written by PackFM on Mar 6, 2008

Stories From The Vault Vol.2


All-Star Cypher – Substantial, PackFM, Rise, Wordsworth, Wiseguy,
A.L. Skillz, Tonedeff (2000) [Click the player above to listen]

Way back in the days, before I was down with QN5, or even down with The Plague for that matter, I was rolling with Substantial and we had a group called Pack-Y-Stan (Pack and Stan en español) and another group called Dominion with Mr. Mecca (catch the reunion in NYC March 16th). But we also kicked it alot outside of music. In early 2000, we were interns for a company called 24 Hour MC. 24 Hour MC was a multimedia company that was widely known for their weekly hotline with exclusive freestyles from the hottest MC’s. It was nothing for us to have cats like 50 Cent (who was really nothing back then), Canibus and Erick Sermon come through and rip freestyles. So being that our job as interns was to schedule these sessions, we took the opportunity to put on some of the MC’s that we felt should be getting exposure in the mix with those names.

One of the first sessions we scheduled was with the top dogs in the underground at the time. Wordsworth, Rise, Wiseguy & Gaston, AL Skillz, and the one and only Tonedeff. At the time, most of us weren’t too familiar with Tone, we just knew he was nice from seeing him in freestyle battles. So we all go in the booth one by one, and Tone is the last one in and let me tell you he left the mic SMOKING! Everyone in the room is jumping up and down like “OOOOOOOOH!” and then me, Wordsworth and Rise literally raced to the both to go next after that. Words gets his 8 bars off, and I got to freestyle next and my 8 bars ended perfectly with the beat. If you listen closely you can hear how the level of excitement in our voices was raised after Tone got busy. Not only did that freestyle go down as one of the most played sessions for 24HourMC, it also ended up on the rare Tonedeff Mix-EP Hyphen as “All-Star Cypher”.

Check it Out

[Click Here to Download the MP3]