In late 2020 producer Will Magid, known to the music world as Balkan Bump, quietly released Osmanity, his full-length debut under the moniker. It's a wildly fun and ambitious record that really sounds like nothing else out in the musical ether. It's an album with deep grooves and big musical ideas, clearly crafted by someone with a deep well of skill to draw from and, perhaps more important, a more than palpable LOVE for music. “The title track 'Osmanity', me and my buddy Greg who co-wrote it, did the basic framework of it about 4 years ago. The CloZee track came out about a year and a half ago. Basically, I just started working on music and at some point realized, 'Hey wait, these songs fit together. I could put out an EP but I have more than four or five songs,'” says Balkan Bump describing the genesis of Osmanity to me over the phone from his home in Oakland. “Deciding to make an album at that point guided the rest of the writing and production process. It gave me a framework, 'Okay, I'm going to make this record. It's going to largely incorporate sounds from the Ottoman Empire, but of course with hip-hop and electronic and some jazz.' That decision gave me the context to get the album to another level as far as the cohesiveness of it. That's where the interludes come in and a few of the songs I wrote really late in the process to seal the package of the record together.”

While the album is a clear, cohesive statement with one person at the helm, Osmanity is at its core a deeply collaborative record, and for good reason. “I'm a pretty social person and I grew up playing in bands. So the idea of being a lone-wolf producer is not really my personality. For the most part I really thrive in environments of collaboration – out in the world at a festival, on tour or even just on the computer, on Soundcloud. In the case of Poldoore, we met on Soundcloud like 10 years ago and I think I've played trump on nearly half of his songs or something and he's done several remixes for me. CloZee, we toured together and vibed a lot together. We were talking about hip-hop [earlier], and I love the idea of group like the Wu-Tang Clan,” the excitement in Bump’s voice is more than palpable. “Okay, you have this group but you have all these individuals who have their own careers and collabroations. I look at the music world that way. All these artists are really connected, there are so many threads. The classic example of the scene I'm in is Big GriZmatik. Gramatik and GriZ and Big Gigantic are obviously separate artists, but can easily be one artist with different muscles being shown when different players step out front. I love that idea. It's not that I seek collaboration out or that it falls in my lap, it's more of just a natural continuum of the folklore nature of music.”