"cats that wanna send beats, [my] email is homeboysandman@gmail.com. only send 2, as mp3 attachments. I'll only respond if I pick 1, but I'll listen," read a very recent open casting call from Stones Throw emcee @HomebpySandman dispatched to earnest beatsmiths world-wide. It seems as though the construction of Sandman's latest release was conducted in a somewhat similar manner: "well, it [happened] just by itself. One day, I got an email from Homeboy Sandman, who asked if he could use this beat from my Chinoiseries album that I released in 2007. It's a really old beat I made over 10 years ago, so I wasn't too keen at first, but I decided to let him use it, since he's a real dope emcee and the result came out as a "Bus (A Rhyme)." He made a dope video that comes with it and that's that. Thanks," Arnaud Bernard (better known as Onra) wrote within a Facebook message sent directly to The Witzard. I've been mulling over it for a while now and I'm just gonna link you guys to Homeboy Sandman's Facebook-transcribed "Bus (A Rhyme)" lyrics (September 22) because I can't even begin to pick a few favorite couplets!


It's not entirely clear which 2007 Onra instrumental Sandman took the liberty of lacing up, but the source material for Chinoiseries was culled during a 2006 trip to Vietnam "after hours spent riding on a motorbike in Saigon streets, a taxi finally helped [Bernard] find some Asian records... It reflects all the different sides of those countries: raw, sad, culturally rich, amusing, kitsch, and romantic." Onra's latest release was his May 2015 Fundamentals EP featuring the talents of The Cool Kids rapper-producer Chuck Inglish and Snoop Dogg-affiliated emcee Daz Dillinger; while Homeboy Sandman, by all accounts, had a marathon 2016—single-handedly releasing his Kindness for Weakness full-length, painfully brief Lice EP recorded with buddy Aesop Rock, and an RJD2 remixed instrumental-turned-vocal "Gumshoe." Now, with any hope, "Bus (A Rhyme)" is just the first of many Homeboy Sandman & Onra collaborations, as Sandman himself so eloquently put it, "I actually just made contact with him on Twitter today... hopefully, cat sent me a hundred million beats." HOMEBOY SANDMAN. EUROPE, OCTOBER 2016 tickets on sale at Stones Throw, spanning October 14-23rd.