Track By Track: Lily Haz – Jealous Hours

For her debut album Jealous Hours, which inevitably comes again via her regular affiliate Tofistock, she puts sampling front and centre, manipulating and reinterpreting its role in music using cinematic motifs and references from nineties songs and films.

There are nine tracks all in all, which are tied together by her love of hip hop and a penchant for electro dub sounds, but factor in pitch-altered raps, rolling drums, otherworldly atmospheres and leftfield beats.

Each track tells a different story and below Lily guides us through the origins and inspirations that led to their creation…

Lil Rapper

Colour: Yellow

Season: Summer, because it’s cheerful and resembles birth, beginning, sunshine.

Inspiration was from the movie sample, where there’s a dialogue between a kid from the hood and a police officer. The kid is trying to give the cop the solution of a murder mystery through the words of a rap song, but the cop is too patronising to understand it. The kid has to insist he is a rapper but the cop couldn’t care less about what he has to say. It’s about staying true and believing in yourself when other people don’t.

Foggy

Colour: Purple

Season: Fall.

I wanted to create a club track. I made it in almost one shot after coming home from the club. It’s called ‘Foggy’ after the party line I’ve been running over the last year. I don’t usually create music that is properly club-orientated, so I had to step out of my limits a bit for this one. I wanted to create something that is deep and so I worked on the synth part the most, as well as on finding the most accurate way of it ducking below the drums, and creating the right depth-picture of the track. I used a Memphis rap acapella, as I love this combination when hip hop and club meet – you can say that’s a main principle I think about while making music.

STP

Colour: Red.

Season: Winter.

I created it while I was living in Berlin. I had the idea of combining a post punk theme with hip hop, which is where this bassline came from. Throughout making this album I was dealing a lot with sampling and tried to sample things that were a bit out of the ordinary. In this case sampling old films, while aiming to tell a story through bits of sentences, or creating an odd text that doesn’t cohere to any concrete thing, just an associative connection. I think the result feels like an odd murder mystery taking place in the 50s, with a postpunk \ hip hop soundtrack.

Sunny and it’s fine 🙂

Colour: Spring

Season: Pink.

I was in Berlin, moving between flats, and I was crashing at my friend’s place where I had literally nothing in my room but a ton of red beetles (he was living near the park and it was their mating season or something). I first bought an auto-tune effect and I was super excited about it, so I just recorded myself with very poor gear, (a shitty mic in the bedroom) singing these lyrics, which were about a recurring dream I had at the time, that just wouldn’t let me go. I woke thinking about it everyday, like I say in the lyrics. Sometimes making music helps you deal with frustrations and emotions that are a hard pill to swallow, which is what making this song was for me.

Dame b

Colour: Green

Season: Fall.

I was on the go creating beats, had found a super nice acapella pack of some memphis rap vocals and wanted to make a proper phonk track. With this one I remember that I challenged myself to make a beat in an hour, I found this sample for the beat that I really liked and made a few fast beats of it, and eventually chose to go with this version. It was especially flowing and easy going to make this track, everything fell together quite easily, which is something that doesn’t always happen, sometimes there’s a struggle in finishing something. Another thing I like about this track is the odd outro. I was working on the echo of the vocals and had reached a very strange texture during that process which I didn’t want to give up, but it was too much to go along with the beat. I decided to keep it as a “final phase” that the track is going through in the end.

Eifo Ha’Atid

Colour: Grey.

Season: Summer.

This is one of like 20 tracks I have of rapping in Hebrew, the translation of the title is “Where is the future?”. I made it during the 2020 lockdown when I was like ‘ok, no pressure, I don’t need to think about who’s gonna listen to my music and just make whatever’. So I made these strange beats that were very loose and minimalistic. I feel like I made it with a lot of self humour, and again coming from feelings of being overwhelmed and frustrated I just dealt with it through self humour. Someday I will release this whole pack, but at the moment I’m trying to figure out the right context for it.

Aahhh!!

Colour: Purple.

Season: Winter.

Same setting – 2020, lockdown – I had borrowed DJ gear from a friend who’s venue was shut down, and I was experimenting with scratching on the CDJs and with some vocal effects I could get on the DJ mixer. At the time of making it, I was super into 90s trip hop, from underground stuff to classics like Portishead’s Dummy, which is an album I grew up listening to – I came back to it as an adult and a producer it was very interesting. I was looking deeper at all the components of this music and tried to realise what it is about this sound that I especially like. A main theme for me was the use of scratching, and since I had this gear with me I could create it more authentically than using digital effects. Another thing that I found very appealing in trip hop is that there’s a use of beats that are more from the hip hop world while many of the other elements in the production sound like they are coming more from rock and punk worlds, I always find music that’s a combination of a few very different genres is especially interesting.

Ex Realities

Colour: White.

Season: Summer.

Jokingly, I was kind of pissed off at the time of creating this one. I ain’t fucking with you is what I’m saying there, after someone had made me sick and tired of them. I made a laugh of it. If I remember correctly this was also a beat that was very easy and fluid to work on, it just poured out of me and came together quite easily. It’s fun that sometimes when you work, and I feel like it happens especially when you are approaching the work with a very light minded energy, things just come together easily. It can be a very hard and darn frustrating process sometimes, taking days and weeks to find the right sound or instrument, making millions of versions. Other times everything just falls into place in an hour, like with this one.

Chew It

Colour: Red

Season: Winter.

I actually made this one in 2017, and had this as a demo on my computer. I always felt there was something to it and that I should go back to it. So I took it out, redid the mix for it and put it out along with the rest. At the time I had a small drum machine called mfb 522 and the ju-06 synth. I had to re-record the drums for it because the original recording from the drum machine felt very thin and when I approached this piece again for the album I was looking for a thicker, fatter sound. This one also had many layers of sampling, background noises from films, a verse from the beginning of 90s rap, and my own vocals as well.