The debut studio album from international plunderphonics band A Tribe Called Kong.

Finally, it's here for you, the 1st studio album from this beat-making crew! It's a 13 track vibe and an audible ease for everybody's ears to jam with in a breeze. It's a free download, It's stats may not be high, but it's a pretty nifty album made by sample based guys. If you choose to listen it can do no wrong for the debut album from A Tribe Called Kong!

I guess I should explain the forward now, huh? Welp where do I even begin...

Would you believe me if I told you that "A Tribe Called Kong" would not have existed if I chose to continue my old work ethic? Sunset Sunbeams was the first track I started in February to try and go with the flow of "get a beat done a month so I can have around a dozen tracks for a compilation this year". I managed to get a bit more then 1 beat a month done, but everything was so scattered and varied. I didn't want to put out an album simply from the amount of inconsistent variety from my unreleased catalog at the time. There was a little bit of everything at the ready, but it all felt like a box of nothing altogether.

Then one day I discovered that SNES audio restoration extraordinaire Sam "Jammin Sam" Miller had a Discord server. Me being the Nintendo nerd I am (even more so a Donkey Kong Country fanatic) hopped in to see what was up.
Upon joining I conversed with the locals and found out that Sam compiled a sample pack containing every high quality instrument that was originally used to produce the Donkey Kong Country trilogy soundtrack. I downloaded this immediately. Realizing all the cool sounds included in the pack I dragged some in various old projects to see what would work. The open hat fit so well on Sunset Sunbeams in the demo stage to the point where I let my creative side unleash and finished the song. The samples used in production range from R&B vocal chops from André 3000 and The Weeknd, to drums from the late James Dewitt "Dilla" Yancey; and the open hat from Sam's compiled folder just added the icing on the cake.

Now that I think of it I may have lied in saying that Sunset Sunbeams was the first track produced for the band. I vaguely remember working on an Aquatic Ambience remix after I started the previous track but before I finished it. I can't remember for the life of me why I decided to do that, but I had a bunch of other DKC project files involving reversing and chopping up sounds and the underwater masterpiece by David Wise came to mind when I was experimenting one day. I also remember screensharing the process in Sam's Discord briefly and receiving comments from him watching such as "Nice. Better than the hip hop tracks I've heard rappers make out of aquatic ambience, they don't do anything fun". I guess his compliments added a bit more to my already ambitious motivations to work on music with Donkey Kong Country songs which is a delight to hear from other musicians with similar interests. After I worked on more of that track with another set of André 3000 vocals and a lot of well-hidden microsamples, I decided that the album I work on this year would be a Donkey Kong themed one. I already had a couple of random project files involving songs from the franchise so I thought it would be a fun challenge (even more of a challenge considering I chose to go through with this mid-April so I only had so much time before the end of the year came to be).

I used to do a lot of concept albums when I did mashups back in the day but I'm an adult now and don't take satisfaction from simply layering songs atop one-another. I always get creative when working on music to steer away from my simple past and the creativity really does show on this album. You could probably find out a good amount of the samples used throughout this project on your own but I guarantee you some of them are so different from their originals it's hard to tell they're remixes of Nintendo music sometimes. Unless you've played Tropical Freeze and have familiarized yourself with the OST as much as I have then you'll probably have no idea what Ethereal Forestation and Fruit Farmers Anonymous are based from. Some blends here contain sources that are more obvious to point out but the album still has a unique flair regardless. This ain't ya grand-dads hip-hop album with loops on loops. This is a sample-based production containing sounds from various pieces of media I enjoy, and a marvelous combination of DKC music with clever cuts and dope drums.

As for the name, well, it's nothing special. A simple spoof on sampledelic pioneers A Tribe Called Quest was all I needed to come up with a catchy enough band name. The production on here is similar to what's hearable on any Tribe album due to the insane amount of sampled sounds organized so fluently. I don't want to compare myself to Q-Tip at all though, as he's earned the status of legendary abstract poet and producer (meanwhile I'm just some guy in his early 20's toying around with videogame music). I felt the name was fitting though because when you look up what the word "tribe" means Google's first result opens with "a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities". That couldn't have been more perfect for the project because of all the Kongs in the DK series that operate as a crew and have several blood relations (and even the distant cousins like Lanky).

To summarize, A Tribe Called Kong (while being a parody of A Tribe Called Quest) comes from my love and appreciation towards the music that is used on and inspired this album. The synonymous "family" aspect comes not only from the expanding members of the DK crew (pun not intended) but the assistants I've reached out to in order to complete this project as soon as possible. I myself am a multimedia artist but suck at digital works, so a good amount of the cover art was handled by mutuals from social medias. As for Mondo? Well he's a friend I've known back from my SoundClown days who I wanted to voiceover certain parts of the album. We both have experiences remixing videogame music and because of his naturally Afrocentric voice I thought he would be a much better introductory presence then just me alone. Funny how the "band" I started is me doing 95% of the work with occasional help from guests and pals but they deserve the credit because without them I wouldn't even have a cover for this thing yet (conceptually yes, but not physically). The album art alone was so flashy and appealing that a local t-shirt printing business "MyMainManPat" loved the design and put it up on their website! To think that a dumb little concept album I thought of in the year's 2nd trimester now has officially printed clothing products you can buy was the thrill of my summer.

Alright, alright, I'll stop yammering and finish this off already.

After nearly 6 months of production and several soundchecks from myself and people behind the scenes the album was finished. All that was left was just to determine what songs would make good singles (cause what's an album without a teaser track here and there?). So many people had different songs in mind for me to release individually, but I decided on the 3 currently out for the sake of variety. Remixes of songs based off DKC 1, 2, and 3 felt like a fair gamble rather then just putting out what a few people liked most (considering everyone who listened beforehand had differentiating favorites). They didn't get too much traction, although that's natural when coming up with a band in modern times. Nobody starts off easy even with labels yanking the dog chain around, but luckily ATCK is more independent then an asexual introvert (I should know heh).

We will never have anything for sale. Nobody owns our music, and we will always credit the original composers and lyricists that we end up using on our works.

We will continue to work on music no matter what people say because we have no contracts to follow.

We have plenty of ideas still left to execute and we will finish them so the public can discover our work.

We are A Tribe Called Kong, and this is The Simian Theory.

Are we gonna make another conceptual clash of memorable music and call it Monkey Mauraders? You bet your big baboon asses we will! Because as long as there's music out there that comes from or related to Donkey Kong, we will return.

- D.J. Lankalicious