Mane Rok, Es Nine pay homage to boom-bap era as En Stereo

Musical collaborations usually begin with a shared love of music, an instantly recognized mutual passion for making sounds, or a long-term friendship—in short, a great first impression. For En Stereo, not so much: The first time MC Mane Rok crossed paths with his future DJ-producer Es Nine, things didn’t get off to a great start. Things didn’t even get off to a lukewarm start. A chance encounter at a house party years ago nearly deep-sixed any hopes of collaboration before they could get started.

“[Es Nine] just came from a job interview, so he had a tie and a button-up shirt,” Rok says. “He looked real conservative. I was giving a lot of my friends at the house fliers for my next show, and they were like, ‘Give this guy a flier.’ I looked at him, and I completely judged him, and I was like, ‘This guy does not like the kind of hip-hop that we make.’ It was kind of I didn’t want him judging me, but in the process I was judging him.”

Years later, those awkward bad-impression moments are behind the two, who are set to release their self-titled debut Thursday, June 23 at Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom. In fact, when the pair overcame those wardrobe hang-ups and started working together, it was clear they were onto something. En Stereo banged out its first track, “A-Game,” on a two-day deadline to land it in a video made by Rocky Mountain Sports Network, a creative clip at which neither Es Nine nor Rok had produced anything before.

“Neither him nor I really work on that type of schedule,” Rok says. “We’re not the type to sit down and just bang something out all the way through. The chemistry was there.”

Rather than letting that chemistry fizzle out after a one-off collaboration, the pair instead settled in to develop En Stereo’s sound. Eschewing the social commentary of Rok’s most recent solo affair or Es Nine’s work with Prime Element, the pair drops out of the here and now to pay tribute to its original hip-hop love, tunes from the ’90s boom-bap era. Produced as a tip of the hat to Gang Starr, the record’s a throwback to the days when one MC and one DJ were all that anyone needed to make music. 

While the duo wears the influences of Gang Starr and A Tribe Called Quest proudly on its sleeve, En Stereo isn’t just a cut-and-paste tribute. It’s the work of a pair of seasoned Denver hip-hop veterans reflecting on their past from their spot in today’s underground.

“That boom-bap, early ’90s hip-hop is always the love of what we did,” Rok says. “That’s what gave me chills the first time I heard it all, from A Tribe Called Quest to Wu Tang, Pharcyde, things like that. Now, to sit down and the very thing that ever even inspired us, to make us love hip-hop, to make a tribute album to that idea, is something I always wanted to do.”