Story

I make instrumental music rooted in hip hop and electronica at the core. From there it leans into the SoundCloud movement, into Lucid Monday as a collective and the beat tapes its producers put out. The sound itself is harder to pin down: a genreless new wave of electronic music, standalone in nature, built to be the main event rather than just a bed for vocals. It’s omnivorous and a little unhinged, pulling from everywhere all at the same time. My 2020 album Alignment planted the roots, with one excursion each into house, drum and bass, bounce, and experimental territory. The direction I’m headed now commits to it fully.

prod.mason is my working name. I’m Mason Dean, a producer and audio engineer in Baltimore by way of New York City. My parents met while my father was DJing in Austin, around 6th Street, and he never put the records down: while I was growing up he was on the decks everywhere, from clubs on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the basement at home. By ninth grade I was on the turntables myself, working out an unorthodox mixing style of my own. The beats started there. In 2013 and 2014 I’d loop a melody off one record and drums off another, cutting them in and out by hand and recording the performance straight off the turntables. From there it moved to my phone, chopped in iMaschine and finished in GarageBand, until the winter of 2015 when I got my first Maschine MK2.

After an abrupt departure from New York City, I landed in Towson and finished high school there; that’s when the DJing wound down and producing took over. After a year and a half at Goucher, the music technology program I enrolled in was discontinued; I transferred to BCCC and finished my associates there. Through the Goucher and BCCC years I was a regular at Baltimore Beat Club, run by The Lineup Room (@lineuproomstudio), and networking at those events is what got me into the room for the first professional recording sessions I ever attended, watching Brandon Lackey engineer. After BCCC I stepped away for a year during COVID. I’d been engineering all the while. That December I released Alignment, eighteen instrumental tracks. I returned to school at Towson University, where I studied electronic media and film with an audio concentration, and that’s where post production sound found me. I got fluent in Pro Tools and iZotope RX on student films and worked my way through Baltimore’s rooms: shadowing at Greenhouse Studios (@greenhousestudiosmd) in Fort Washington, a door fellow Towson alum Spence (@spence.wav) got me through, then a year as lead engineer at Highlife Baltimore (@highlife.studio), where Steel ali (@steelali_) and Vrando (@vrandosde) vouched me in, and engineering today at The Music Space (@themusicspace) in Towson. At Highlife I co-ran and co-engineered Highlife Live, a monthly live session series in the style of NPR’s Tiny Desk, where songs born digital were rebuilt by a live band.

By day I install audio visual systems in venues like Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium. By night I make beats, and they travel: my production is on fifty-plus records across the Baltimore and New York City independent scenes, with artists like Camden Malik (@camdenmalik), Vrando, Luioto (@luioto), and Eze Jackson (@ezewriter). I engineer for independent artists, often handling my own placements end to end, and finish sound for film and TV.

I build my own tools when the right one doesn’t exist: Modal Circle, a free music theory tool I vibe coded in HTML, and a set of Reaktor instruments including a filter that snaps to the octaves of a chosen key and a rebuild of the Maschine stock EQ so my hands work the same in every program. I document the workflows too, with video tutorials on recording Maschine MIDI into FL Studio and Ableton on my blog.

My collaborators map the road. Before I left New York City, I met Ruben (@jodiix.x), who introduced me to the rest of the sLUms circle. After the move to Maryland I met Vrando at Towson High School, but I kept a foot in New York City for a year or two, taking the Megabus up to the Vernon house, a legendary spot, whenever I could get the money together; it was KingCarterSlums (@cheikhuana) who first brought me through. That’s where I played beats for Camden Malik. We locked in on the spot. At Baltimore Beat Club I met Dre Thompson, Eze Jackson, ApexThaGenius (@apexthagenius), and BenBanger (@benjaminbanger), a frequent collaborator who showed me the value of going live and taking remote collaboration seriously; in my group chat full of producers, Ben keeps the loops coming. Eathn (@_eathn_) came around through that same sLUms orbit, and I recognized him: we’d gone to middle school together. Eathn introduced me to Iris Ameerah (@iris_ameerah_c); we’ve collaborated for years over Discord and have never met in person. At Goucher I met Wayne (@onlywannyae), who introduced me to Steel ali. At BCCC, QBG UNO (@qbguno) and Luioto. And at Towson University, a circle of producers: Ethan (@moezygoes), John Schmidt (@schmidty4k), Zay Charles (@prod.zaycharles), Garland (@garland_lee_3), Steve (@_dsembr_), Jericho (@jerichodesigns), and Spence.

The first DJ I ever knew is still my closest collaborator. As I’ve taken the business more seriously, my father has too, getting back on the decks at home and entering scratch competitions; we trade music and feedback constantly. He spins as DJ Soop (@DJsoop), which stands for sounds over obese perspectives. The piano practice continues, and the long game is scoring film.