“Well, here goes… Magnesium Opium. Finally. There has been a considerable amount of folklore amongst longtime fans surrounding this album: “Was it ever completed?”; “why was it never released?”; “what’s the story behind the title?”—that kind of talk.

Let’s take a sec to look back: the early 2000s were an incredibly industrious time for myself and my peers in music. We had big rap dreams, busy schedules and bountiful ideas—all amidst what some would consider to be the “last big hurrah” of the music industry as we knew it.

As for the nowfolk album, Ishkan and I had been recording music under the group, Moniker, since the mid-late nineties and had released two albums already: Style Gangstas (1999) and The Moon (2001). During the late fall of 2001, we hastily launched into a project called The Winter. We ended up shelving it, and at the start of 2002, decided to work on something we felt would be more substantial (a more updated nowfolk project, if you will). We worked on the album incrementally from January 2002 until June 2003. Around June, I had a conversation with a fan who told me of a crazy dream he had involving finding a “lost nowfolk album,” and in the dream he recalled the album being called Magnesium Opium. I told Ish about the dream, and we unanimously decided use it for the title.

It’s kind of amazing that we didn’t have a real album title until the project was wrapped. That’s unusual. As I mentioned previously, it was a very busy time and between my solo work and touring with my main group—I was swamped.

At the end of June, my Adat recording system was destroyed virtually stranding the nowfolk album from being mixed and released along with many other solo projects. I know I’ve brought this up countless times, but it has to be rehashed to accurately tell the story.

Anyway, all I had were very rough mixes on cassette and cd of “mag op”. I acquired new recording equipment and really didn’t look back from that point plus Ish moved to Victoria in the fall of 200,3 and it ultimately slowed our nowfolk aspirations to a near standstill for years. When I finally acquired a replacement Adat lx20 unit a couple years ago, I began to unearth and mix mag op using my rough tape mixes as reference. Then, I reassembled the album chronologically in the exact order that we had recorded the songs.

Now that URBNET has granted me the opportunity to release an album monthly for 2016, I knew that it was the perfect time to bring Magnesium Opium to the world.