MUDluscious
Songs from the Candylandfill
Mutenus Records/Bagavagabonds
MUDluscious is:
MUD/Carl Stoeber
MATTER/Matt Seigel
Even if you've never been there, you know all about it. Los Angeles is a sprawling, hazy, stretched-out, cacophonous world-inside-a-world gone mad. Inside the City of Angels, everywhere you turn your senses are overloaded with glittering, glamorous gentrification-in-reverse and vice-versa. The trash is candy-striped and the actors look like bums. Your secretary is a movie star and the principal sells weed. With so many different noises in this Candylandfill called LA, it's impossible to have a single, unifying LA Sound.
Fuck it. We love it that way.
Inside all this sprawl, fueling it, giving it life, is a never-stopping stream of unparalleled creativity. Those who grow up here (and believe it or not, some people do; not everyone is a next-big-thing import hopeful) are raised on equal parts skate-punk, gangsta rap, Beach Boys, studio polish, campfire surf guitars, Long Beach dub, Flea circus, and sun-drenched waves of sound. And it takes a local, it takes the city's native sons, to navigate through the mess and cohesively tie it all together. It takes a crew of homegrown LA sons like MUDluscious to capture that discordance and turn it into a record album.
MUDluscious, like all complex things broken down to their simplest parts, is comprised of two main ingredients: MUD and MATTER (didn't your green-slangin' science teacher learn you that?). MUD writes the songs and MATTER makes them sound good. Shouldn't every duo be that simple?
The story is a familiar one. MUD and MATTER grew up as friends in the heart of the city, playing sports as students at the school in the Hills, the famed Beverly Hills High School, and at the school on the hill, Loyola Marymount University. Parents taught the kids how to balance art and business, fun and maturity, yin and yang. MUD was an aggressive baseball and soccer player wearing suspenders and checkered Vans. He was a little strange in the Beverly Hills universe, but he was good at sports and he'd kick your ass for a sideways glance, so he fit in, in a weird Angeleno way.
The two drifted a bit during college but reconnected when MUD showed up at MATTER's apartment one day with a guitar and some ideas. MATTER was teaching at the world-renown Scratch DJ Academy (and still does) and was all-too happy to start work on his own shit. Tired of waiting around for someone, anyone in their circle of talented friends to start something, they combined their love of ska, funk, hip-hop, Sublime, and indie rock and worked out some songs, to become the MUDluscious Day at the Circus EP. The seed for the Candylandfill had been planted.
While MUD hustled his way through the ins and outs of the nearly impossible grind of daily life in LA, including a brief stint in the corporate clown world, the pair shopped the EP to engineers and recording studios and landed a dream base at the world famous Cherokee Studios, thanks to a visionary named Ian Page. Calling on friends to play in the band and guest MC, MUDluscious found themselves a very real entity making a very real record in the same legendary and very real studio that had recorded Bowie, Dylan, Jane’s Addiction, Cypress Hill, John Lee Hooker, Dr. John and Fishbone. Very real, indeed.
The resulting record, Songs from the Candylandfill, is best summed up as music that could only come from the artistic melting pot of Los Angeles, and only from artists who were born and raised here. "They're songs about growing up in LA and piecing together the beautiful things that make up the city, along with all of its tragic parts," MUD says. "Those things create the urban decay that draws people from all over the world."
The songs are as diverse as the city itself, but the unifying theme is one of fighting through the impersonality to make a life for yourself amidst all the city's distractions.
And Candylandfill's music is a perfect representation of a genre-hopping drive through LA's center, with the acoustic hip-hop collage of opener "Don't U Know?!?," the stripped down electro-pulse of "California Karma," the funk rap bombast of "He's a Joker. . .She's a Choker," or the grimy urban grit-hop of "Tangwich." The song may say there are "too many pricks in the city," but MUDluscious knows better than anyone how to navigate through them and the rest of the candy-color to find the true heart and soul of their hometown.
The way the pair of masterminds work is deceptively simple. Says MATTER: "MUD comes in with his stuff and I capture that madness and put it together. He hears it in his head and it's up to me to really make it happen. Where his skill stops, mine starts, and where my skill stops, his starts."
The MUDluscious family is a web of overlapping circles and arrow-crossing friendships, with MUD himself at the city center. One of my biggest talents is bringing people together,he says. I wish I could just sit at home and master my craft, but I can't let myself do that. What I can do is master my role as a facilitator. And thats how the album got done.
MATTER adds: I love trying to figure out everybodys style. Thats why I like working with so many different people.
Songs from the Candylandfill is full of appearances by a rotating cast of LA comrades, including Animatronics, Inverse, and The Conquistadors, and verses are spit by a slew of fittingly diverse LA underground MC's including Noah King, A-Dub, Tunji, Franklin Grimes, Toby, and Nieve. Call it a collective, call it a family, call it whatever you want, but it's always going to be a group of friends from LA, in LA, the products of LA, making music together about LA.
But in the end, the sound, like all of us, comes down to those two simple elements: MUD and MATTER.
Even if you've never been there, you know all about it. The MUDluscious sound is impossible to nail down.
And besides, fuck it. They love it that way.
The MUDluscious debut full-length Songs from the Candylandfill is available now on MUTENUS records. MUDluscious recently capped a year of playing local LA hotspots with playing the Mainstage at the 2006 Rokout Festival in Los Angeles alongside The Prodigy, Qbert, Z-Trip, Sage Francis, and Shiny Toy Guns. For more go to
http://myspace.com/mudluscious
