Fenn Mercer

Fenn Mercer raps over his own production and has done since before either half was any good. The results are dense, low and unhurried: he writes to a loop until the loop stops being interesting, then keeps writing until it is interesting again for a different reason.

He built the first three years of his catalogue alone, releasing at a pace that made no commercial sense and taught him how to finish things. That period is now out of print at his own request. What replaced it is slower, better mixed and considerably less eager to prove anything.

His records are made almost entirely in one room, with drums programmed rather than played and everything else recorded through the same two microphones. The voice sits forward and dry. He does not double his vocals, and has said that stacking is a way of hiding an idea you have not written yet.

As a producer he works with a small number of other artists and takes no more than four outside projects a year, a limit he set after a year in which he took eleven and finished none of them well.

Live he performs with a drummer and a keyboard player and rearranges the material rather than running the record underneath it. The next release is a short one, built around a single voice memo he has carried for six years.