Music, rap, hiphop, triphop

Spencer makes music? Meet Phobea

Yes, I make music. I guess I’m better known as Phobea in most parts. I was on that Channel 4 TV show “Chancers” and since then I’ve been taking bit of a break from the whole scene in order to develop my album and figure out exactly what type of music it is that I want to be making. I’ve made a whole dedicated site for it over at phobea.com and I’m constantly adding bits to it here and there so keep checking back.

I started making music quite unintentionally to be honest, writing psuedo-poetry from about the age of 13. When I hit 16, being heavily into the whole hip-hop scene I decided that I wanted to be able to battle. Considering that back then, Bognor had about as much of a hip-hop scene as the Sahara has water, I wasn’t able to battle other rappers face-to-face and resorted to posting lyrics on online message boards. It was about that time when the whole netceeing thing was just taking off so there was a lot of competition and a healthy number of worthy opponents.

How it worked was, one emcee would challenge another, then they would go back and forth with as many verses as they’d agreed at the beginning. Most battles just consisted of each emcee posting one 16 bar verse. Then it was up to the other forum members to vote and decide who the winner was. Not only did people vote though, they offered criticism and encouraged each other to improve. I really enjoyed it. I think in total I had over 170 text battles and only lost 3. People would form online crews and at my peak, I was a member of a crew that was considered one of the best across the whole internet, The Plaguez of Impact.

Naturally that all progressed to audio battles, with each emcee instead recording their verses. I didn’t flourish so well in that particular scene, due in most part to my English accent and the fact that 99.9% of the scene was made up of Americans. Instead I turned to making proper songs, and the rest as they say, is history.

Noise Flow

Oh, it’s another indie record label

Yeah, I also half-assedly run a little indie record label called Noise Flow. Things are going really well at the moment, we’re just moving our pieces into place ready to take over the world like. Check out the site a) because it’s sexy, and b) because dotted all over the place are loads of downloadable tracks and goodies, a merchandise shop, and the official forums(!) boasting more games than you can shake your leg at. Massive kudos to my label-mate Damn Trouble. Note: I recently rebranded the label from Clockwork Chapel to Noise Flow so the site’s being redeveloped, sorry!