http://twitter.com/MarvinEllis

there it is. the link to my twitter.

Follow if you must.

One love always.

Find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot, who calls you back when you hang up on him, who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat, or will stay awake just to watch you sleep... wait for the man who kisses your forehead, who wants to show you off to the world when you are in sweats, who holds your hand in front of his friends, who thinks you're just as pretty without makeup on. One who is constantly reminding you of how much he cares and how lucky his is to have you.... The one who turns to his friends and says, 'that's her.'  He will be your protector.  He will shield you from lifes missles and lift you to your light. 

PEEP THIS LINK


http://bachremix.com/emcee.html

Going for the Gold
Eugene hip hop fixture Marv Ellis gets funky with new CD
by Sara Brickner


Despite his place at the forefront of Eugene's thriving underground hip hop scene, Marv Ellis, a bilingual rapper with a penchant for funk and world beats, doesn't like the label "underground" — even as he achieves modest fame among its subterranean dwellers. "I believe completely in the underground," Ellis explains. "I had a problem being labeled as underground hip hop, though, because I don't feel like I'm really hip hop anymore. I feel like I'm this twisted amorphism of a bunch of different styles."

It's been a slow but steady progression. Ellis, a Spanish-speaking Eugene native, got his start as a live performer with Papa's Soul Kitchen, the funk band that preceded the existence of Eugene's premier Southern comfort food restaurant (and yes, Papa was in it). Unfortunately, the band dissolved once Papa's Soul Food Kitchen took off, and Ellis formed Genus Pro, whose wild local popularity caused the group to burn out, bringing Ellis full circle back to performing with a live ensemble.

"I'd always fantasized about having a band called 'My Imaginary Friends,'" Ellis says. Temporarily setting aside the all-digital composition he'd become accustomed to in Genus Pro, he cobbled together a 10-person band. With the help of his very real Imaginary Friends, Ellis has incorporated more Latin jazz, funk and soul than his previous efforts, focusing more on perfecting his live performance than on his studio work. And while the instrumentals on his brand-new album are still digital renderings rather than live recordings, he'll be celebrating the July 5th release of Dreamcatcher Juice with all of the Imaginary Friends backing him.

Ellis says he owes Justin Dodge, a multi-instrumentalist and member of funky Eugene hip hop troupe The Juice to Make it Happen, for working with him on the record, composing digital beats that could be easily replicated by a live band. Ellis calls Dreamcatcher Juice his poppiest work to date, but he still rhymes more than he sings (though he calls one track "Bobby McFerrin hip hop"). But hip hop is still the album's focal point, musically and lyrically. At its core, Dreamcatcher Juice is about relationships: not just romantic relationships, but the relationships we have with our ambitions and the sacrifices we make to stick with them. Listen to the record straight through, and you'll notice the progression — what Ellis refers to as "the love cycle" — which concludes, he explains, with one important revelation. "In the end, my one true love this whole time has been hip hop," he says. "And I don't care if hip hop gets clubbed out, if it's being exploited, I don't care anything about that. Because my love for it is unconditional."

Marv Ellis and His Imaginary Friends, Uncle Nancy & His Jug Band, Marlis, Raw Action, DJ Jeff Ray, Bohdi Reeves. 10 pm Saturday, July 5. Latitude 21 • $10. 21+ show

Bushek distills creativity, puts it on disc

By Serena Markstrom

The Register-Guard


In this Olympics season, there's no shortage of dramatic story lines that play so well on television. The media focus is on overcoming adversity and realizing dreams, usually accompanied by reflective sound bites and ambient acoustic guitar.

For athletes, dreams can crumble with one pulled muscle or come true behind the power of a hometown crowd.

Garrick Bushek wants to be in the latter group, but with a more inventive sound to tell his story. He has been ruminating on dreams for years and has harnessed all that thinking, planning and rapid eye movement into a concept album called "Dreamcatcher Juice," for which he will have two CD release shows Saturday.

The first performance will be at the Eugene 08 Fan Festival adjacent to Hayward Field, and the second will be a late-night gig at Latitude 21.

A marathon day of performing is an appropriate way to release an album that is the culmination of the Eugene native's more than 10 years of performing, writing, networking and developing as an artist.

"This is the first album where I recorded it like I was paid to make music," Bushek said. "I wanted to do that once at least in my life. I was able to be free more with my life and my happiness. I pushed myself to my extreme limits, but I still got to be free like a kid with my music."

Right now his motto is something most athletes, or anyone trying to achieve something extraordinary, can relate to, and it's also the name of the first track on the album: "The Grind to Paradise."

When reached for an interview, Bushek sounded weary but proud of all that went into his latest project. He worked on it for nine months and said in the past 3½ months he drove 5,000 miles to create its 16 tracks.

He logged those miles mainly between Eugene and Portland, keeping up with gigs elsewhere while collaborating with "super producer" Justin Dodge in Eugene.

The driving is part of the grind. But Bushek prepared for this project, he said, with the delirious passion of a parent-to-be, not letting a detail go unconnected to his overall concept — from CD cover art to each written word.

Hung above the bed at night, in Native American lore, a dreamcatcher snags bad dreams before they enter your head. But Bushek thought, "What if it caught all dreams and you could squeeze out the psychic matter and filter it into creative endeavors?"

If it sounds like no-boundaries Burning Man thinking, it is. The emotional ride Bushek has been on in recent years that built up to this creative outpouring includes last year's sojourn to the Nevada desert. When he talks about how he reached the low covered in "All I See Is Up," the desert always enters the picture because he pushed himself to the limits there and during a subsequent few months in the woods working on Keegan Smith's "HYbrid." But after that he found himself in a slump.

"I really did make that song when I was at my lowest point," he said, noting he had been to the Burning Man desert city, the woods of Mount Hood to work on the project with Smith, and the valleys, sleeping in a basement with no place to live.

"I didn't have anywhere to go and I had no money," he said. "Sometimes you are so low that you can't get any worse. The only place to go is up."

Ready to release the newest project and re-release "Underwater Not Underground," Bushek said he hopes some folks from out of town see his fan festival show, complete with 10-piece band.

He's part of a hard-working core group of artists who want to push hip-hop stylings from the Northwest to a broader audience. Part of the challenge spreading the music is that it's difficult to define. You can't just give it a name like krunk and call it a day.

Bushek and Dodge produced beats and mixed samples for "Dreamcatcher Juice," which has some instrumentation but nothing to the degree of what Marv+Ellis pulls off live with his Imaginary Friends band.

Sprinkled with references to the Northwest and his friends and fellow artists, this is personal project, but its themes are universal. The biggest one is love, but self-doubt, loneliness and money struggles are big ones, too.

Bushek's vocal style comes from a hip-hop tradition (Dodge wears Bushek's first hip-hop group, Genus Pro, T-shirt in the album art), but leading up to working with Smith on "HYbrid," Bushek came into his own as a singer and "Juice" shows off that fact.

"Usually I don't make a new album unless I am emitting creativity," Bushek said. "It's a piece of art. It's not a bunch of hot club hip-hop tracks that I threw together."

The tone is heady and serious, but there are plenty of clever winks and smiles.

He takes the tune from the '80s science television show "3-2-1 Contact" for a collaboration with Smith about the initial chemistry and excitement of a relationship,

The melody made famous by the Oompa-Loompas of Willy Wonka fame serves as a backdrop on "Outside Looking in," featuring Lafa Taylor.

Here the two play with the poor grammar of a common hip-hop slang question, "What it do?" saying instead, "What doth it do young player?"

"I'll be a thespian if you are going to be a player," Bushek said in the interview, lounging in a backyard oasis under wind chimes and hanging crystals during a short break that week. "We try to warn the people, too ... to remind you of the feeling of getting a warning, in a playful way."

There are also subtle references there for Bushek's incarcerated brother to relate to, without elaborating about what landed him behind bars. The track is about changing your ways.

To carry out music with such creative and diverse production live is not an easy task, but Bushek and Dodge worked on charting the music so musicians could learn it.

"He's an actual composer," Bushek said of his longtime collaborator. "I took my beats to him. He tweaked them slightly to keep the feel of the songs."

Go to the blog to read backstory of how Dodge and Bushek managed to get the inside art for the album and other serendipitous moments that led to "Juice" coming together.

Marv Ellis, Underwater Not Underground

"Local emcee Marv Ellis closed out this year by dropping a solid,
conscious album that is 100 percent homegrown hip hop. Only had
this CD for a few weeks, but I already like it enough to mention."

New Music: Marv Ellis and Cosmos - Highs and Lows
By: Stone | August 14, 2006

The Best Things in Life Indie Hip-Hop Are Free:
Download Highs and Lows (Zip File)
Highs and Lows might be one of the best albums of 2006.
There haven't been many CDs this year that I have played repeatedly and played often. In fact, I can count them on my hand. However, there is something about Highs and Lows that is making this stand out a little further. Oregon MC Marv Ellis and Cosmos Corbin's Highs and Lows proves that psychedelic hip-hop can be done. It doesnl;t try too hard to be different like Electric Circus. Beats are minimal, yet complex. Ellis has a downright incredible flow (for a white dude, of course), and on songs like "Electropimp" its almost like he's playing hopscotch with the beat.
The standout track is the opener "When It Hits," which uses a screwed and chopped guitar chord from Jimi Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner" performance from Woodstock. The song itself is a soulful depiction of what happens after a heroin trip, or at least that's what I think (i'm sure its just about cooking chicken). The other standout songs on the release are "Slide off My Back," "She Needs To," and the end song "Until Then."
Highs and Lows sounds like the soundtrack for Requiem for a Dream. Itâs almost like a drug trip of sorts and the best legal high you can get right now.

Marv Ellis and Cosmos

Marv Ellis and Cosmos are backing their cerebral rhymes with some of the best beats to grace these ears in months. It's pen and paper hip hop, surviving while the ego battles the Id. Their partnership with ragingfamily.com offers their fruits, an honest surprise in the quality of a downloadable MP3 album. A touch of RJD2 with the feeling that I always overestimated in Mos Def. The way Cosmos blends the organic/ ethnic with the future is worth the time. When an album not only creates conversation, but entertainment, you have to give it it's due.
Download their MP3 album [here].
Marv Ellis and Cosmo- When It Hits
Jul 25, 2006

Thanks to The Couch Sessions, a favorite site of mine that focuses on hip hop, particularly the indie variety, for turning me onto Marv Ellis and Cosmos Corbins Highs and Lows. Stone describes it as psychedelic hip hop. I prefer to think of it as another example of just how transcultural hip hop is. Marv is a white guy from Oregon and Cosmos is part of Raging Family, a collective of artists from the Pacific Northwest. One of the things this collective is about is freely making their music available, which is how I got a copy of the album.

There's lots of good stuff on the album. But the track I keep returning to is She Wants Too, which is has a very simple, yet powerful, message for men: If a woman doesnt want you, let her go. In light of what seems like a constant stream of news stories about domestic violence and men killing wives/ex-girlfriends, heres a perfect soundtrack to an anti-violence campaign. A brand whose attributes are about empowering women or one of the national anti-domestic violence organizations (Eve Enslers V-Day Project, anyone?) should jump on this.

Quite often, cause marketing is overlooked by both brands and artists. However, when the intellectual property has authenticity--as I believe the case is here--there's no reason not to look at this angle. And, it would most likely be valuable for the organization, since they are quite often underfunded and will look favorably on any legitimate opportunity. We're squarely in an age of niches. Leveraging a developing artist enables the organization to build their message from the ground up while most likely avoiding being overshadowed by a celebrity's star power.

Anyway, dont take my word for it that "She Wants Too" is a good song. Listen here: