Mr. Hill

Seattle's Mr. Hill has always been the one to play the humble part, no matter how many topnotch projects he's involved with. The DJ/producer responsible for the beats on such Northwest releases as Onry Ozzborn's The Grey Area as well as the upcoming Grayskul album Deadlivers with Onry and JFK, Hill has been making music for quite some time. He's dabbled in production work for H-Bomb from Sinsemilla, Boom Bap Project, and the Silent Lambs Project.

An avid listener of hiphop since the golden era, Hill bought records here and there as a kid and eventually got turntables. "I was always the guy that had to change the tape in the car after every song because I wanted to hear something different--which annoyed a lot of people but that's the way I was," he says.

It was listening to Eric B. & Rakim's Paid in Full that got Hill seriously interested in becoming a DJ himself in 1994, though. "I thought Eric B. was dope at cutting back then, although he really wasn't. But listening to him scratch made me want to get into it. Him and DJ K La Boss from EPMD."

Some might also remember Hill from his now defunct production crew, Chapter 29, the group that included Putney Swope and DJ Kashun. Hill met Swope back at the pirate radio station FUCC 89.1 where they both had hiphop shows, and they moved on to have shows together at Groovetech.com, where they met Kashun. "We all made beats, so we formed Chapter 29 as a production company to get our music heard," explains Hill. Eventually Hill began to do his own thing, though, to start defining his own style.

In the mid-'90s, his passion for DJing started dying down when Hill felt less inspired by the output from the hiphop community. He got into beat-making instead in 1997 when Swope got a Dr. Boss sampler. "We would mess around on it and eventually he ended up buying an MPC 2000. I hit that thing every day until I bought my own gear," he notes. The first beat that he actually laid down for someone else was used on "Investigation Zero," off Footprints' 1999 cassette tape Operation Raw.

This year, expect to hear even more from Mr. Hill. Having already worked with Canibus, Abstract Rude, Casual, Busdriver, Sonspot Jonz of the Living Legends, and Kool Keith, it's no doubt the guy is moving up in the world.