Machine Drum

Machine Drum is this guy named Travis Stewart. You might know him, all he seems to do is chat on aim and go to parties. Anyway, he launched the Merck label as Syndrone tracking Autchere stylized glitch but smacking it down to a lay man's level with some venous melody. In the meantime, Mr. Stewart was up to something else. Since 2000 he'd acquired all the instruments of post-teenage-dom. Higher drinking capacity, girlfriends, and a life away from home. Out of this squalor of college living came his next musical project Machine Drum. Machine Drum, to paraphrase Travis, is party music. It's a party accentuated by mutant drum patterns, MCs freed in the digital world to slip up and double back on their rhymes, and the occasional body massage. His first release as Machine Drum, Now You Know, was a defining moment. Mr. Stewart became a competitor to the glitch-hop throne earning merits from the likes of Pitch Fork Media who said, "Now You Know is perhaps the most promising and accomplished album born yet from the marriage of IDM and hip-hop." Since then he's taken hip-hop into gritty ambient worlds with Urban Biology, and here with Bidnezz smothers dirty-south conventions with his own Hickory, North Carolina raised brand of beats.