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July 28, 2006 BY DAVID JAKUBIAK | CONTRIBUTOR Earmint, a.k.a. Robert Krums. Earmint (Robert Krums) is the type of contemporary musician that makes traditionalists shake their heads in amazement, and he said, he can count his mother among them. "My brother was the one who was always in bands and did orchestra, so [my mother] thinks it's pretty funny. She can't fathom it. She's like, 'but he can't read music!'" On Tuesday Earmint will release his debut CD "Another Early Evening" on Evanston-based EV Records. A hip-hop record, largely because rappers appear on six of the CDs 18 tracks, "Early Evening," is a melancholy, introspective work laced with the murky sounds of warbling manipulated keys, fading guitar strings and drums piling onto one another like branches in a heap of brush, due to Earmint's thoroughly do-it-yourself ethic. "I like doing my stuff at home rather in the studio. It lets me experiment more and have that 'weird scientist in the lab' sound," he said. Unusual childhood Born in Maywood and raised in Elmhurst as the son of Latvian immigrants, he spent his childhood between public schools and Latvian Sunday School, which resulted in a unique upbringing. "No one but the other kids in my [Latvian] class did anything like that," he explains. But once he also had one very typical experience, even for a kid in Elmhurst in the early 1990s. "Whether it's on a cheesy NBA half-time show or YO! MTV Raps you're going to get exposed to hip-hop," he explained. "It's so marketed that kids get interested in it and then they figure out what they like." Introduced to artists like the Hieroglyphics through skateboarding magazines, he soon developed a taste for a more underground sound. "I was never really into stuff like Snoop and Dr. Dre," he said. "I can appreciate it now, but at the time I wasn't into the gangsta sound people were doing." Soon he decided to try his own hand at making some of the melodic beats he so enjoyed. "It took messing with computers and keyboards and gear that let me realize that I could do this on my own," he said. "I didn't need to know how to read music or anything. I could teach myself." By the time he and his brother bought a computer, a keyboard and a sampler with the hopes of becoming a band and running a home studio. "It quickly turned into something where it was clear that I wanted to do it more than him, like way more." Making beats As he dedicated himself to making beats, Earmint soon developed a belief that he didn't really need rappers on his tracks. With instrumentals he could create stories. "I don't consider myself to be a straight-up hip-hop producer. I just like to make beats that can stand on their own," he said. "Whatever instrumentals I do are cool enough for me, working with MCs is icing on the cake." But through an encounter with a classmate at Columbia College in Chicago, he soon started pairing up with MCs. One meeting led to another, and soon he was working with Evanston's Diverse on a project that led him to self-release a single called "The Bluesinger" using a $2,000 inheritance from his grandmother. "Usually trust funds are a ton of money, but I had $2,000, so I tapped into it for the Diverse single," he said. "With stocks moving around it's still about $2,000." After that, he said, "Everything kind of snowballed," which came as a surprise. "It's not hard to do songs with people once you know people. But when you are on the outside looking in it's like, 'how the [heck] am I ever going to meet anyone?'" he explained. On "Early Evening," Earmint put together an impressive group of underground rappers including Psalm One, Murs, Diverse and Longshot. But he's not going for the rap production game. "I don't like the idea of hustling to get your one beat on a CD with 20 other songs," he declared. "That doesn't make a very cohesive album." In fact, he said, for his CD, "I made the beat for the MC and said, 'I think you should pick this one.'" In the future, he said, he plans on releasing more instrumental albums. "I'll just continue working at home and whatever happens will happen," he predicted |
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