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Baker's Dozen

13 Steps To Perfection: El-P's Favourite Albums
Kyle Ellison , October 17th, 2012 12:16

The rapper, producer and Definitive Jux head honcho rifles through his racks and picks out his top 13 records

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Suicide - Suicide
I discovered this late, in my mid-20s, and ever since then it’s just stayed on my iPod or iPhone or whatever the fuck I have. It’s one of those hypnotic records that are so hard to define, but again it’s just so sparse and dark as hell. It’s also based on a lot of Americana guitar rock stuff and has an almost Johnny Cash guitar style, but doing it with a drum machine and a space echo and what might be a guitar? It’s just one of those that never left me and is one of those records I play all the way through.

All these different scenes were happening in New York growing up, and I was obviously into the Hip Hop side. I was a little too young to go to the clubs or be around for CBGBs, so I had to go around things in a roundabout way through being a producer and collecting records. But it was interesting finding this because, even if I didn’t realise it, it’s a part of the lineage of my city and its music. I didn’t know anything about genres, I didn’t know anything about anything, I was just hearing music.