Album Notes

"I don't care what anybody says: it's a cop-out."

This is Ispee Luscious's reaction to the photo spread of a female DJ in a club exposing her breasts between tracks to the crowd. Not that Ispee herself - a very striking 20-something musician, producer and DJ in her own right - doesn't think women spinners shouldn't be sexy. "It's just that you can either knock people's hair back with the music or you can't. What good is flashing your headlights at an audience in a stadium of 10,000 people? Or just a dark club with 500 people?" Touché, even from someone whose handle ends in the word "Luscious".

Of course, finding things to keep people interested in your work is easier for Ispee (who maintains that at least the first half of the unique nomenclature is indeed her real name) than most: she has one of the deepest record collections around. Steve Reich and Spike Jones sit in the front of her stacks and have often found their way into an off-the-cuff mix. What she doesn't possess in sheer numbers she makes up for in range.

Not that her record collection sees much daylight. Ispee spent her admittedly late formative music years in Athens, learning production values literally from scratch: attending parties and taking notes, then translating that information into original music back in her dorm room. "After a while, I wasn't even really going to classes anymore. I still got the grades, but that was mostly luck." It was in Athens' often-foggy hills that Ispee developed an almost frightening appetite for crate-digging, though not in the typical places. "I would hit up a lot of yard sales, and ended up in a lot of attics looking for plates. One time I got a really, really rare, really clean Love Supreme out of this dead hillbilly's house when he died. The family was just emptying out the house when I was walking by on the way to class and I asked if he had any records that they didn't want. That just proved to me that you can't keep good music down. It's going to find its way out to whoever wants it most."

After handling a number of DJ duties and making her bones in the area, Ispee expanded by looking within. "At the time, I was really starting to get my music theory strong enough to compose some things - mostly rhythm stuff, not so much melodies and what-not - and at the time drum-n-bass was exploding: Goldie was slamming really hard then. It was an exciting time. I was already looking for something else to do with all those Caron Wheeler "Back to Life" samples everybody was using, and here the music was, coming to me."

Ispee boned up on her rhythms, composing songs for no one but herself for a few years, until "one day I'm playing a tape of some stuff in the background while my boyfriend at the time was over and he asked me what it was. I said it was me, who else? He didn't believe me, and this was someone who was in my face every other day. At some point I just leaped past what I had been doing and it all just clicked: the records, the technology, my ear, the scene...it all just locked inside of me and what came out was just new. At that point I got serious about my music, dumped the guy and became a hermit for about a year, woodshedding."

It was during this key year that Ispee's bootleg sets started making the underground rounds and eventually, being in Ohio anyway, caught the ear of a fan of the downtempo impresario breath, who was immediately taken with her work. "Every musician," breath says, "has that cat whose stuff makes you say 'I wish I'd written that', but it's usually like one, maybe two songs. With her stuff, I
couldn't get it out of my CD player. I hated her for about fifteen straight minutes before I fell in love with the work." Catching breath's ear was the turning point for Ispee's solitary existence: after one very long conversation with breath and BAPM founder Scott Woods (two straight days, by her recollection) and half a dozen pots of coffee, Ispee was a member of the Black Air Press Music family. breath quickly picked her dreamy "Satisfied Sigh" for his first compilation, Setting Slow, and the experience
of being around so many other like-minded artists influenced her to set the record for an all-new, original, single-artist recording for BAPM.

Ispee is now splitting up her time between composing, watching planes take off from the top of her car and the occasional belly-dancing class. "I like the way the moves make you look one way while something else is going on over there. It's very deceptive, but nicely so. It gives your body grace and depth."

It certainly doesn't hurt her music, either.