Album Notes

Beef Wellington is on a quest; an evolutionary path towards revolutionary funk. For the past few years he's been at the helm of Starship Fantabulous, exploring strange new worlds with Intelligence Officer Swamburger, seeking out new beats to feed the Cultural Starvation, and boldly going where ...

Okay, we won't go there yet. Bottom line is Beef has been on a quest, exploring a musical universe in search of a universal sound. Or rather, a real world version of his sonic vision. The Fantabulous Family is well-established, with two helpings of collective groove in the beat philosophy travelogues knows as Cultural Starvation (Round One and The Second Coming, respectively). His journey began with years of formal musical training, with a sudden detour from the home stretch that led directly to the streets of Orlando where a serious jones for funk led to that all consuming quest.

After immersing himself in the loose-knit Downtown Orlando community that worshipped hip-hop, down-on-the-heavy funk and soulful sonics as much as he did, Beef began to assemble the Fantabulous Family, in no small part to MC extroadinaire Swamburger, an transplanted Chicago-born starchild whose non-stop flow of cerebral verse was the verbal equivalent of Beef's attitude toward making music. Vibe established, a subsequent sense of community, positive attitude that begets positivity, simultaneous evolution of a range of musical voices and visions, and breaking down of barriers for beat-driven music began to infect the MCs, singers and musicians who became Fantabulous.

The Family did grow, and every individual who contributed to the Cultural Starvation projects grew as an artist. Some of them joined Beef and Swam for the Fantabulous Family live project that stormed the stages of Downtown Orlando as well as Downtown Disney, where the FF opened for
G. Love and Special Sauce. More projects came, different combinations of the Fantabulous Family, solo Swamburger excursions, more time in the studio, more sonic exploration, closer to the funk.

Closer to the funk. That's where Beef is heading now. "Basically, I want to drop the funk like its never been done in this town," he says. "Some good, nasty funk." Funk with more live elements, more instrumentals, less rapping, more singing. While there is another Cultural Starvation on the way, one more world to create and explore, Beef has his sights set on that elusive, universal funk. It's a progressive path, expressing what feels right in the now. And while you can look back on previous Cultural Starvations and easily recognize Beef's emerging auteurism, its only now that he's developing a signature sound, one that will drive Starship Fantabulous to the next level of that evolutionary path to revolutionary funk, transcending all genre boundaries to create "Music for a Unified Planet."

Listen.