Rob Swift - Career

Career

In 1991 Rob Swift joined the groundbreaking turntablist crew the X-Men aka X-ecutioners (Roc Raida, Total Eclipse, and Mista Sinista). Also in 1991 he won the DMC East Coast title, becoming world-renowned as a master beat juggler (a style of turntable manipulation which involves manually rearranging actual drum beats from vinyl in real time). In 2001, Rob Swift was featured in the DJ documentary Scratch (film) (Palm Pictures). He has appeared on ESPN, the Late Show with David Letterman, and Sesame Street.

In 2008, Rob Swift was the first hip hop DJ invited to perform at the Savannah, Georgia Jazz Festival. He has collaborated with artists from many genres including Blue Man Group, Herbie Hancock, Bob James, Linkin Park, Good Charlotte, Dan The Automator, Fat Joe, Cypress Hill, Bill Laswell, and many others. He currently works solo, as part of the group Ill Insanity (featuring former X-Men Total Eclipse and Precision), or collaborating with other like-minded artists.

Since January 2010, Swift has hosted the online hip-hop radio show Dope on Plastic on Scion A/V Streaming Radio 17 on which he features mixes and interviews with guest turntablists. Guests have included J-Smoke & DJ Element, Tim Martells, and DJ Platurn.

In February 2010 Rob Swift's solo 18-song turntablism-classical music fusion album The Architect was released by Mike Patton on Ipecac Recordings, which Swift dedicated to Roc Raida who passed on in 2009. In June 2008, Swift's girlfriend played a piece by Chopin for him on her iPod while he was shaving. Swift says, "for some reason on that day in my bathroom, my heart was ready to embrace this genre." In July he began work on a new album and a month or two into the recording process, he said, "I listened back to see how to album was starting to shape up. After sitting down and listening to it I started realizing that I was being influenced by this genre of classical that I had a new found love for ... I then started creating my music in a way that was reflective of the way that the composers created their pieces. So I started working in movements. I was using sounds and then reintroducing the sounds in other songs. And I sat down and went, 'wow!' All this time, artists like Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven were influencing me on this album subconsciously without me knowing. So once I realized that, then I decided that this album would be a take on what I feel classical composers like Mozart and Chopin would have done if they had turntables." One guest MC, Breez Evahflowin, rhymes about the album's concepts on "Principio" and "Ultimo."

On March 20, 2012 Rob Swift released the album "Roc for Raida," a collection of songs (some unreleased) and battle style routines that defined the late fellow X-Ecutioner Roc Raida as an artist, lost interview archives (from John Carluccio), and other material, with proceeds going to Roc Raida's family.

In August 2012, Swift became the resident DJ for a new late night college sports TV talk show on ESPNU called UNITE, on two Technics 1200's and a Rane 62 mixer. On his blog, fellow turntablist DJ Qbert reported Swift as saying, "Never would I have thought as a 12-year old that DJing would take me this far. It is something that I have always done out of pure love. Now I’m being contracted for a full-time TV position and paid to do something I truly love. It just goes to show, when you do something for the right reasons, the right things happen. Stay positive, stay true to what you love, don’t compromise your craft and never give up on your dreams."