KILLER BEE
Hailing from New York City, Killer Bee first began making hip-hop music at age sixteen, recreating Drake songs on Garageband by strumming along on his guitar and programming drums via his MacBook keyboard. He’s come a long way since then. High school led him to Kanye, then to Dilla, DJ Premiere, Pete Rock, and eventually to Japanese beatsmith Nujabes, whose tendency to sample piano lines from Japanese music resonated with Killer Bee’s Toonami-cultivated love for anime and its similarly pentatonic-inclined anthems. When he stumbled upon bsd.u, all of these sonic interests aligned. By then he’d started college, and there Killer Bee began trying his hand at creating the lo-fi beats that had captivated him.
These early efforts coalesced into Venus EP. But from its very first second of playback, it’s apparent that Killer Bee—whose name is a reference to the pseudonymous rapping ninja of Naruto notoriety—would go on to bend and break the “rules” of lo-fi’s aesthetic. Rather than a sample from Naruto, or some other anime amenable to Western taste, Venus EP’s first track is built around perfectly looped chords from King Krule’s “Baby Blue.” Under that, the drums snap—definitively boom-bap, but considerably more aggressive than what you’d expect from a lo-fi joint—and over it, snips of Japanese dialog serve both as a tasteful garnish for the music and as irrefutable admittance under the lo-fi umbrella. Despite these intriguing anachronisms, Killer Bee’s debut fits comfortably under that umbrella and sounds like an initial, though very solid, offering rather than the work of an experienced artisan. But the signs were there from the beginning.
