RJD2

hip hop · acid jazz · electronic

RJD2 is the stage name of Ramble Jon Krohn, an American producer, multi-instrumentalist and DJ born May 27, 1976 in Eugene, Oregon and raised in Columbus, Ohio, where he is based. The name is a play on the Star Wars droid R2-D2. He began making music in 1993 and came up through Columbus's underground hip hop scene, first as a producer and DJ for the crew MHz. His 2002 debut, Deadringer, was released by El-P's Definitive Jux and built its instrumental hip hop out of dense sample collage; Since We Last Spoke followed in 2004. The Third Hand (2007) moved to XL Recordings and pushed his own singing and live instrumentation forward, a shift he has continued across The Colossus (2010), More Is Than Isn't (2013), Dame Fortune (2016) and The Fun Ones (2020), most of them issued on his own label, RJ's Electrical Connections. He also records ambient and synth material under the alias The Insane Warrior. Collaboration runs through the catalog: Soul Position, his duo with Columbus rapper Blueprint, produced 8 Million Stories (2003) and Things Go Better with RJ and Al (2006); Icebird paired him with vocalist Aaron Livingston; and Magnificent City (2006) with Los Angeles MC Aceyalone yielded A Beautiful Mine, whose strings and breakbeat became the opening theme of the television series Mad Men and sharply widened his audience. Live, he plays rather than presses buttons, working behind a bank of four turntables plus samplers and a laptop, cutting one routine into place while another runs and leaving parts of the set deliberately unsequenced. In 2021 he released a production course, RJD2: From Samples to Songs, through the music-education platform Soundfly.

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