Kruse

Born and raised in Salem, OR, underground rap beat-maker Kruse began most of his work producing for his idols, West Coast underground mainstays the Living Legends. His lightweight, smooth jazz-threaded productions appeared on the LL group album Classic (2005) as well as on LL solo records, including Sunspot Jonz's Back in Black (2006) and Luckyiam's Most Likely to Succeed (2007). Kruse gave a small sampling of his own rhyming abilities on his 2006 EP Raw Materials (which was tagged under the name A. Kruse), but returned a year later with the full-length effort True Stories, displaying not only his skills behind the boards, but his common-man raps of everyday life and struggles.