I am The Rapman (Casiobelly muzak)
By laguna on February 1, 2026 11:56 pm
This one goes out with a superduper thanks to Sodabelly, for letting me sample his fantastic drum break on "hiding" !!!
The result is quite messy. I spent most of the week designing and printing a case for my almost-forgotten Meeblip synthesizer. It is a curious open source design from 15 years ago, and although it is quite limited, you can produce harsh filter sweeps and quite other abrassive sweeps with it. I sampled it and built the bass with it and a lot of instrument modulation within Renoise.
Also, I chopped the break, which was wonderful and gave me the tempo... and then I run out of ideas.
I finally fused all that with a sketch I did last year, messing around with the whole Casio Rapman original soundset. In case you don't know, it is a home keyboard from 1991 loaded with some "rad" hip hop sounds, a microphone and a fake scratch wheel. Now it sounds cheesy and dated, of course, but my 14 year old self thought it was the dopest thing ever.
Vocal snippets come from an early local NYC TV station news coverage about this "new movement" called "hip hop"... and also, the Casio Rapman commercial, which is pure gold.
Extra bleeps from my beloved Casio VL1 sound set.
The end is somewhat abrupt. I couldn't put the same care in the edits or creating new "cuts", because I ran out of time. I thing it sounds loud enough, but I'm afraid it's not that punchy.
I didn't want to waste that excellent break on a mediocre song, though now my ears are super tired and I could not tell the kick apart from the bass. I hope the idea has some interesting moments, at least.
Hope you start February with a smile. Lots of love to all of you, all around the world.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Share Alike (BY-SA)
