For five straight summers, DJ, producer, and rapper Fess Grandiose helped put on Kimball House Rock, a daylong DIY hip-hop festival he hosted in the backyard of his Logan Square home. Though Grandiose, 30, was raised in south-suburban Hazel Crest, he’s completely embraced his new neighborhood: the final Kimball House Rock, held in 2014, offered a snapshot of the alternative-rap acts operating on the northwest side. The bill included rappers Angel Katz, Auggie the 9th, and Rich Jones; DJ Sev Seveer of beat-scene collective Push Beats; nomadic multi-instrumentalist Netherfriends; and now-defunct hip-hop group Hurt Everybody. Grandiose has continued hosting his own events since retiring Kimball House Rock, and earlier this year he debuted Open Beats, a live beat-making showcase on the third Friday of every month at Cafe Mustache.
It’s mostly what all I listen to now—instrumental albums from various artists. You’ve got the bigwigs, of course—J Dilla, Madlib—but guys that aren’t really heard of much more as well, especially local cats. Dibiase, Radius. I feel like Chicago has one of the better live-beat, live-PA scenes in the nation. It’s kinda really booming: everybody’s got Ableton, everybody wants to come out and play beats off their [Roland] SP-404 and jam out. I got caught all into that, and so it was only right to put it all together in album form and re-present myself, at least to the rest of the world. People who know me locally, they’ve always known what I was doing and capable of, but this is me kinda taking a step forward and really trying to get out there.
I started an event this January at Cafe Mustache in Logan Square—it’s called Open Beats. It’s like an open-mike night for live beat makers and live PA. For the first couple hours, from nine to 11 pm—this is on every third Friday of the month—the stage is literally open for producers who come through, and they can play about ten- to 15-minute sets. Then we go into our featured sets for the night. I try to feature at least two to three different producers, alongside myself, to cap off the night.
Cats really take an interest in my sets, because I don’t use a laptop at all when I’m doing the live-beat thing, and a lot of people want to know different processes of doing that. People who do use laptops with their live beats—I’ve seen very, very well-put-together beat sets ran off of Ableton and just a MIDI controller, and I don’t wanna say that I can do what they do, just like they probably wouldn’t want to say that they can do what I do. We all do what we do and make it work onstage, and that’s what’s beautiful about this whole live-beat thing that’s happening right now.
For about five years straight, me and my girlfriend, who I live with, were throwing backyard jams at our house. From the nature of a lot of people coming over and hanging out, and it being on Kimball Street, it just became Kimball House. I took the name that it already had for itself, and that’s the name of my production company. But for those five years, it was pretty awesome that we were able to do essentially a day festival in the backyard and not really have too much static from the neighbors. The cops were always cool too. It’s hard having DIY venues in the city, but it worked out. But I stopped doing that, ’cause as Logan Square got more popular, Kimball House got more popular—more people kinda knew where we were at, and knew what we were doing. I attempted to run a studio out of our basement, and I had to close those doors within a couple of years because of business stuff.
I don’t take anything away from rappers, because hip-hop is where my heart is. But especially as I got older, I didn’t have the same passion and drive as rapper peers of mine would, to come out with five or six mixtapes before I even drop an album—or write 30 songs for an album just to put out only half of ’em. Any song that I made that I wanted to record raps on, I wanted to take that as actual material to put out, and not just be so disposable as rap has become in this singles-driven market that’s around now. I grew up embracing albums, embracing concept albums, and as rap got away from that more—and became more about the better singles, the better songs, the better mixtapes—I kinda just lost my drive and passion for contributing my art to that part of hip-hop. I felt better suited being a DJ for rappers that I know, making their live sets better.
