By Alex Kantarelis

Producer, musician and downright rad dude, Owen Black, is back in Worcester and is creating a new sound that is all his own. The longtime hardcore kid and eventual Brooklyn, N.Y., resident has returned to the city that got him his start in music.

Black, who is originally from Maine, made the move to Worcester when he was in high school, where he jammed with friends and constantly started new projects. By the time he was in college, Black had started the hardcore band, Jaguarz, one of Lockin’ Out Records’ earliest bands. Influenced by older New York bands like Underdog and Warzone, Jaguarz developed its own sound that fit in well with Mental, Righteous Jams and the rest of the Lockin’ Out’s roster from the early 2000s.

Black then took his love for music to New York, where he continued working on small music projects. However, he focused most of his attention on Trumbull, a web magazine and production studio based in Brooklyn, N.Y., and also spent time working at Metrosonic Recording Studios, where he picked up more tools of the music production trade. During that time, he continued dabbling in more of his own projects, expanding from hardcore to more metal and crossover sounds. He eventually met up with former drummer René Natzel, of legendary German hardcore band True Blue. Together, they worked on some demos for Natzel’s new project, World Collapse, but before those could see the light of day, Natzel moved back to Germany and the project was put on the back burner.

Black wanted more from music and decided to take on all the responsibility himself. “After spending so long without a band behind me, but continually thinking about music, I started to learn to compose music on the computer. First, in garage band and then in Logic,” he said.

The experiment actually started while Black was still in Boston and continued being an experiment until recently. Black decided to mix all his influences and base everything around the old Rick Rubin/Beastie Boys sound. “A lot of bands, when they get together, zero in on some influences,” Black said. “What I happened to zero in on was this year, 1984, when the Beastie Boys were transitioning from a New York City punk band to a hip-hop group, which has never happened before or since.”

Using the first single from the Rick Rubin/Beastie collaboration, “Rock Hard,” as his starting point, Black started producing his own tracks that were unlike anything he had ever worked on. He is leaving everything out on the table for this project. All the hardcore, metal and experimental influences that he has gathered over the years are popping out in an aggressive and funky, License to Ill-style sound.

Black recently left Brooklyn and has spent a good portion of 2013 living back in Worcester and fine-tuning his new songs. “I needed to get away from [Brooklyn] to get into a more creative and comfortable zone to bring together my ideas on this project,” he said. These tracks are instrumentals created on a computer that feature real instruments and real drums as the samples. Black’s ideal goal is to get a band to play those parts live, creating sound that is totally unique, yet still rocks, just like License to Ill and Paul’s Boutique did for the Beastie Boys.

“I’m trying to put together all my influences, which are all over the place, and bring something back to the city that we can actually play,” he said.

While the project began as just an experiment, it has become so much more. Check out Owen Black’s tracks at soundcloud.com/bugbarack.