Chalking his own path: Manchester MC and producer Chalk lays it out

An in-depth interview with one of the city’s nicest, whose recent concept album Death Knocks And He Shall Die honed his production game. Article and interview by Red Hen.

Chalk is a versatile producer and rapper. Hailing from Manchester, he grew up in a musically rich city and nurtured his love of hip hop from a young age. Working with some of Manchester’s finest musicians such as Bill Sykes, Aver and Yemi Bolatiwa, he has honed both his rapping and production skills. 

With two albums and an EP under his belt, in May 2024, he released his latest album on his own label, Odd Particle Records. Death Knocks and He Shall Die is a lush instrumental album which serves as a soundtrack to an imaginary film noir movie.  

Not one to rest on his laurels, Chalk shows no signs of slowing down and already has several more albums mapped out.

Could you tell me about your musical journey?

My musical journey hip hop wise started at the age 10 or 11 when an older friend of mine had this tape.  I remember meeting him and another friend and we got into his dad’s car and he was like, “Oh I’ve got this tape, you’ve got to hear it!”

I could never forget that sound after he played the tape – it was Midnight Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest. That was the first time I’d heard that kind of hip hop and I was like, “What is this?!”

Immediately, I just wanted to know what that sound was. All I knew was that it was called hip hop and so I started searching for radio stations that would play it. One station in particular was called Luv NRG which had a hip hop show called Looney Tunes, I still have a tape of it from what must have been 1996. That was the start of me being fascinated by hip hop.

I guess it was the jazzy sounds that I liked the most, and so all through high school I saved my pocket money to buy hip hop CDs from the likes of De La Soul, Nas and Wu-Tang. I was mad about Wu-Tang at the time. 

In regards to getting into writing raps, I was 16, I had a friend who for some reason had written a couple of rhymes in his phone. It was something to do with sipping champagne, which he purposely pronounced exactly like it was written (sham-pag-nah), ha! It wasn’t very good but it was enough to make me think, “If he’s trying to write raps, why don’t I?” and I ended up going home and started trying to write rhymes.

I think I was absolutely terrible at first just writing nonsense, nothing that was very about me, just braggadocious stuff, “I’m the best MC blah blah.” That really kicked me off with writing though. I used to look up to my friend a lot, he was a couple of years older so I saw him as the cooler older brother that I wanted to be like. Without him intentionally trying to, he got me into writing and he was actually the person who got me into hip hop music, I was with him and his friend in the car where I first heard the tape of Midnight Marauders.

Sadly, he passed away back in 2011 and I’m forever grateful for the huge influence he had on my life. At 16 I hadn’t yet started making beats or buying vinyl for instrumentals so I used to make myself beat tapes by finding the beats I liked on rap CDs, and at the end when it would just be the instrumental bit I used an A-B repeat button on my CD player which allowed me to loop a bit of a song up, but you would always get a tiny bit of dead air at the end of the loop where it would have to go back to the beginning, so it was pretty tricky getting the loop on tempo.

Through high school I had two friends who I grew up with called Joe and Will, and we were all big hip hop lovers. Joe is known as Aver, now of the jazz/hip hop group, Move 78, and Will is known best as Bill Sykes of The BluntSkins. But before then we had formed a group called The Natural Curriculum (TNC) back in 2002/2003 when we were about 17/18 years old and that is also around the time I started making beats.

Bill Sykes had an old computer program called Sonic Foundry Acid where you could loop stuff and I remember he had looped up a Supremes song and put drums to it. I thought, “Wow, how have you done that?” and I managed to get the program off him and I started trying to loop stuff myself. I used to go to my local record store and buy CDs of anything that was jazz as I knew that I’d heard horns in Pete Rock’s music and wanted my beats to sound like his. I ended up buying jazz and soul stuff, looping bits, throwing drums on top and trying to fit delayed horns over them. I’d spend nearly every night doing this and burning the beats on to CDs. 

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You were quite young when you started then?

 Yeah, fairly. I actually think that I was quite late at getting any good. I personally think I wasn’t happy with my own raps till I was 22, which is when I was exploring how to talk more about my own life and be myself more.

The Natural Curriculum (TNC) really drove my passion. Me, Will and Joe would meet up and freestyle with each other and then we all started trying to make beats together. We were all writing but I was the first one who was actually rapping and I think that spurred them on to give it a go too. All of a sudden it just really worked because we were together all the time doing stuff.

I also had a small stint during and a couple years after being in Manchester City college doing music where I met a guy called Olly (Woli Wols) and we started a group called Absent Minds. Olly was the DJ/producer and I was the rapper. We used to do loads of gigs around the time of 2005-2007, mostly through a group of friends of ours who put on a night called Mind On Fire.

Sadly, we only ever properly recorded two tunes for release on a label called Gems Tone Records that was headed by Rod Hotley (Chopped Herring Records/Real Dolls) now known as Burgundy Blood. But they only released one 12” and packed it in, so our songs didn’t get released. We used to do 30 sometimes 40 minute shows performing around 10 songs a show but other than those 2 done in the studio for Gems Tone I don’t really have any recorded music from my Absent Minds days which is quite strange. That was the beginning of everything really. 

Waste Away is an old unreleased Herrotics song featuring myself. A song made in winter ’06/’07 by a bunch of cold Manchester rappers.

Chalk

Who influences you?

The artists that changed the way I wrote would definitely be Eyedea. Eyedea was on Rhymesayers Records which is the same label as Atmosphere. When I heard their music, lyrically and content wise it was very different. I was hearing a lot of metaphorical songs that you really had to listen back to and think “What do they mean? What is that?” 

All of a sudden, I was like “I want to do stuff like that!”

They really changed the way I look at writing. Other than that, I’m very influenced by styles of rap from artists like Percy P. When I first heard Percy P it was this rapid delivery and I just thought it was incredible!

And Godfather Don too, the way they rap and the multi syllable rhyming that they do really changed how I wrote. There’ll also be certain people where even though what they rap about is New York life or something which is far from who I am, the actual style and delivery really influenced me. I would say that De La Soul are probably one of the biggest influences on me, just musically and by what they were talking about. They were very un-gangster and very themselves. Prince Paul is probably my favorite producer and I would say my biggest influence on me for making beats. I rate Prince Paul just because of all the different samples he would find, whether it be jazz, soul, folk, rock, all sorts, and he would be able to mix all these together seamlessly to make his own song. I thought that was amazing and also because of his humor. Prince Paul’s humour is the best stuff. De La Soul Is Dead is probably my favourite album of all time; it’s a big influence on me.

What advice would you give to anyone who wants to rap? 

 Just listen to and study the flow of artists you like. Listen to how they use rhythm and melody and copy that til you’re used to it. Then try writing to different beats using different flows to develop many styles of rapping. I think everyone needs to be able to copy people at first to get an idea of how to do it and then evolve into creating your own style and your own voice, something that fits with you. For the most part just make sure you’re staying true to yourself at all times.

What was your inspiration for the album?

I hadn’t done any music for 4 years. My last album, Growth, I’d finished at the end of 2015, and couldn’t get it pressed and be able to sell it as I’d made a choice to move to Thailand. As I was away and also was dealing with a relationship break up, I ended up being too caught up in other life stuff to feel my best for doing music and also didn’t have my musical partners (TNC) around to vibe off and keep me inspired.

After returning to Manchester in 2017 I felt like getting back to music but it wasn’t coming to naturally for me. But then in 2020 when Covid hit, I’d quit my job just before all of a sudden, I was out of work, no furlough and I’m wondering what to do with myself in lockdown. So I thought this was probably the best time to get back into music.  I wasn’t feeling like I wanted to rap, so I decided doing a beat album would work best.

I started compiling beats together in different folders to create possible album ideas; one of them would just be all jazzy boom bap, another was loads of sci-fi, synthy sounding beats and then another was strictly beats with female “oohing” and “aahing” samples over them, something that I’ve really loved since first getting into making beats. When I was listening to that folder of beats, it was sounding like a soundtrack to me, something that you would hear on films from the ‘70s. It made me think: what if I make a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist?

Also, there was a lot of time to watch films in lockdown and I had just watched the film “Possession” by Andrzej Zulawski who is a Polish director. The film is about the  break up of a marriage and it gets mad, it loses the plot! It’s totally over the top and turns into a bit of a horror film. That inspired me to then come up with an actual story for the album instead of it just being a bunch of beats that sounded a certain way. That’s how it started.

I actually wrote out the story I wanted first and decided I would find dialogue from films that would piece together to tell the story. This turned out to be a pain in the arse to be honest! I came up with the story of a psychiatrist who is seduced and has an affair with one of his patients, then he rejects her and he ends up dead. It’s meant to be a whodunnit, thriller film, a breakdown of a relationship and the man being murdered. Each beat was meant to be a scene in the movie so I knew what each beat needed to sound like and I had finished making them all maybe in the first two to three years (by 2022 – 23).

Since that point I was just spending all my time watching what might have been hundreds of mostly giallo and film noir movies to try and find people talking about the particular topic my song/scene needed. Basically felt like a whole year was spent only watching films, trying to find suitable dialogue to get the album finished. Many times I stopped working on it for long periods because I just couldn’t handle watching a majority of shite movies anymore. Anyway, after a while, I just powered through and was happy to be done with it. I won’t do that again to be honest, that’s a good learning experience. 

How did making an instrumental album differ from previous albums?

With rap albums the beats aren’t really the main focus. Once you’ve found a loop you like much more time and effort is spent writing and practicing the raps. My last album, Growth, was probably the quickest album I’ve put together (in the space of a year or so.) I kept it very simple and a couple of the beats are literally just loops, with no drums put to them. I kept it simple, if the loop was nice then for me it was more about making sure I wrote something that worked well with it.

With creating an instrumental album, I wanted it to be something similar to listening to DJ Shadow’s Entroducing. The songs on Entroducing really take you on a journey. I had to be like, “Right what am I finding to put on top? How is this song going to move? What’s going to come in later to create a certain atmosphere? Which bits will change to keep everything interesting for a listener?”

My main focus was to spend a great amount of time on each single beat finding different samples and instrumentation that would weave in and out and have changing segments in the songs to create a flow, movement and feeling that would match the so-called scene I wanted the listener to feel that they were in. At the beginning of the album I knew that the story was to be a love story, so I knew that the beats would have to reflect a happiness, so you’ll hear the melodies and female vocals sounding a lot more happy and cheerful.

Later on, I knew there was gonna be certain things in the story which had to convey a craziness coming in, like an anger which would then veer into horror territory, so I knew I had to work on beats that would give a horror atmosphere. I had to create the emotional feelings I wanted for each song on the album which was very different from just putting raps to beats. I found it gave me a great focus towards bettering my skills in making beats.   

Was it all made using samples or was some of it recorded live?

I used three bass guitar players on the album, my friend Ordell Duke played over the original loop I had for The Seduction. A friend of a friend named Morgan Pugh came over to my house and we recorded his playing over two songs, Stay With Me and Maker of Evil. He made those two tunes sound amazing which I’m happy about. He’s a great bassist.

My friend Jam (from TNC), he’s a beatboxer, but now plays bass. We had a jam session together one day at his place for fun. I was playing electric drums and he was playing the bass. I recorded the session and later decided to use a couple loops of certain bits he played and I then built a song around them. On the song Last Hope, I played the bass melodies on the keyboard, but the rest of it is entirely sample based. 

Where did you get your samples from? 

 I’m not gonna give names because I like to keep a bit of mystique to the music, but I sampled from some library records, some jazz albums, one was an experimental Russian jazz LP, also a Jazz folk rock group from France. On the song Nightmares I used cries and laughter from a pretty weird experimental Korean record and also singing from a traditional Japanese LP I got from a charity store probably 15 years back, and also from some European horror movie soundtracks. Thinking about it, there’s a lot of music from around the world on there.

Do you enjoy the process of looking for samples? 

 Absolutely, yeah!  I’d say my process has changed though. At first, I used to go to the record store and I would always go to the soundtrack section and see what was there. If I was in (famous Chorlton record shop) Kingbee Records, I could get a stack of records and listen to them in the corner and then decide what I wanted.

Nowadays I do a bit of that but not as often, I’m always digging on Discogs because there’s always links to YouTube videos so I can now listen to stuff through there then order the LP in. At the moment, I’m a bit mad on listening through the discography of the ECM jazz label from the ‘70s upwards. I get myself in weird little modes where I’m listening to lots of soundtracks or I’ll find a nice little record label and I’ll listen to everything they’ve ever done just to try and find samples. I’ve currently got a box of more than a hundred records I’ve been collecting together the past few years for making beats and putting together some new albums.

Who did the artwork?

The artwork was done by a woman called Amy De Nobriga. She’s my girlfriend’s friend. A great painter and an art lecturer at university. My girlfriend showed me some of her paintings she’d done which were of trainers, dogs and cats. I thought they were amazing, super realistic! All of a sudden, I thought I should see if she’d be happy to do my album cover. I’d been waiting for one of my friends for around a year already to put something together for me originally, but it didn’t materialise. In the end it worked out great as I had my idea for the cover and LP design already worked out in my head, I wanted the painting to resemble covers of crime mystery story books from the 50’s/60’s.

I just told Amy what I wanted, which was a girl with a gun pointed down, a dead body, the faces of two lovers and some sort of background. As she’s a busy person and also wanted to make sure that she did a great job on it, it took half a year to be done, with a fair bit of practice painting and going back and forth with ideas. When she sent on the final pieces I was well happy. What worked out great was her idea to paint each subject/section separately which meant I could photoshop them together whichever way I thought looked best for the final layout. Lastly I asked her to do the three bloody gunshot wounds for the back cover. She absolutely killed it, it’s amazing!

What are your hopes for the album?

My biggest hope for the album is to sell at least half of the records I had pressed so I can make my money back, which can then be used to pay for the next record to be pressed. That’s the main thing. It cost a lot to produce and I hope there are enough people out there who appreciate a tangible piece of music/art. I know it will take a long time to get the amount of people I want buying it as I’m a small time independent artist with no other backing but me but other than that, I just want people to hear it and enjoy it. 

What are your aims for Odd Particle Records?

The plan is literally just to release my own music. I’ve actually got three, maybe four other albums planned. I have an EP planned for this year with a couple rap songs and a few instrumental beats and then a full album of sci-fi based instrumental beats. I’ve also got a couple rap albums planned. A solo Chalk album of the usual jazzy, funk boom bap with introspective and humorous rhymes. Also for ten years, I’ve had the idea of making an existential story rap album about a man’s life and all he goes through and I already know what the songs will be, three of the songs were done ten years back, just another sixteen left to write!

Are you interested in working with other artists?

I am. I’ve always kept things very homely in a way because I mostly work with my friends. I find it easier instead of thinking to reach out to people I don’t know for a feature. I actually want to make more beats for people but it would be for friends again.

I’ve recently recorded a verse for a rapper called Jaroo, the song will be coming out on his upcoming album with Broomman this year. I’m going to be collab’ing with the producer Chilla Ninja who lives locally in my area and has his own record label called Legacy Echo. I’m also in the process of writing raps for an EP in collaboration with Andy Votel. After a lot of years away I’m pushing myself to be very involved in music again and I realise collaborations help with the push.

What’s your favourite song on the album?

 I have two favourites, Last Hope and The Crime Scene. I think I’m most proud of these two because of the way they are arranged with many bits coming in and out, switching and changing up. Nice heavy bass on both as well.

Any special mentions?

A big thanks to Jam, Morgan Pugh, Ordell Duke, Amy De Nobriga, Will (Bill Sykes), Dave Fortune, Ken Long and my girlfriend Natalia for all the great work and help on the LP. Also a big shout out to Aver, DJ Omas, Ink13, Orko, At Large, Herrotics, my friends and all the true supporters of my music, especially those who have bought my records.

Check out the Odd Particle Records Bandcamp here, and follow Chalk on Instagram here.