Sitting Down with Flux Duckling A Conversation by Dan Bollinger
In the second installment of my quest to share the stories of musicians on campus, I caught up with Ben Wedin, a rapper who goes by the name of Flux Duckling. Ben has been a staple of Carleton’s underground rap scene for a couple years now. I sat down to talk with him about his recent mixtape, Steady Waxing. What was the process for this mixtape like? This was actually the second mixtape I’ve ever done. I wrote the first one when I was in Sweden two years ago. And that one was literally me just rapping into my laptop…I only gave it to a few close friends. I started this one last summer, but the writing for it started winter break two years ago. That winter break was me just writing a couple songs, the next summer was a second period of writing, and then this past winter was me finishing it up. Jon [ver Steegh] ‘14 and I recorded it, we mixed it when I got back this spring and then we put it out this summer and have gotten good responses, which is fun. You cover a lot of different genres of rap in Steady Waxing. You’ve got the chill flow kind of thing, but also more aggressive stuff like in “Grand Thought Auto.” Did you know that method going in or did you hear the beat and think, “this is what I want to say?” Well I think when I was planning it I was writing down all these various “chunks” of lyrics that weren’t really for any specific song, but then when I decided what actual beats I was going to use, I was going through the beats of some of my favorite producers and I was like “I wanna have a BadBadNotGood track” or “I wanna have a Nujabes track.” I definitely picked beats that were from different artists and and looked for some variation, but once I picked the song, I would listen to it and think “these are the kind of lyrics I want to put on it” or whatever. Do you have a beat in mind when you’re writing or do you try to match it later on? I think it’s really just a combination because a lot of times I’ll just catch - wait let me see if I have it… no I don’t have my word book but I have my journal (pulls out a small black notebook). But you can imagine like this many pages of just lyrics. It’s like Eminem from the movie “8 Mile.” Yeah, definitely; and so sometimes I’ll listen to a beat and I’ll freestyle over it first and some of those words will come in and I’ll be like “Oh Shit I remember writing that before!” and I’ll go back to it a little bit. But to get a starting point, it’s usually just a couple words or whatever. Once I get the first kind of rhythm, then I’ll just put the beat on and have it on repeat for like an hour and I’ll just keep on trying things and see what comes out. Then once there’s maybe a bit more, then I’ll start going back—spit the first 8 bars and see what sound should come after. Like “all right I’ve done this flow, how should I change the delivery after that?” Which track from the mixtape are you most proud of? I really like “Ataraxia” because as far as where my head was at, it was definitely the most indicative of enjoying change. And also I went through and that was one of the few where I did more than one take of it. I was able to double a few of the more sing-y parts, so I was happy to get a bit more production on that song. But I don’t know: with a lot of the songs I was really happy with individual chunks. I’m really happy with this one lyric or this one rhythm, but I feel like “Ataraxia” is actually a whole song.
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