A little over 5 years after Percuss and I began rapping together in a tiny spare room at Percuss’s old place, our debut album ‘MD’ is officially released!

It all started when when we were driving around our local area in Perth and Percuss said he was keen to write some raps but didn’t have the motivation to do it alone.

He asked if I would join him, throwing in a few comments about how he “had the Rhythm” and I “had the words” and how it “would work”. Well, I guess he was right!

Within a couple of weeks we were spitting some relatively direction-less rhymes over miscellaneous jacked beats ranging from J Dilla classics to instrumentals from Graphic’s “A Shadow of A Smile”.

It was fun, so we kept going.

Not long later we had our first moment of noteworthy progress, when Percuss created an excellent original beat which Shareef followed up with our first first solid verse and the song now known as “Goes On” began to take shape. The song didn’t make the album, but it was a noteworthy moment.

In August 2009 after 8 months of rapping and writing, we bit the bullet and put some money into setting up a basic studio. We found an awesome offer at the time – buy a RODE NT1-A and get a RODE M1 for just $1, so we bought 2 of each. The whole album, except 1 verse on Rights & Responsibilities, was later recorded on one of these NT1-A’s. 

It was around this time that we came across a list of beats for sale by Mdusu and the partnership which became the theme of our debut album “MD” began taking shape.

From that list we bought our first 3 beats from Mdusu, two of which made it to the album in the form of “Hacker Mentality” and “Words”. Over a number of years we continued buying Mdusu beats ad-hoc and writing to them. The beats for the 7 originals on ‘MD’ were all acquired in this way. The hidden track on the other hand came from Paradox MC!

The lyrics and messages for these songs developed over time and in a variety of ways.

Hacker Mentality and Words began as the result of bleary-eyed sparks of creativity late at night by Percuss. One of Those Days began as a thought bubble in my head while driving home from a tough day of work at a shitty job.

Spatters was inspired by the beauty of a mid-summer storm in 2010 and written as the rain fell just inches away under my patio at home. It was later finished after serious local bush fires and the Queensland floods inspired the final two verses.

Tired came from a combination of it’s sample mixed with my experiences with Occupy Perth, and later topped of with Percuss’s personal musing after after a gig we went to in 2012.

You can see the story of Rights & Responsibilities here, and I’ll leave the story of Pretty Woman for an upcoming feature post.

The additional remix by Paradox is a nod to our appreciation of his support since the very early days. I had met him while discussing hip hop on the old Elefant Traks website forums and we developed a friendship quickly. Indeed the first person to ever spit a guest verse on a Selekt Few song was Paradox on our track “In My Mind”, which Paradox also provided the beat for. If there is anyone we could call our ‘crew’ it would be him.

The Lenny Rudeberg remix was a last minute addition by our good friend Wisdom2th, another local guy we respect and wanted to give a shout to; although we’re yet to have him on a guest verse! We’ll have to fix that some time soon.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. That’s the basic story behind the album ‘MD’. If you want to know more you’ll have to catch us at a show or send your questions to us on  Twitter / Facebook!

– Shareef