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Bio
Born in
San Jose, CA in 1979, Controller 7 (aka Tommy McMahon)
spent his early years spinning G.I. Joes off of his Sesame Street
record player, playing in the mud, and falling face first off his
bike. After spending some quality time memorizing the lyrics to Run-D.M.C.'s "You Be Illin'," air drumming to mid '80s jams on
MTV, and becoming obsessed with dubbing tapes, he started playing
the drums in 1988.
Fast forward four impatient years later
and the idea of lessons and proper technique have been abandoned for pause tape beats with drums and an out
of tune player piano. Two or three years later the obsession becomes
making mix-tapes with a belt-drive turntable, a cd player, no mixer,
and a broken 8 track cassette receiver.
It wasn't until he was introduced to the Ensoniq
EPS sampler that his music materialized into rough demo
tapes. Although the tapes were made purely for his own enjoyment,
the dream of pressing up a record was there. So when one of those
demo tapes fell into the hands of Sole (who was starting the Anticon
label) in 1998, things started to take shape. Requests for a beat
or two soon turned into a series of budding friendships.
In 1999, while living in Berkeley, Controller
7 started working on the third of those demo tapes. The two week
project ended up taking six months to finish, and after squeezing 4 track mix sessions in between
classes and
homework, "Left Handed Straw" was finally released in the Spring of
2000. A small scale hand-made cd, it was self-described as a mixtape of
"soon
to be lost beats and records". After receiving great reviews, it was
professionally re-released, and helped earn Controller 7 the honor of being one
of URB Magazine's NEXT 100 people to watch for the year 2002 (in
the company of D-Styles, RJD2, Dabrye, FOG, and others).
Check out
the "expansions" EP and the "Egg" EP to see what he has been up to lately.
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