Ital Santos’ last record Reflections was a retrospective on many of his greatest beats in the form of a memorable instrumental long play- his newest is Perception and sees him taking off the producer hat to rhyme and vocalize over a new set of beats fully produced by Big Mason.

On “Snakes Part 2” Ital delivers some of the sharpest flow he’s ever exhibited while he goes on to dissect his ideas about deceitful half-friends in the community- “ I always show you love now tell me why you hating on me?” Cuda delivers a scorcher as always over the menacing piano cut.

The album’s songs have intermissions with tales of Mexican immigrants and their struggles in America. The theme adds a sense of perspective- Ital laughs and says “just playing” at moments of rapper excess, while the stories of travelers and their travails with our border adds to the idea that some of the things we obsess about aren’t that important. Whether it’s the XXL rookie list or the latest thing Kanye said- Santos recognizes that the way people perceive what is valuable is skewed.

Santos vocalizes about modern love on "Last Date", Slick-C and Edubb enliven the posse cut “Conchas” which creeps and bumps like an early 90’s West Coast cut. The claps will take you back. “Stop” bangs with hard guest bars from Azma and expert scratching from Mando the DJ. As you trip out faded to the synthy Intermission outro, ponder on how Perception rhymes with and shadows Santos’ last record, Reflections, in which he produced an entire instrumental album in contrast to Perception where he raps entirely on beats by Big Mason.

Having listened to Santos’ music, Reflection and Perception are appropriate concepts in which to categorize his musical proclivities- Santos the rapper is perceptive about how people live while the producer angle is more reflective and melodic. Step into the other side with Perception.

GET A SNEAK PEEK INTO THE UPCOMING ALBUM "THE SUN SETS IN THE WEST" WITH ITAL SANTOS' NEW EP "MY FATE". THIS 4-TRACK PROJECT IS A GRITTY, UNAPOLOGETIC LOOK AT LIFE'S REALITIES. FEATURES FROM XIKANO SYNDICATE, MANDO THE DJ, AND ARIES KAE. PRODUCTION BY SLICK-C & ITAL SANTOS.

EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: XIKANO SYNDICATE

Music is a powerful inducer of nostalgia. A song, a melody, a rhythm can take us back to moments both familiar to our memories and to our own inner thoughts. On Reflections Ital Santos takes us through some of his most melodic and beautiful productions to narrate a mostly wordless mental journey that illustrate his own reflections on life and the world. On tracks like “4 Moms” and “Piano II”, he takes the listener into vulnerable tones but still addictive tunes. His thick-bassed drums and funk-sample drenched works have always shown us someone who desires to harness the emotional power of contemporary music for the benefit of the people and on Reflections, Ital delivers one of his most successful, consistent and profound projects yet. Like Gil Scott-Heron’s 1981 album of the same name, the album borrows and samples and covers from great tunes of the last 50 years while also delivering the soulful perspective who lives within the music. Some of the beats within are from previous Santos projects but in different forms, decontextualized and recontextualized to reveal a new side and story. There is so often a sense of world weariness- Ital has always empathized with the working class struggle of his community- and his thoughtful productions assure anyone in the audience that someone else indeed knows that feel of walking through a broken city, feeling broken and wondering if there’s even art to set or derive from it. On Supremo, Ital’s previous life died. On Leifs, Santos was reborn. On Decem, he shared his journey. On Reflections, a more matured soul shares with us the blues, the funk, and the soul that he has learned that cannot be put into letters and sentences.

released October 15, 2017

All Tracks Produced by Ital Santos for 909Lab Music. Artwork by Inanz www.nanlib.com

© 2017 Black Cloud Music™. All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.

Gangster Movie continues the artist formerly known as Jynxx’s reinvention and rebirth as Ital Santos. This new outing has Ital playing the Scorsese of sound as he tells a noir and mafia influenced street tale through an exciting and sinister tape of beats and film samples. Clean bass lines, banging drums, ominous jazz marimbas and snaky guitars populate the soundscapes of tracks like The Traitor and The Attempt while R&B samples and cinematic strings fill time between the subtle military march drum hits of The Warning. The juxtaposition between the smooth sounds of Ital Santos productions and the edgy near violence of the film sample scenes creates a tension that the next track on the tape always cuts through deftly. Gangster Movie reflects a maturity and respect for accomplishment in its restrained yet powerful melodies and dialogue dripping with reverence for an older kind of man-code. Nimbly bouncing between the soulful coos of 70s style breaks and the angry mid-Atlantic accents of 30s crime flicks, the album is wise yet defiant. Chill yet wary. Clean yet grimy. IE yet global. Timely yet timeless. Itals' drums are insistent but never over-the-top. His tunes impressive but never too busy. His basslines potent but not obfuscating. Among the stand outs are The Traitor whose melody is ethnic and mystical, dark and beauteous. The Trial is another, encapsulating the seasoned pugilists, the made men that populate Santos’ dark tale. With its brutal simplicity and unceasingly banging and old school rhythm, the beat’s crisp snares and menacing horns announce that playtime is over. With Gangster Movie, Santos challenges previous notions of beat tapes and their parameters, winning in his gamble that marrying classic crime cinema to hard hip-hop instrumentals could still be fresh with new angles and strong musical chops.

Slick-C and Ital Santos come together for Sermones with production and raps from both of them. Their particular brand of Inland Empire Chicano funk-hop is evident but with more wisdom and a matured almost subdued but sinister melodic sound. Slick-C brings out the goodwill in Santos and this record sees them both turn more attention to the fortunes of the next generation. In "Don't Follow Them Footsteps", Slick and Santos share hood tales of multiple generations of tragedy as a cautionary story for young kids in cities like the IE's San Bernardino. The guest roster is impeccable - Mando the DJ, Azma, Notiz Yong, Yung Miss, Ominous and more So Cal heavy hitters. Songs like "Know Me Now" roll along luxuriously. "Finer Things" recurs with a reprise at the end of the album- all 3 songs reinforcing that their tastes are aging as they do, seeking a more adult sophistication in the challenging economic milieu of the I.E. Like the "I Pray" interlude in Santos' recent Leifs, the "Pass the Blunt" interlude is actually a highlight of the album. The skits show Slick and Ital acting a fool, but the blend of lesson songs and conversational interjections play with the idea and etymology of "Sermones". "How I'm Livin'" chimes with one of the album's standout melodies. "Stories of an OG" and "It's Called Hate" continue the subdued chill melodic meditations on life, the "sermons". The sermons might culminate in one of the least rap-filled tracks, "Letter to Time", a truly beautiful and haunting poem-song that finds the rapper producer duo anthropmorphizing time as people they haven't seen in a long time. It's refreshing to see hip-hop's men opening up like this. On it, Slick-C' sounds like Rappn' 4 Tay on "Player's Club" on the chill guitar-soaked beat. Much of the record reminds me of Warren G in its having producers laying soundscapes for themselves to rap funky chill songs to. "Sermones" gives listeners a peek into the more luxurious side of Inland Empire hip-hop, illustrating aspirations and meditations that many of us find all too relatable. - Tristan Douglas

A decade retrospective of Santos’ prolific and diverse musical career, one can hear some of Ital’s best productions along with the obvious and often dramatic development of many of his I.E. compatriots that appear on the 10 year saga of an album. The older tracks bristling with a little more trigger-happiness and aggressive masculinity. Their pre-track shout outs sound Death Row-style and Yasin, a frequent Santos collaborator on the earlier works, throws down hard bars over powerful and grimy boom-bap. The later tracks are more chill and even stoner-hippie in their wizened observations and wisdom. Noted posi-gawds like Noa James show their earlier more gangster side on older tracks from the collection too. Ital Santos’ musical tastes reflect the larger culture’s shifts; here is a musician who has been here for all many phases. Songs in between like an addictive R & B number, "Black Brown Soul Revue" sung amazingly by CornBreeze near the end help show Ital’s diversity and vision. Santos shows us his part in local lexicon development with tracks like “the 9”, and the collection’s standout almost-closer “The Realest Shit I Ever Wrote” on which he says "I got friends but sometimes I feel alone." The whole song is a bluesy soul slapper which encapsulates, I think, Ital's desire to shed light on the struggle of people in the I.E. This record commemorates a decade of him doing exactly that, through different collaborators, different eras and personas of the self, just trying to give the I.E. the kind of musical shading and texture so many other hard-up communities have had in the past. He's been busy in this last decade and I look forward to what he produces next.

Ital Santos is never going to quite do something predictable and it will always have a point. Sometimes that point will simply be to amuse himself but if we’re being honest that’s what a real artist is. Fresh off his Reflections beat album, he returns to a practice not used since his Supremo album, but this time instead of pouring out his frustrations on DJ Premier selections, he waxes philosophical about modern romance on instrumentals from 9th Wonder’s Tutankhamen.

He tells the story of two single parents in the Inland Empire who meet each other and start dating despite not really being ready to be selfless enough to make such an arrangement work. Skin deep in every song is the implication that this new world of disloyalty, thirsty instagram shenanigans, and unlimited options through technology is ubiquitous, all too repeititive; the album’s thesis is that it’s hard to find real love in Babylon.

“You Single?” begins the courtship, “Chocolate Hearts and Roses” deepens it, culminating in “These Girls (Somebody Stop Me)” in which our protagonist finds himself drinking and contemplating new conquest and possibly starting the cycle all over again. Ital’s details about working class parents, the flippant humor about the painful idea that no one is really putting their true self out there, the fun made of the idea of something being “wrong” with single people that’s always to be discovered by their new lovers…all of it paints a relatable human picture that everyone always wonders about. Documents like this album will be there to answer folks’ from the future’s inevitable question, “what was dating in the 2000-teens?”

Sometimes a soul survives death and seeks itself again. Through pain and loss, Ital Santos' journey of rediscovery of self begins here. A raw diary of rebirth in the I.E. that expresses frustration with life and disloyalty over a sweet selection of classic beats by DJ Premier, Supremo is an ambitious and unique artistic experience that shows how hip-hop becomes part of one’s being and survival. Supremo is an interesting piece of history for Inland Empire hip-hop nerds as Ital copes with the new psychological space and talks about life after death over previously released DJ Premier beats. Usually when someone hits rock bottom, they are not mentally in a place to produce art from it but for Santos, hip-hop is instinct. As a buff of the scene myself, I cite it as some of the best work I have yet to hear by KastOne, whose personality and attitude-filled appearance helped Ital shape something new, raw and interesting out of a remix EP that is more of a personal statement of mentality than a remix EP.