Since relocating from Hawai'i to San Fran in '96, I had worked on some material that I never got to releasing; in Dec '00, I moved to the East Coast (NY) for work reasons, which kept me pretty busy over the past almost-two-decades. Needless to say, this resulted in less beatmaking.

I would get on my AKAI S9 & 950 from time to time though, and managed to keep my beats stored somewhere.
(With that said, I do plan to do some back-logging of them SF/NY beats sometime soon...)

With my music gear now pretty much pushed back in boxes, I started to meddle with a freeware on my PC called AUDACITY, and around late 2017, felt a new sense of inspiration with beatmaking again. But there was something different this time.

Now, I wasn't so stuck on discovering a loop that nobody had heard before; instead, I went with an approach of paying tribute to artists and songs that I simply enjoyed listening to. And it didn't matter if the sample was obvious, so long as it helped in creating a vibe I was feeling at the time.

So I began cutting up recent (and old) songs that I was being inspired by, and arranged them with something different than the original.
It started with the first track on this album, which comes from a Japanese pop/rock band called Ame No Parade, and their song called "Shoes" which was featured on this late-night obscure TV show called "Shimokitazawa Die-Hard."

And I guess things snowballed from there.

As I lay track after track, I thought of how music had become a huge part of my life (if not my career), and wondered how I could create a sort of a "memoir" for all that has happened up until now. With beats.

So, to add to the songs that were tributes to musicians and their music, I came up with an idea to give my props to the places that I have thus far spent the most time living: TOKYO, LONDON, SAN FRAN, NEW YORK, and HAWAI'I.

The year is 2019.

My 19th year living in NY.

Here come 19 tracks (and a few interludes) to remember this moment.

Mahalo Nui and Aloha!