An omnipresent and irreplaceable part of the soundtrack of our times.
The title of 'super-producer' is thrown around so often now that it might as well be a synonym for 'one who possesses a Soundcloud account'. At this point the amount of actual super producers is negligible. These being artists who, beyond the intricacies of their drum programming or sound design, are gifted with the unlearned ability to craft a capital-S song. A song which will draw an emotional response from others and leave them not thinking about process, but rather ‘can I hear that again?’.
Ross Birchard has made the leap from beatmaker to genuine super-producer far more spectacularly than most. Long before Kanye West pulled him into his inner circle in 2012, Hud Mo was crafting MDMA-drenched, strobe light rap anthems from a bedroom in Glasgow. Many of these would eventually make up his legendary 2005 mixtape Hudson’s Heeters, his first release Hudson Mohawke Says Oops! (a cover of the timbaland producer ‘Oops’ by Tweet) and eventually his debut album for Warp, Butter (2009). These were kaleidoscopic stepping stones to future glory, equally informed by a certain golden age of electronic R&B and rap innovation as by the bracing freeform antics of prog rock and fusion jazz.
These early releases were instantly recognized for their crazed energy and ambition by a generation of electronic musicians who had grown up without the boundaries of genre, linked by the Internet and sharing free and easy access to an abundant trove of hacked music software. No sooner was he crowned the ‘wunderkind’ of these misfits than the calls began trickling in from artists seeking his singular productions. Then that trickle turned into a flood.
