The Boom Bap Archive: Drum Machines and Hip-Hop

Join us for the third and final event of our 2025 Black History Celebration, a discussion between producers K-Def (Lords of the Underground, Artifacts), Internal Quest of Jersey Produce, JWords (Nappy Nina, H31R) and Purple Tape Pedigree founder, Geng PTP.

The four will dive into the history of hip-hop, breaks, and the drum machines carrying the sonic history forward while adding to it. An exciting beat set featuring some current and up-and-coming producers will follow this discussion!

K-Def is a New Jersey based producer/DJ who has actively been involved in the music industry since the early 1990s. He has produced for artists Ghostface Killah and Craig Mack, and many others. K-Def earned critical praise early in his career for his work with Marley Marl on the album Here Comes The Lords by Lords of the Underground. Among the songs from that album that benefited from K-Def's production work is the hits "Funky Child" and "Chief Rocka."

Internal Quest is an audio engineer, music producer, and youth mentor. He began his career in the Barringer High School marching band, producing for local artists and competing in area beat battles and talent shows. Internal Quest attended the Institute of Audio Research in New York City graduating with high honors. In 2010, he became the lead engineer and general manager of Jersey Sound Lab Recordings based in Newark, NJ. Internal Quest calls his sound, style and delivery of his music as, “Hip-Hop: With a little innovation.”

JWords is a producer, composer breaking boundaries in black electronic and hip-hop music successfully fusion the two genres together to create a whole new world for herself. An arsenal of synthesizers and drum machines have become her signature in creating dynamic live performances. Having produced albums like ‘ve·loc·i·ty’ by H31R which is a duo between maassai and JWords. She’s also produced for rapper Nappy Nina and their album is called ‘Double Down’.

GENG PTP is a Manhattan-born, Queens NYC-based sound practitioner (poet, producer, DJ, audio engineer), educator, archivist, visual designer, organizer, and physical trainer. With 3+ decades of participatory roots in NYC's underground music/DIY communities, he has been making work through a multitude of solo and collaborative processes. Most currently, he performs as KING VISION ULTRA (est. 2017), a multimedia project considering memory and voice as quantum weaponry in relation to honoring/making/taking space, sampling from the archive (recall/remembrance), and spirit channeling. He also makes up half of Centennial Gardens (aka CENTENNY GZZZ), a duo with Dreamcrusher.

GENG's organizing and coalition work expands to the visionary collective and label, PTP (Protect The Peace fka Purple Tape Pedigree), which he established in 2009. PTP operates in spaces as "counter-industrial purveyors of weaponized media and information.”

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