Keelay & Zaire

Keelay & Zaire is a team-up between Kyle "Keelay" Pierce and Tim "Zaire" Lewis, two hip-hop producers working on opposite sides of the continent. The duo originally met on an undergroundhiphop.com message board that pertained to the art of making beats. When John Fischer (J. Fish), another aspiring producer who posted on the site often, invited them to come out and create music in Pittsburgh, K&Z established a bond and officially decided to make an album together. They returned to their respective studios ("Keelay" to The Torta Oven in California and "Zaire" to Sole Vibe Studios East in Virginia) and built up beats by sending them back and forth over the internet and adding to them in a Postal Service manner. The foundation for their first album was laid out over the next few years, in the off-hours of their day jobs, as Zaire worked as a Department of Defense contractor and Keelay worked as an Information technician for Wells Fargo. Once a blueprint for their first album was mapped out, a surplus of emcees and vocalists were procured to lend their voices to 16 bare-boned tracks. Several studio sessions and countless instant messages later, a loosely conceptual record titled Riding High was released in February of 2009. ~ Jason Lymangrover