words Sven Carlsson / images Ed Gumuchian / stills Space & Sound

Meet Los Angeles’ own Teebs, who recently released his debut album Ardour on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint.

With the wealth of innovative beats that continues to come out of Los Angeles, particularly under the Brainfeeder banner, it would be nice to know more precisely what the creative environment is like. Teebs knows.

“It was a crazy building. Really weird place, but weird in a good way. A two-story art colony with a big snake living downstairs, headless samurai statues and a lot of crazy shit going on. It was a good environment. You walk in like, ‘this place is crazy.’ You hear really good music and it’s like, ‘OK, I’m inspired’.”

Teebs spent a little over six months living alongside Flying lotus, the label’s founder and musical spearhead, and Samiyam, a celebrated beatmaker who’s been based in LA for the last few years. How he ended up there was a matter of circumstance; a beat CD ended up in Flying Lotus’ hands, who liked what he heard and suggested the yound producer move in to the Brainfeeder headquarters.

Despite being the youngest cat in the Brainfeeder crew at 23, Teebs has a debut album out. That also happens to be largely down to chance. This artist/skater/beatmaker was born in New York and lived in Atlanta and Conneticut before bouncing around Los Angeles as a kid, and could well have pursued another talent ahead of his music-making, he tells us. “I kind of fell into [making music]. Like a free fall; I took the wrong path and fell into it. It was amazing.”

After falling into a more serious approach to his music making, Teebs found himself working wall-to-wall with two respected beatmakers. Having Samiyam and Flying Lotus around for the early stages of the album’s creation provided an obvious opportunity to receive input. But Teebs, who says he isn’t necessarily the kind of person to share his works in progress, wasn’t begging for it.

“Maybe more when I knew I was making an album, I’d check in with Steve every now and then and show him my collection of songs intended to make the album. He kind of runs the label, you know? He should like what he’s putting out.”

It wasn’t until late in the process of creating Ardour, by the time Teebs had moved back in with his parents, that he adopted a more selective and deliberate approach when sifting out what would become his debut. The result was a blooming record, one that could easily replace David Attenborough’s narrative to breathtaking shots of our planet.

“Some of the tracks were made in 2008, when I didn’t know I was making an album,” says Teebs, who didn’t feel like his neck was on the line creating the record. The process was more natural than arduous. “I guess at the end, after all was said and done, I picked the tracks that fit together. Just the ones I could listen to.”

What we hear on Ardour is undoubtedly the product of a creative mind and an MPC. The shimmering tracks give away the fact that Teebs’ best working hours are between 9 am and 2 pm. This is obviously daytime production.

Aside from chopping samples and incorporating hip-hop’s beat science in bass music—a common denominator all Low End Theory residents—it is the psychedelic and ambient influences that distinguish Teebs’ work as his own among a talented crew.

What’s most remarkable about ‘Arthur’s Bird’ is the intro. The opening bells are cut off by the recording of a breeze that, one sound at a time, brings out a few thumps, a chord progression and finally some keys that get the hypnotic track rolling as if it had just emerged from quicksand, or slowly been absorbed by it. Perfect for a label whose founder, according to Daedelus, wants to focus on “big ideas, DMT… that kind of thing.”

“A lot of the stuff I sample is from the record sleeves I paint,” Spencer says, revealing once again how equal parts fortune and talent have turned circumstance in his favour. He doesn’t only paint his own sleeves, you see.

“I do a lot of [cover art], so I get a lot of free records. Just random ones. And I usually just sample from that stack to make my music. I work on the covers, but once they are done I have this stack of vinyl so I just listen to all of them and sample those records.”

How Teebs began painting vinyl covers is also circumstantial. Having been asked to move in with Flying Lotus and Samiyam, putting his painting skills to use to cover his part of the rent seemed logical. He had skated, painted and made music before, but earning money off his art was a new concept.

“I took a free crate of records, started painting covers and went online to sell this series of record sleeves. So I was using the records and selling the sleeves,” he explains the business model.

Were you excited by selling your stuff or do you just want to create for the sake of creating?

“It was exciting, but at the same time I priced it so that I barely made enough to survive. Sam was taking care of me, a lot of people were helping me out. So it was more something I wanted to see if I could manage doing.

“I figured if you want to get into art, this is the downside. You really have to try to live off of it if that’s what you want to do. I had to figure it out, it was a necessity. Not that exciting, but it was cool that it worked out.”

Teebs will make his next album as one of Brainfeeder’s most promising artists. Given his own ambition and the heights he seems to reach without thinking about it too much, we would be right to expect some great work.

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Album: Ardour (Out now—buy here)
Teebs on Brainfeeder’s website, Myspace

Read Beatnik’s review of Ardour