Since moving to Milwaukee from southern California last summer, producer and central Wisconsin native Will Mitchell—who creates under the moniker Riley Lake—has had a hand in the releases of other artists on both local and national stages. Riley Lake has a co-producer credit on a song off Busdriver’s latest, Perfect Hair. He worked on milo’s well-received a toothpaste suburb, and procured beats that helped bring WC Tank’s live show to the next level. Though the volume of work he’s piling into other musician’s efforts is impressive on its own, Riley Lake also found time to hunker down in his secluded Shampoo Horn workspace to construct his own EP, Spaces, which the driven young producer put out earlier this week.
“I realized I had no proper body of solo work to hang my hat on, just a lot of half baked one offs,” Mitchell says. “With Jason Nanna’s [of Bread Mothers] help, I’ve been slowly building up an assemblage of useful castaway gear, and this record shows me finally getting comfortable with how to use that to get results that I could never achieve with just a laptop.”
Spanning less than (primarily instrumental) 20 minutes, Spaces sees Riley Lake going beyond the confines of traditional hip-hop production and venturing into the expanses of spaced-out electronica and dance. Max Holliday (Bleach Athletixx) is also credited in this EP, as is Bread Mothers, who assisted Mitchell in the making of the trippy visual component for Spaces below.