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Studio Feature: Piper Street Sound
Piper Street Sound (Matt Mansfield) is a producer, a dub engineer and a multi instrumentalist/composer. He steps out of his studio occasionally to play bass with bands such as DubConscious, Flight Risk and Dialect Trio and produces music at a staggering rate under the name Piper Street Sound. Mansfield also works with Argentina based label ZZK Records and with his own label Boom One Records.
Named in the tradition of Jamaican sound systems, Piper Street Sound’s music is based around 899 Piper Street, a studio located in Atlanta, Georgia. All Piper Street Sound productions are overseen by Matt Mansfield with a fluid line-up of backing musicians (sometimes) entitled the Piper Street All-Stars. This in-house approach to music production is based on Jamaican studios/sound systems/imprints like King Tubby’s, Lee Perry’s Black Ark and Augustus Pablo’s Rockers International, wherein music could be written, recorded, remixed multiple times, distributed to various outlets and expressed via the movement of speakers within a single day to the benefit of the daily listener and dancer.
Piper Street Sound productions utilize elements and influences from electronic music to international pop and folk musics of all varieties, looking toward the future musically and seeing no major divisions that need be heeded in music genres. He functions as many things: a musician in a band, or a one man band, a recording engineer, producer, an electronic artist doing laptop sets, a Dub Reggae selector, a dub engineer remixing tracks, basically a musical organizer and nurturer. Piper Street Sound ties various musical strands together with a distinct intense production style and imbues all with a psychedelic tone and a particular allegiance to the mixing techniques of dub reggae and the rhythms of the Afro-Latin diaspora.
In just the last 7 years Piper Street has produced over 100 albums, EPs, Singles, mixtapes. Working alone as a musician meets DJ/Dub Scientist or with a variety of bands from local to national acts, constantly expanding sonically and exploring Dub-Reggae, Afro-Latin music and bass culture in the Atlanta area. As bassist, dub Engineer and producer with 1320 Records artist DubConscious, Matt has toured across the US over the years as well as touring and recording with electronic dance music trio Flight Risk. In 2011 settling to a more locally based lifestyle in Atlanta Piper Street dove into the studio work, incorporating a massive stylistic influence from Chicha and the electrifying Cumbia Digital, Nu-Cumbia and Latin Bass sounds. With this burgeoning interest Mansfield started a blogsite piperstreetsound.com- which highlights Matt’s diverse musical taste, offering music reviews, suggestions and previews of exclusive mixes and podcasts. In 2013 Piper Street joined the team and The GLobal Bass Experience blog and has since then most of his blogging and mixtape curation will be done there under the guidance of John Newell aka EL Guero Unico one of the internet’s central figures (also unifying) in the modern Cumbia blog-o-sphere.
Reviews:
“Enter Matt Mansfield, a man with his finger fully on the pulse of emergent themes, an obsessed Dub Producer, an avid devotee of the music of Africa, especially what forms it takes in the Caribbean and Latin America. A man who, with Eye Of Mordor-like intensity, searches out the newest ways of interpreting the old, and assimilates it into his transnational panrhythmic hurricane-scale musical brainmachine that is MattPiperManStreetSoundsfield”
– Russ Bledsoe
Not only is he a talented producer that truly knows his craft and the history of the music involved but he is also a talented musician which makes it even more pleasurable for me. He never ceases to impress me with his productions and I have faith he never will.
-El Guero Unico (John Newell) of GenerationBass.Com and NuCumbiaExperience.Com
For more on Piper Street, check the official site HERE, Twitter site out HERE, the FaceBook page HERE and the BandCamp page HERE…
