(2009-06-15) Hypnotic Brass Profile

Interesting profile of Hypnotic. Cohran routinely woke the boys at 5 A.M. so that they could practice playing horns before school. At first, he had them play just the mouthpieces--once they'd achieved "purity in their tone," they graduated to full instruments... According to Saiph, they could make about two thousand dollars for six hours on the street. He also says that, over the course of several years of touring the United States and Europe, the band sold about three hundred thousand copies of its first record (the orange one, sometimes called "Flipside," after the fifth track), entirely through self-promotion... In a typical Hypnotic song, the shifts in key and the emergence of themes happen against a sound of massed horn parts that provide a sense of solidity. The music stays rooted to the cycle of the beat and the riff, and the players don't leave the center behind to leap around as they might in hard bop or free jazz. Unlike the musicians in the avant-garde community that Hypnotic grew up in, these players have no interest in dissonance or "out" passages of squeaking and skronking. They keep their compositions lean and their harmonies broad and varied... The brothers moved to the New York area around 2005, settling first in Queens, then in Westchester, and now sharing two apartments in Brooklyn. They plan to move to London next. Over the past few years, Hypnotic has turned down offers from several major labels, including Def Jam and Atlantic, though they have also cannily maintained ties to well-known artists. (They have recorded with Maxwell and Erykah Badu and have a collaboration forthcoming with Mos Def.) "Our plan was always to sell a million albums and then start our own label," Saiph explained. As the brothers see it, their father never cashed in on his talent, so they've had to make sure that he would approve of the way they are handling the business side of theirs. (Music Industry)