Artist Profile: Child Actor
Max Heath, the man behind the one-time dream pop duo and current hip-hop production powerhouse Child Actor, has taken, to put it lightly, a winding path into the annals of underground rap.
Coming from a family of musicians, Heath was trained as a jazz pianist from as early as ten years old, making his first music on a Boss SP-303 sampler.
In the process of trying to emulate artists like Aphex Twin, Heath slowly and painstakingly developed his own style, branching out into a variety of creative avenues that ultimately became the foundation for Child Actor.
In these early days, hip-hop production was only a “phase” for him, through which he modeled his greatest influences: J Dilla, Madlib, MF DOOM, and RZA.
Yet, that stage of his creativity gave way quickly to more songwriting-oriented pursuits, as he released Victory with his cousin, Sedgie Ogilvy, and a trio of albums with singer Natalie Plaza under the first two iterations of Child Actor.
However, over time, Heath became worn out with the potentialities of the genres in which he was working. At this point, his relationship with now-revered alternative rapper Billy Woods renewed his spark for hip-hop production.
“I took about seven years off from making beats while I was doing Child Actor stuff, and I also got a job doing music for commercials. [I loved] the guys that I worked with, but I really got a little burned out on that… I couldn't keep going really creatively, and, right when I was feeling that creative burnout, and not feeling like I was making anything new is when I met Woods.”
Woods opened a tour for Ceschi, in which Heath was playing the keys, in 2019, and he seized the opportunity. He asked Woods if he could send him a beat, and Woods agreed.
There was only one problem: Heath hadn’t made a beat in seven years.
Yet, Woods accepted the first one Heath sent over, which ultimately became “Shepherd’s Tone” on Terror Management.
Nevertheless, Heath identifies the second beat he did for Woods, which became “Charms” off Armand Hammer’s fourth studio album Shrines, as the first step he took in truly defining his style of production.
“I somehow, somewhat miraculously, put together a basic approach for [making] my style of beats… I really did start to make this choice. I used to feel that it was cool that I do all these different styles of music, but then I realized that my favorite artists are the ones where you just know who it is when you hear their music. And so I wanted to have my own sound…”
Now, having produced for the likes of Elucid, Open Mike Eagle, Navy Blue, and Fly Anakin, Child Actor’s unique sound and approach to production have entered the public consciousness in a profound manner.
His improvisatory and innovative manner of locating and flipping his samples, in part, defines the spatial and metabolic sound that permeates the songs he has produced.
“The moment I'm quantizing what I do, the moment I copy and paste, all those little things you do take you away from your musicianship and put this barrier. So, most of the beats I make are one pass through, even drums, all the layers at once in the same pass, so they all kind of move together. And, to me, it's kind of like a painting in that respect; you're hearing exactly what I did. I might have had to practice it a bunch of times, but that's the one.”
Heath’s rapid ascension into working relationships with these artists is a sign of the respect they have for him and his art, and his current output, insofar as it reflects a culmination of his decades of musical exploration, is some of the greatest and most exciting in hip-hop right now.
As he continues to push onward into new territory, Child Actor’s journey will certainly be worth following.