Back to Table of Contents

Vitamins for Your Ears: Ithaca sound merchant Jason Begin

By Matt Hourihan

Jason Begin, a.k.a. Vytear, electronic musician and Ithaca resident, is a very eager man, like any up-and-coming musician. When he speaks about his first solo album, the newly released The Great Rubber Audio, he leans forward, with a constant, somewhat devilish smirk on his face as he searches for the right words, like someone who is in desperate need of getting out what is inside him.

He looks the part of the struggling but energetic musician as well. As he walks into Wownet Café, greeting some of the patrons with whom he is familiar, he is dressed in blue jeans and a hoodie under a jacket, all dark colors, with a good amount of scruff on his face and long, unkempt hair hanging out from under his winter cap.

“I haven't washed my hair in weeks,” he playfully says later. One gets the impression he couldn't care less, because, the reality is, he probably doesn't. His first love is his music.
The Great Rubber Audio, which Begin released under the moniker Vytear (a mixture of the words “vitamin” and “ear”), is a mixture of hardcore techno thump, audio experimentation and melodic groove. The melodies on some tracks are striking, as they are mixed in with some nasty audio sampling, twisting, and smashing.

“I'm trying to keep my melodic sensibility, even in the harder stuff,” says Begin. “I do find that a lot of hardcore jungle, drum and bass, breakcore stuff tends to sometimes lack the melodic element. That's a big part of what I am. I try to weave those in when I can.”

This is not only his first solo CD, but the first release from newbie electronic record label g25 productions, based out of Boston. Both Vytear and g25's other artists have been getting positive responses from the public, and have been getting airplay on techno/electronic college radio shows.

Morgan Betz, co-founder of g25 productions and himself an electronic artist, is proud to point out that Vytear's tracks have beaten out such established artists as Aphex Twin on recent playlists at Penn State's radio station.

Recently, Begin and other g25 artists played an overnight set at Emerson College's WERX station in Boston. The response was positive, with people calling the Web site and writing in to the record label's Web site to express their feelings.

Says Begin of the show, “They had a really nice facility there. It was Vytear, Binaural and Borful Tang from New York. We all went in and set up in their live room that looks out onto the sidewalk of the Boston Commons. We played at 11 for two or three hours.”

Begin has long had dreams of recording and producing his own music, ever since he was attending Ithaca College's Park School of Communications as an audio production major. Vytear and g25 productions aren't the first project Begin has been involved with. In the late ’90s, Begin played guitar in g25's original manifestation as a five-piece electronic rock band and later as a trio. On top of releasing two CDs, g25 the band formed the foundations for g25 productions.

“A bunch of us started listening to old drum and bass records because our bass player, Jared, wanted to pick up some of those bass lines for the band,” says Begin. “So we started buying and listening to and getting a hold of any drum and bass music that we could.”

Eventually, they were able to get their hands on some of the well-known artists and classics like Squarepusher and Amon Tobin, and these records influenced the band. Begin says that this has sent him on a natural musical trajectory that has pushed him farther into techno and production.

“g25, over a couple years, started getting more and more electronic, getting more keyboards, drum sequencing and stuff like that. During the last year of g25 I started making tunes by myself, in my little studio, recording, sequencing, drum programming. After g25 broke up in ’99 I just got headfirst into that, just started doing it all the time.”

The label could be seen as the end result – so far – of the band's growth towards an electronic sound. However, it was late coming, as Begin, Betz, and the rest of the crew spent a few years doing their own thing, making their own music in different areas of the country.

Eventually, a longtime idea for a label turned into concrete plans, and g25 productions was born. Betz currently runs the day-to-day operation, handling promotion and distribution.
“We want to continue on doing g25 productions, but we never want to be some huge record label,” says Betz. “A lot of labels expand and lose sight of what they were doing.” He mentions Planet Mu as one label he looks up to. “They're still independent, but not too independent.”

Begin's bedroom in his South Hill house doubles as a studio. Taking up one end of the long room is his bed. At the other is his setup: synthesizers, mixers, samplers, some rather large speakers and, of course, the computer, an Apple. A portion of the CPU's face has been ripped off, and a pair of external hard drives has replaced the CD-ROM. He spends quite a bit of time here producing songs, when he is not stuck at his day job. “I do it any free moment I can,” he says, adding with a laugh, “And sometimes not even in free moments.”

Begin is already planning his second CD, to be released in May, and wants to get deeper into sound construction, messing with the noises he can create, while also getting back somewhat to natural guitar sounds, albeit with “alien” arrangements. “My big interest is in breakcore-very fast, very dirty, very cut up, sound.” He also plans on working with Bumpy Records in Philadelphia on a few tunes.

g25 productions is moving ahead with other projects and live shows and live shows in Boston, Philly, New York and Ithaca, in addition to the next Vytear release. “It looks like every time we produce an album, the, Vytear will be the one after that. He pumps them out,” Betz says of Begin's abundance of material.

Begin says he is going to keep plugging ahead, spending his free time writing and producing his music, day job or otherwise. "I would love nothing more than to wake up in the morning and think, ‘my job is to write a couple tracks today.’”

The Great Rubber Audio is available locally at Sounds Fine, Sam Goody,Borders, and on Amazon. See g25productions.com for more info.