For his 13th birthday in 2005, Chuck Strangers was gifted Akai’s MPC2000, a bulky workstation immortalized by the likes of J Dilla, Kanye West, and DJ Shadow. Audio interfaces didn’t cost $100 the way they do now, and so, like any other adolescent (1) obsessed with music and (2) lacking the riches of favorite musicians, he programmed countless beats onto the machine in his free time, with zero idea how to actually get them out.

It would be four years until a friend of his finally introduced him to FL Studio, but those four years — of creation, and a lot of it, purely for creation’s sake — remain indicative of a love for hip-hop that, though fairly tested, has never wavered. As time has created increasing room for overnight sensations and superstardom-via-paid-promotion, his relationship with his art has remained process-oriented, married to both lofty highs and inevitable lows.