The Witzard

Haj of dumhi tells us he's been working on Shanti's Rebuttal on-and-off for about two years. We briefly spoke with Haj about Shanti's Rebuttal during our 2020 wrap-up style interview earlier this year. The majority of his beats were completed pre-COVID, but when COVID-19 hit, Haj started working on his 2020 projects with FERMENTED SPIRITS and Charles Only/ShamelessPlug. Some of the beats from Shanti's (and some from 2019's TERiYAKi HAiR.PIECE ) wound up being a part of the 2020 project The Airing of Grievances with Reef The Lost Cauze. Initially, Haj intended to put Shanti's Rebuttal out as an instrumental companion piece to Grievances shortly thereafter, but, then, he started working on video collages and more artwork, etc. the music, also, evolved a little bit. It's about 18 minutes long and is intended to be experienced as one continuous piece of music; an Instrumental Hip-Hop soundtrack, of sorts. Its basic plot involves an unwitting heroine who wind...

dumhi ORIGIN STORY: I started making beats around 2002, I guess. I had no intention of doing anything with it, except having fun. At that point, I, personally, knew no one that did music stuff. 2003-ish to 2005, I started meeting some other folks who did music in various capacities like Shameless Plug/Charles Only, Flud, Mash Comp/Wise, MicheleQJ. A lot of us met through sharing demos and talking sh*t on okayplayer.com. That was such a great place to meet [people,] at the time. A lot of [people] were on there, also, just starting their music and learning and we were all hype to talk to each other about it. This is where I met the Tanya Morgan guys and E L U C I D and I used to send my horrible early beats to Nicolay [The Foreign Exchange], via AOL Instant Messenger and we would sit there doing stuff like that until 3:00am every night. Then, on the weekends, I would get up with Plug, Flud, Mash, and whoever else might be around and we'd drink and make jokes and make songs. I, ...