Cut Chemist - To All My Teachers

Join Cut Chemist on a four part journey storytelling musical adventures through listening. This episode is focused on how taste is shaped through others "friends, DJs, and informal mentors who passed along records, ideas, and obsessions. From compilations to close exchanges, listening becomes relational, and the act of digging is refined through influence and mentorship". Read more on the series here on the dust and grooves website. 

Episode 2 (linked below) covers "how compilations shape musical education, serving as entry points into new sounds and ideas, reframing them not as shortcuts, but as essential tools in building musical taste." The series starts with Episode 1...

Learning to Listen Through Soundtracks and "Non-Music" Cut Chemist revisits his earliest encounters with sound, from movie soundtracks and radio to dialogue records, exploring how they taught him to "see" music. A formative chapter where listening becomes storytelling and sets the foundation for everything that follows.

Film soundtracks, radio, and dialogue records form the base. Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, and Chopin at home establish a way of hearing where music is felt before it is understood. Dialogue, composition, and experimentation begin to merge. Laurie Anderson's Big Science, Art of Noise, and Ken Nordine's Word Jazz introduce sound as narrative.

With Double Dee & Steinski's Lessons, the language of film is cut, looped, and rebuilt over beats, opening the door to a new form of composition, leading into Cut Chemist's own Lessons and the start of an artistic voice. The thread continues through artists working with narrative and sound, from Public Enemy to DJ Shadow and Kid Koala.

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