_ _ __ ___ __ _ _ __ _ __ ___ __ _ __| | ___ | '_ ` _ \ / _` | '_ \ | '_ ` _ \ / _` |/ _` |/ _ \ | | | | | | (_| | | | | | | | | | | (_| | (_| | __/ |_| |_| |_|\__,_|_| |_| |_| |_| |_|\__,_|\__,_|\___| W I T H _ _ _ __ ___ __ _ _ __ _ __ __ _ _ __ _ __(_)___| |__ | '_ ` _ \ / _` | '_ \ | '_ \ / _` | '__| '__| / __| '_ \ | | | | | | (_| | | | | | |_) | (_| | | | | | \__ \ | | | |_| |_| |_|\__,_|_| |_| | .__/ \__,_|_| |_| |_|___/_| |_| |_| @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @@ @@@@@@@ @@ @@ @@@@ @@ @| ____@ _______@@ @| ___ ___ |@ @| | |@ (| \ | / |) | \ -_- / | | ______ | \ __ ' / \ / |\___'____/| | | | | ///////////\\\ ///\\\\\\\\\\\\\ /////////////\\\ ///\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ////////////////\\\///\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ MAN PARRISH stood at the foundation of Electro, Hiphop and Freestyle in the early 1980s. As influential as the likes of Kraftwerk, Arthur Baker, Afrika Bambaata and YMO he is truly an electro pioneer. Growing up in 1970s New York he schooled himself in the arcane techniques of synthesis and created a list of bona-fide electro and hiphop classics. Filling the airways of our youth with sounds the world had never heard before, he would inspire many of us to pursue a 'career' as an electronic musician. SHADOW WOLF hooked up with MAN PARRISH in Florida via cyberspace and asked him some questions on how it all started. If you are not familiar with MAN PARRISH check out some of his tracks below and listen and learn! Let them play in the background while you are reading the interview for an exhilarating media experience! Heatstroke - One of his first tracks was the soundtrack for a gay porn movie, somehow it ended up being played in the New York clubs and became the initiator for his classic debut album. Six Simple Synthesizers - Merging the spine chilling mind shivering opera voice of Klaus Nomi with Man's synthesizer futurism. Boogie Down Bronx - An absolute huge electro-proto freestyle/hiphop banger with Freeze Force on the mic. Hip Hop Be Bop (Don't Stop) - This track is believed to be the origin of the term 'hip hop' as a music style How did you start producing electronic music in the 1970s exactly? Marijuana. And I'm not joking...LOL Back in those days we used to smoke a lot of weed. I can't anymore, it makes me paranoid but back then, I Barely breathed oxygen. My face was attached to a water bong 24 hours 7 days a week. In those days you would smoke pot and listen to what they called "head music" which was not quite like ambient music but more on the electronic side. Some of it was rhythmic, but it was based on trippy sounds that would enhance your high. Due to the lack of "head music" albums (remember in those days everything was on vinyl) I knew a little about synthesizers and wondered if there was a way I could make "trippy" music myself and listen to it after I smoked weed. My neighbors would totally freak out from the sounds coming from my apartment door. They probably thought I was landing an alien spaceship in there, these were not sounds that you would normally hear from the rock & roll bands on a stereo. So basically I have marijuana to blame for my interest in electronic music! I also went on a very deep mission to find other experimental and electronic musicians. In New York they had the Donnell Music Library and the library at Lincoln Center which had audio recordings. I would search for electronic and obscure records and listen to a lot of experimental synthesizer music which basically had drones and blips and bleeps. I figured if I was getting into electronic music, I should definitely know the roots of all this. I would like to say at this point anybody who is interested in doing electronic music REALLY should study the background of this music going back into the 1950s when it first started. That way they would have a very good solid foundation for creating music today. I eventually wounded up taking a course at a continuing education school learning the basic physics of synthesis...Manipulating sine, sawtooth, square-waves, envelope generators, ring modulators and things the analog synthesizer is made up. That was truly an important foundation to create an understanding of the whole audio spectrum. The first synthesizer I learned this on was the ARP 2500, people should google it just to see how it looks, it was about 4 feet high and 7 feet long...LOL People today try to just grab a sample and like the way it sounds. I come from an era where we had to break that sound down into waveforms and understand the physics and the science behind that. We could recreate sounds with accuracy and have total manipulation on shaping it into what we heard in our heads. In that time it must have been quite an obscure endeavour making electronic music, like super futuristic, almost magical!? I was always into electronic and obscure music as well as modern rock'n'roll and pop music. But when I heard groups like Kraftwerk, I suddenly realized the two came together and you could take synthesis and make real songs... music molded into an electronic band. I immediately knew this was the future of music and in that sense, discovering all this indeed made it very 'magical'. In an earlier interview you once talked about your very first synthesizer you bought from RadioShack, was it one of those sound science kits? RadioShack back in the 70s had all these homemade 'science kits'. One of them was a mini 'synthesizer' kit. It was very basic and rudimentary but I actually had to sit there and solder wires to transistors and potentiometers and stuff like that. Today that would have been a really cool geeky thing to do but back then real synthesizers were like 5 to 10 thousand dollars... way out of my price range as a 17 year old kid. Putting together the kit for 20$ and smoking pot was a lot easier to do! It must have been difficult to get your hands on electronic music machines ...expensive, cutting edge and puzzling...how did you learn to use these machines? I learned to use these machines by trail and error. I had some basic synthesizer school but I am a true believer in Chaos Theory and experimen- tation. If someone says don't push the knob past 10, I dial it up to 15 to see what it sounds like! And I file that away as an interesting effect that I may need to use later. Synthesizers were extremely expensive. I'll tell you a funny story, this will show you the funny "low" that I went to go through to get a synthesizer. The ARP 2600 came out and was about 2000$ in those days. It was an incredible amount of money. I told my parents I wanted one. Of course they said absolutely no way! I pulled my mother over to the side and said: "If you don't give me money for the synthesizer, I will become a male prostitute and sell drugs until I make enough money to buy this". She looked stunned and thought for a few minutes...then turned to me and said "Let me speak to your father...". The next day we went shopping for that synthesizer LOL...my poor mom! Do you have some advice for any future artists? My advice to anybody doing synthesis is please, please, please get online and take several evenings to study as much as you can about the beginnings of electronic music and how it has developed. People are lucky today because you have the internet. In my day we didn't. I had to physically go to the library and read books. Today its all online on Youtube and you can find almost anything with Google. If you want to be a really great synthesizer girl or guy, record producer or artist you MUST study your craft and know your foundation and what shoulders you are standing on to create something new. Don't be afraid to beg borrow and steal from others because all great artists did that too. Learn, learn, learn and never stop learning. I am constantly working and moving forward even though you may not see many records that I put out. I have over 100 releases on my own label on iTunes and all digital outlets like Spotify and those sort of things that people can listen to for free or purchase. I am currently working with Steve Bronski from Bronski Beat doing some remixes of new material. I've worked with everybody from Boy George, to Micheal Jackson, to Gloria Gaynoer from the disco days, Crystal Waters and even managed the Village People on the road for six years. I was learning, learning, learning and still do. Never stop or should I say "DON'T STOP!" The day you stop learning is the day you are dead as an artist. I am not a musician...I am an artist and that changes my whole perspective on how I approach music and sound! Thanks Man Parrish! Selected Studio Gear list (of his kit around the early 80s) ARP 2600 Electrocomp model 200 Electrocomp model 101 Sequential Circuits Pro One Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 Korg Lambda String ensemble Roland TR808 Roland TR606 Roland CR68 Roland Space Echo Roland SH101 Roland MC202 Roland Jupiter 8 Korg Poly Six Korg MS20 & MS10 Oberheim Four Voice Oberheim OBXA Oberheim OB8 Mattel Synsonics Linndrum sw