Holland hasn’t got too many English lyracists any more since the Nederhopa scene started rapidly growing. A buble has formed, a language barrier has been built. However, there is a small group of writers that do want to spread their words internationally. In 2004, SuperCharger Records was founded, and I went to one of the guys to see what’s happening nowadays. Bring your leish, and focus on my man: Ciph Barker.

The Dutch sweet water ponds hold a lot more sharks than most fish hope for.

The SuperCharger history kicks off pretty interesting with The Campaign. This mixtape sort of launched the label and the artists on it: Ciph Barker, M.O.D. The Black Marvel, Thun a.k.a. Hurry Fabz, Tyrone, and Mr Probz (who you will be reading more about soon). It didn’t stop there though, the cd honestly is a big, biiig mixtape including featurings with Tragedy Khadafi, Hell Razah, Shabazz The Disciple, Timbo King, Freestyle, Sunz Of Man, Destroy (Arsonists), and Killah Priest. All productions were done by Godz Wrath. The Campaign definately set the tone.

Godz Wrath? Yeah I know the intro holds a lot of names. Some of these names in hiphop families are hard to get without some explenation. Godz Wrath is: M.O.D. The Black Marvel, Jordan Rivers Banks, Ciph Barker, and Dirty Needlez. Whenever you don’t get something when reading the rest of the atricle, go to the top and take a peak, we’re not in college any more.

The Campaign gave Godz Wrath publicity and the guys did a lot of shows following the release. Nationally they rocked all the important stages, they also did shows on Splash and HipHopKemp to just name two big international achievements.

Alright, SuperCharger set foot on planet earth, Godz Wrath was rocking shows, but The Campaign still was the only cd out on the streets. In 2006 Ciph decided to gather a bunch of tracks he had written over the previous years and drop Zoominati. By the way it’s a nice thing to mention Ciph also does his own artwork, and it looks good! To all the peeps that never heard the cd, press play on the youtube vid beneath

Still holding strong connections with Killah Priest, Godz Wrath produced 7 tracks for Priest’s The Offering album in 2007. And then it stopped, or did it. In January 2009 something shifted in the elements, Ciph and his boys dropped the free online Fingerprintz of the Godz mixtape. Again a compilation of tracks created over the previous years, including artists such as Killah Priest, Dead Prez, Immortal Technique, Hell Razah, and one of my own favourites: Rass Kass. Fingerprintz was dropped not only to not let the music go to waste in a dusty cabinet, Fingerprintz is a feather light set of jabs announcing the punches that are comming soon:
Godz Wrath is producing a full album for Killah Priest right now. M.O.D. The Black Marvel drops his album later this year. Jordan River Banks just dropped the All The World’s A Stage mixtape. Ciph Barker is dropping both an English solo album, as well as a Dutch album fully produced by BeatButcha. And as if this isn’t enough Ciph is also working on a production album. International artists, not just hiphop, that will do their vocal things to the Barker beats. What I did not mention in this article yet is that Godz Wrath has got close connections with Style43′s beloved Triple Darkness, so you might just hear some collaborations in the near future as well. he peeps that never heard the cd, press play on the youtube vid beneath.

Zoominati is a very good record, much love for that, but on the Fingerprintz mixtape there is an obvious progression to be heard. Sheeple is probably the oldest track on there (2002), but it makes even noobs understand in 1 track what mr Barker is all about. Make sure you download the mixtape, the Dutch accent is noticable but just take that as positive, there’s no need in exactly copying Americans.

The music shows such passion for the fight, passion for freedom of expression, that I expected a pumped up guy raging inside with a visionary mind and red angry eyes. I arrived at Reggy Lines‘ house much too late because The Hague is a maze. First we ate, then we loosely hanged a bit, Reggy, Ciph, Monn-e, and I. Because of the delay there wasn’t enough time to really do anything, Reggy offered me to sleep over, and so I did. The next day I followed Reggy around in his every day life and ended up at Ciph’s house in Zoetermeer (Sweet Water Ponds as he likes to call it). The weather just sucked, we were all very mellow and just ended up hanging around again. Nevertheless we talked a lot about what I came for in the first place. Ciph isn’t in a too good financial situation, which will probably feed the music a lot, the future looks brighter though. The Killah Priest album of course will help get some digits on the bank and I even heard names like RedMan slipping his tongue, is Ciph’s bark finally getting louder?

Ciph Barker, the man that was almost forgotten is setting his sails to charge again, and rule overseas.

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There is a negotiation going on for a UK tour, shows in Paris are coming up and Holland will get Ciph on the podium once in a while too of course.

fingerprintz download link
superchargerrecords website
myspace supercharger
mysapce godz wrath
myspace ciph barker

Text & Photos by JERE (www.jere-me.com)
Article written for Style43 (www.style43.com)

translation:
I always do stuff when I need to do stuff
but the stuff I need to do, I do not

That is pretty much me at this moment
And thanks Brith for teaching me those nice words, you’re awesome!

————————————————————————————————————–
re⋅cal⋅ci⋅trant [ri-kal-si-truhnt]
1. resisting authority or control;  not obedient or compliant; refractory.
2. hard to deal with,  manage,  or operate.

–noun
3. a recalcitrant person.

Lately I have been in pretty odd situations, and took souvenirs where possible.
These five are my favourite objects within reach, precious.

If you ever want to hear interesting true stories, come and see me, bring some drinks and I’ll tell you all about it.

When digitalizing the ISTD sketchbook this page caught my eye. I made it myself of course, bot forgot about it, that is probably why I wrote it down haha. The little poem says:

The biggest treasure on the planet
is filled with emotion and sound
‘Cause who needs money when he believes
music makes the world go round?

- J.    18-12-’08

Klapband means ‘exploding tire/flat tire’, which sounds like a very simple word to make a conceptual logo with. It quickly occured to me that none of the ideas I came up with had anything to do with either hiphop or electro music. Time for some commercial thinking. After some brainstorming the descision fell on making a car-brand-shield-style logo. Starting off with creating 3D looks in illustrator, eventually it turned out like this:

This is a very straight forward logo fitting with the music and an absolutely amazing base for further graphics. Right now a t-shirt design is in the making. It’ll take some time till the shirts are really there, but that’s definately happening. You will see them in some time

Always having been fascinated about the Rorschach ink blot test, and after seeing Watchmen finally knowing what the test is called  I decided to do some research on it. There are already plans for commercial uses of this project, you don’t get to see my written research, but you can see a few handmade expiriments in this post.

The graphic above is a combination of the following:

This was made by folding paper once while there was ink on one side, logical. What I did next was folding papier, taking a scissor, and cutting stencils.

Using spraypaint and keeping the stencil at a fair distance from the surface should give a nice new touch to the Rorschach ink blots, let’s see what it does later this week.

Peace, J.

PSE