Blueprint interviews Finnish instrumentalist MAW
I first got familiar with Maw several years ago when he popped up on the Weightless Recordings forums. He quickly became a regular poster and welcome contributor. Although his conduct was very mature, we soon found out that he was only a teenager at the time, which made him the youngest regular on our forum. Even more interestingly, we found out that he was from Finland and english was his second language. You never would have guessed it by the way he interacted with everybody.
Over time, Maw started getting into hip-hop production and posting his beats in our “show & tell” forum. His beats were decent at the beginning – especially for a young kid who didn’t even seem to have any equipment – but he seemed to get exponentially better every time he posted something. Eventually he was damn good. From there, I always kept my eye on him, and every year he gets better and better. It’s reached the point where I check out anything he releases and try to spread word about him as much as possible.
The Last Five Albums I Bought: June 2012
The Large Professor “Professor @ Large”
This album completely snuck up on me. It wasn’t like the Large Professor hasn’t been putting out music over the past several years and put this out unexpectedly. Actually, it was the opposite. Large Pro has been pretty consistent with his releases, but nothing moved me like the legendary work he released in the early 90s with his group Main Source. I had pretty much assumed that he would never put it together again. Boy was I wrong. His new album, “Professor @ Large,” is the album that I’ve been wanting him to make for the past decade. The production is nothing but great loops and chops, and the rhyming is super-solid throughout.
El-P “Cancer for Cure”
I’m a huge fan of El-P and have been since the late 90’s when he was a part of the group Company Flow and own pretty much every album he’s ever released.
