INTERVIEW: CHLORINE MIST
ONE HALF OF THE LEGENDARY FRIENDZONE
A little while ago, I listened to a podcast that explored what is now known as, I guess, “the blog era” of rap music. It drilled down on that hazy period between roughly 2005 and 2012. It was a weird time: The music industry was continuing to crumble, but a transitional digital infrastructure was popping up. Myspace, blogs, mp3s—that whole thing. Eventually, streaming happened. You know the story.
Setting aside some atrocious production choices, the podcast had a few good moments. But it wasn’t for me. It was light on what I would consider to be the true vanguard of that scene, the kind of rap music that was looked at with skepticism by the sneaker-wielding conservatives of the era; the kind of rap music was radical enough back then to still be relevant to young people right now. What I’m trying to say is that the podcast probably should’ve done an entire episode on the importance of Lil B’s early music.
FRIENDZONE was a Bay Area production duo that started in 2011 and consisted of James Laurence and Dylan Reznick. They were a couple of freakout kids who got caught up in the post-Lil B wave of new school rap production; before FRIENDZONE, I knew Reznick because he was in the noise band Robin Williams On Fire. FRIENDZONE made boundary-pushing beats that had as much in common with shoegaze or Boards of Canada as they did with rap music. They collaborated with A$AP Rocky and Yung Lean; most crucial, though, was their work with the Bay duo Main Attrakionz.
Since the tragic death of Laurence in 2017, Reznick has been making music under the name Chlorine Mist. For years, he’s been producing a ton of music but sitting on most of it. Not anymore. His July release, BL3SS3D, might be a new beginning for the producer. I had a great time catching up and chatting about an era whose influence has never stopped reverberating.
I think the first time I met you, you were playing in Robin Williams On Fire.
Yeah, I think so.
What year was that?
It was probably, well, FRIENDZONE started in 2011. It was probably around 2009, 2008. Maybe earlier. So, I was doing Robin Williams On Fire for like six years.
Did that band do any touring or was that just a California band?
We toured the US maybe two or three times. First, we were just doing shows in Oakland. We did a lot of shows on John Benson's bus—it was a solar powered bus with a stage inside. And there were a lot of warehouses and shows like that. But, when we started going to LA, there was this place, Perhspace, that, I don't know, really vibrated with us. And they just constantly were booking us. We were driving down to LA every couple of weeks. And then we did a whole tour of the US on John Benson's bus. We went to the International Noise Conference in Miami. Just on the bus. And we did a bunch of shows in parking lots and stuff on the way there. It was pretty cool.
I still think that seven inch is great.
Yeah. I was just listening to it the other day. A lot of kids these days are listening to noise again, like zoomers. If you listen to the rap that they're listening to right now, like Bladee, it's basically like the rap equivalent of noise music, or it's just completely deconstructed. It almost sounds like it's not music, a lot of it, but that's what makes it really cool.
That Xaviersobased stuff, I feel like that's created to alienate people over the age of like 25.
Yeah, exactly. They're being really rebellious. But I hear it and I’m like, Isn't this avant-garde music? Every 18-year-old is listening to it.
It's cool. I’m still interested. Even as I age, new music somehow still excites me.
For a long time, I was hearing that stuff, but I didn't notice that it was really cool until I actually sat down and actually paid attention to it. Before, I was just like, Oh, these guys can't rap normally. But then I started realizing, Oh, it's not—they're definitely not trying to rap normally.
Sometimes when I listen to that music, I think about when I was 12 and I first heard hardcore, and I had to reorient my ears to make sense of it. It’s the thrill of being like, What the fuck is going on here?
Yeah. So it totally reminds me of, I mean—we were doing the same thing with noise. It was just, like, rock was done. And we wanted to do music that was destroying rock with a complete deconstruction of what was already happening.
And, how did that lead you to FRIENDZONE?
Well, because I was involved with the noise scene and all that stuff, that's kind of part of how I got into Lil B—first he came out with songs like “Pretty Boy” and “Pretty Boy Remix,” which was kind of the beginning of what is now happening with rap, where it's just kind of a noise sort of approach, where it's just really fucked up sounding. And then he did Rain in England, which actually came out on some noise label—something forest.
Weird Forest.
Weird Forest. Yeah. And by that point I was really, really into Lil B and we decided we wanted to make beats for Lil B. And then also, I had been in a bunch of bands for years and years and years and I just had a couple of breakups with my bands, and I was really sick of having to deal with a whole bunch of other people that make music. And I was like, I just want to make music on the computer, like Pictureplane is doing, like Crystal Castles.
They were the first bands where I saw them and I was like, Oh, I can just use a computer and sound just as cool as a band. And then I saw Lil B and I saw what he was doing. He was putting out hundreds of songs and all of his producers were random people like us that were just emailing him beats. So we were like, we could make beats for Lil B. That was the first time I felt like I could work—I could produce for a rapper. Even though I'd been listening to rap for a long time at that point, like, maybe four or five years, I got really into rap. But I never thought that like, Oh, I could get involved in rap.
And so I saw Lil B and then we started sending him beats. He never used any of them. Most rappers couldn't use FRIENDZONE beats. I guess our beats were not normal enough. They're kind of busy sounding. So it can be hard to rap over them. But then we found out about Main Attrakionz and we really liked Squadda B’s production on those songs, like “Legion of Doom” and “Fuck The World” and “World Domination.”
Those beats had a really, really ethereal sound to them with really cool chopping. So we decided to send beats to Main Attrakionz, and they immediately agreed to come over to our studio and record songs with us. We sent them the “Perfect Skies” beat and a few other ones. And, then, after we did that, we started working with them all the time. We became their main studio and their producers. I started having Main Attrakionz coming over at least twice a week, to record.
Was this in Oakland?
This was in Pleasanton at my mom's house.
Oh, wow. So, Main Attrakionz were coming over to your mom's place.
Yeah. They would take the BART over. Sometimes we'd go pick them up. But, yeah, I had a big space there where I could have a whole studio. And it was just a comfortable, good place to do it. I wasn't paying any rent, so I was able to record Main Attrakionz every day and just make music.
Were you recording stuff that you weren't producing? Were you just tracking vocals for them, too?
Yeah. We did a lot of their mixtapes and stuff. It was crazy how they worked. They would just freestyle everything. They didn't write any songs.
That seems like the contemporary approach. Would they do it bar by bar?
Sometimes. Although they would usually try to just do the whole thing in one take. A lot of times they would do it. They were really skilled at that. When we were creating... I remember the first couple songs, they actually did sit down and write for 20 minutes. Then they started doing it bar by bar. Then by the end, they would do everything in one take. If they didn't work on the first take, then we wouldn't use the song.
Wow.
It was crazy. That's how 808s & Dark Grapes III was created. They were working like that. We were just pumping out beats. We definitely made at least 100 songs over three years. We were just making tons of beats. We thought we'd finished the album twice and they scrapped it and started over. We ended up with 12 songs out of those sessions. I have at least 80 songs left over.
What are you going to do with them?
A lot of them are going on these new collection tapes that I'm working on. Some of them I released as singles and stuff. Some of them we dropped on our Boiler Room mix. I totally forgot that it existed. I re-released one of those songs a few months ago. Everybody's like, this is from the Boiler Room mix. I looked at it and it has seven or eight different tracks that we were going to use for 808s III. I was so ready to put all that stuff out that I just threw a whole bunch of songs on that mix.
I read in an interview somewhere that you got the call to submit some beats for Kendrick Lamar.
We were talking to TDE when we were working with A$AP and stuff. They were saying they wanted to use them. I thought we were going to work with them. They never used any of our beats. It happened a lot of times. People wanted to work with us but they couldn't rap over any of our beats.
It seems like you were operating inside of whatever the indie rap scene was at the time. But still you were still pushing it within that context a little bit?
Yeah. We were coming from the noise scene. We were never trying to make mainstream music, that was never our goal. The reason we started doing rap beats was because we saw what Main Attrakionz were doing. We were like, this is really shoegazey and experimental—I want to get involved in this. I can do stuff like this. We wanted to be like My Bloody Valentine. That's all we cared about.
Once we did “Perfect Skies,” people started contacting us. We were talking to Danny Brown and all kinds of people about collabs. But yeah, I think that people weren't really used to beats like that at the time. Because they were pretty different. But nowadays I feel like I could probably work with tons of rappers because they're all using beats that are kind of similar to what we were doing.
I was listening to some of your instrumental collections recently, and it's a lot like Boards of Canada to me, or Casino Versus Japan. I get that same feeling, when you take the rappers off.
That's all the kind of stuff that we were listening to. I was really into Rustie. He was on Warp. He was like the IDM equivalent of what was happening then. I was really inspired by that. We had so much stuff that we were influenced by. And there was a lot of really cool stuff that was happening. I remember Lil Ugly Mane was also part of the noisy scene before he started rapping. I used to play shows with him when I was in Robin Williams On Fire.
It’s funny how some of these outsiders to rap ended up shaping it in their own small way.
I think it was because of Lil B that a lot of people noticed rap, because noise was kind of getting played out after eight years of it. And people were ready to do something else. And then once people saw Lil B everyone was like, Oh, we could start doing stuff with rap—it’s like the new, artistic thing to do.
For me, there's still some residue of being like, okay, Lil B is the vanguard of rap. But now he's almost the old school. I think a lot of kids barely remember Lil B.
Yeah, it's pretty important. I don't know if any of that stuff would have ever happened—Lil B inspired that entire movement that was happening in the 2010s, basically a whole renaissance in rap. The first decade of the 2000s, it was just a really corporate sort of rap. It was watered down, not a lot of interesting stuff was happening. But that's what made Lil B so exciting. He was breaking all of the rules that were established in rap, that you have to be serious, seem really intimidating or not be funny. He just subverted all of your expectations of rap. And that's what made it really exciting. Made a whole bunch of people feel like they can also rap.
Stuff from that era is a little bit forgotten. I mean, you see people kind of trying to make sense of it now—the sort of, for lack of better words, blog era. Some of that stuff seems lost to time.
Oh, really? You think so?
Well, I don't know. Myspace died and there was no backup. A lot of people stopped making physical records, but the streaming infrastructure wasn't happening yet. I would say YouTube is maybe the most lasting imprint of that time. Tumblr was important.
A lot of music was being released on MediaFire at that time, and was released on DatPiff. I don't even know if it’s still up.
It is.
A ton of music is archived there. Before Lil B, Lil Wayne was inspiring Lil B, I would say. But once Lil B started doing that, it changed everything. All of a sudden there were hundreds of acts that were coming out that were really different and exciting, experimental, and then there were tons of producers making really cool sounding beats, like sampling all kinds of cool stuff. Like, I really liked that the Lil B song “Pretty Box Remix” sampled the Kingdom Hearts soundtrack, a song by Utada Hikaru. it was just really, really beautiful. I definitely started wanting to make beats like that.
And lots of people were starting to do all kinds of cool stuff. Danny Brown's XXX came out around then. There was a really tight knit community going on, we had a Facebook group called The Wavery and all of Main Attrakionz’s producers were in it, and producers for A$AP Rocky, Lil B, Danny Brown, and Spaceghostpurrp—all the people that were working with a Raider Klan. We were all networking directly. We all knew each other personally.
So yeah, it was a really exciting, really fun time. And, it was crazy because we were just trying to make artsy stuff. Like, my biggest aspiration ever, the biggest I could imagine becoming would be like an artist on 4AD or something. But then we ended up working with A$AP Rocky and stuff. Now I have a platinum plaque in my room. It's just crazy.
So you made a Chlorine Mist EP in 2017.
Right.
What have you been doing in the time since?
You know, at that point I was getting kind of burnt out, because after doing 808s & Dark Grapes III, we made a hundred songs, and 80 of them didn't get used, I was kind of sick of making instrumentals. I just wanted to go all out. When I'm making a rap instrumental, I have to hold back, because I like to write a whole song. My normal instinct is to just write an entire song. So for that whole thing, I had to hold that back. So, I just wanted to take music all the way, do some really crazy stuff. And that's what the 2017 EP was like. So I took as far as I could. And it's a very different style. It's almost like prog music.
After that, I wasn't even really listening to much rap. I started listening to ambient music a lot and classical stuff. But yeah, I guess that's what I was doing—I was making mostly ambient music with my guitar and building stuff. I was playing with pedals. I released random songs on SoundCloud here and there. And actually, I mean, I was producing lots of music. Actually, I guess what happened was I started getting some kind of anxiety problem. I was still writing tons of songs, but I just was not able to put together a tracklist as an album and release anything. I was not feeling confident about it.
The more worried I got about it, I kept getting more stressed. And then one day I had a breakthrough. I was microdosing some LSD. And, I just started listening to it and I put together a tracklist and I was like, This is all finished. And I released it the next day. I had a whole album ready just from songs that were already done. So, yeah, in July, I released a new album, and it got a really good response. Everyone really liked it. And I started feeling really confident from all the people on Twitter that listened to it.
And then I went through all my music and I realized that I had so much finished music—I could release probably four more albums without writing any songs. This is all finished. I just have to assemble actual tracklists that make sense together. And yeah, it will be easy to do. I think I could probably put out a new album next week if I wanted, but I probably shouldn't over-saturate people with it.
I’ve realized that putting music out into the world is a little like building a muscle. The longer you don't do it, the harder it gets. You put more and more of a burden on yourself for it to be perfect or whatever, but then you start doing it and you realize that it's not so precious. I think it becomes easier and easier.
Exactly. Because I was so worried—like, what if I release it and it doesn't go right somehow? But then, after I did, I realized, what was I even worried about? Like what could even go wrong? The music is really good. I could just put it out. I mean, of course it's not going to be mainstream, but the people who like my music, they love it.
So, are you trying to make rap beats again?
I was really enjoying going crazy with my music and most of the stuff that I was writing in the past five years was way too crazy for rappers to use. I've been wanting to produce for rappers recently and I've been wanting to send them beats, but I don't actually have very many beats that are ready for rappers. I have tons of songs, but they're all way too busy for a rapper. So I actually have to sit down and make new rap beats.
I've been talking to some people—it's actually really cool, time has passed and now I feel like there's a lot of producers that are 25 that are making music that is directly inspired by our music and they're really good producers. So I've been talking to some of them and they're huge fans—they're really excited to work with me and some of them are working with major label rappers and stuff. So, I'm going to try and make a beat pack of Drake-style beats and see what I can do with it.
I mean, I feel like if you tried to make a Drake style beat, it probably wouldn't exactly come out that way.
Yeah, probably not.
But that's good.
Yeah. It's hard. That's probably my biggest challenge is to make it normal, that's absolutely against my instincts as an artist, but I would like to work with rappers. I have to figure out a balance. So I'm already working with some people that make similar music that already work with that kind of rapper. So I think working with them—maybe I can actually pull it off.
Or you could even go weirder because like some of these younger kids are making music that is really weird.
That's actually the most exciting to me, I think that'll be easy. I feel like a lot of zoomer-type rappers right now could probably go over my weirder stuff. They already do really experimental music. And they like it really busy and their music already sounds really messy. It's like the whole idea behind it. So yeah, it’s not that big a deal that my beats are too busy. It's already supposed to be like that.
No, I think now is finally the time to combine the weirdest of your noise projects with rap.
Yeah, I think so. So yeah, that's really exciting. I really want to produce for Bladee. I've been tweeting about it. Every time I tweet about Bladee, it's crazy how many young people respond to it. I just tweeted, like, where should I send beats to Bladee and it got over a thousand likes on Twitter. I normally don't get more than like 50 likes on a tweet. And so, yeah, it seems like zoomers definitely want me to work with Bladee. I'm trying to get in touch with them. They posted one of our songs on their playlist on Spotify. So maybe they're thinking about it.