it come with those drum sounds or are those yours?

Nicolay: Nah all of those are mine. It doesn�t come with anything and so it looks kinda overwhelming but the timing subtleties you can get with it are amazing. I�ll probably never, ever switch over.

NF: That is my biggest gripe with FL. The swing for drum patters isn�t where I�d like it to be. I just use drum breaks most of the time and use the slicer for chopping the samples

Nicolay: Yeah man I tried FL but i couldn�t fuck with it. I tried it once and I was like�. �ohhhhh nooooo.� I was amazed the results that 9th got with it cause I was like I can�t get it to groove for SHIT. But then I found out he makes it work by using breaks and parts of breaks

NF: Right. It�s hard to straight program with it you�ll sound like mr. roboto on the beat box

Nicolay: Haha yeah youll sound like Kraftwerk, which works for some people, but not me. I need more soul.

NF: Which makes me ask how much of your music is played live? Your keyboard melodies are sick.

Nicolay: Thanks, man�more and more and more. Like on FE, it was maybe�. like I added 25% �So far� is actually ALL samples but the bassline. But for instance �Indian Summer� has none that�s all played. I have always really liked to switch it up like that and to combine. Ultimately it�s far more gratifying to work with an empty canvas and no samples, though�it�s harder I have been forcing myself to do it.

NF: What about �Adore� with Purple Saint James a def fav of mine

Nicolay: Adore is a funny story, because that�s one of those examples that I got my Jon Brion on and I replayed the whole entire thing, all the parts. It was a sample originally but BBE was worried I wouldn�t get away with it. So literally play everything on that track from the guitars to the keyboards to the percussion. I replayed it all and added some of my own flavour to it.

Check back soon for Part 2 of this interview.

By Jerry Barrow. Source: Nodfactor.com