Studemont Project

By SARA CRESS
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle


Houston hip-hop isn't all Paul Wall, Slim Thug and Mike Jones. It's not all bling and spinning rims. Our city's diverse music scene is broad enough to birth independent hip-hop musicians such as the Heights' Studemont Project.

"We're just as enthusiastic about promoting our music as the mainstream artists, but I don't know what else we have in common with them," says songwriter and rapper Gilbert Galvan, aka Caption.

When the group formed in early 2003, Galvan was writing lyrics in the style of Digable Planets and A Tribe Called Quest, and says the songs were traditional hip-hop with beats, samples and scratches. But as the group has evolved, he has integrated his deep admiration for Radiohead and Björk into his writing. This may be one of the reasons the group has been asked to perform at South by Southwest twice.

"Our stuff now is experimental and music-driven," he says. "There might be no ending, just a long jam from song to song, and we've gotten more into ad-libbing within our sets. Sometimes other hip-hop groups look down on us because we're trying to do something different in the name of hip-hop. Stop calling our music 'hip-hop' if it's a problem for you."

The members of Studemont Project — including lyricist Christian Saldivar, aka 25CRUZ; Dan McKinney on drums; Tom Sutherland on keyboard; Bobby Hinojosa on turntables; Josh Nolan on guitar; and producer Eric Edwards — are in their early 20s and have day jobs ranging from janitor to waiter to painter.

Onstage, there's a camaraderie between Saldivar and Galvan, who play off each other's words with responses or echoes. The rest of the group appears almost as engineers, heads down, concentrating on their work. It falls on Saldivar and Galvan, then, to be the faces for the group, which they are with closed eyes, swinging arms and reaching fingers.

The group will release its first professionally-produced EP, Avenue of the Observatory, this week. On it, Galvan and Saldivar spit rhymes over tenebrous streams of sound. They touch on social commentary in Seventy, but the rest of the songs are about performing (Left on Teetshorn) and defending their style of hip-hop (Got Worms, which features a graceful string sample).

There's also an element of notable cleanliness about their music. Not to say that all rap is exploitative and ostentatious, but it certainly has that reputation.

"I don't want to rap about stuff I don't do,'' Galvan says about their lyrics. "Some of our songs are just about music, some are about what happens to us day-to-day, some of them are about how we feel when we perform. Some of them are instrumental, so it's just about putting some good music together.''

Saldivar and Galvan look to Bad Brains, Beastie Boys and Definitive Jux Records as the torch bearers for their style, which doesn't have rigid guidelines and develops organically with the times.

The group named itself after a street in the Heights because, "That's where we go to practice, perform and make music," Galvan says. "Growing up, we all lived near Fitzgerald's, and we spent every weekend seeing as many live shows as possible. Seeing energetic performances made me want to perform."

Avenue of the Observatory is being released on the group's record label, Esthetic Noise, which features prominently in Studemont Project's future goals.

"I hope we can put out our friends' music," Galvan says. "We'd like to build a touring family of diverse artists. There's so much more than just hip-hop. We don't want to be just hip-hop. We want to be music."
- Houston Chronicle

Studemont Project, and started off the quintet’s set with a Beatles riff that gathered steam into some Red Hot Chili Peppers punk-funk, heavy distorted pure funk and a very Ventures-like (and very convincing) cover of the Cure’s “Killing an Arab.” Studemont, whose new album drops next month, isn’t a rap-rock band at all, thank God. They’re a straight-up rock band that happens to be fronted by two linguistically limber MCs, if that makes any sense. But they’re tight. Extremely. They’ll be at Warehouse next Friday too; I suggest you join them. – Chris Gray - The Houston Press