’93 ’til Infinity is 32 years old and it sounds like it was made yesterday. The production — primarily handled by A-Plus with additional contributions from other Souls members and the broader Hiero collective — built something that has outlasted most of its contemporaries. Here’s how the album came together.
The Producers
A-Plus (Adam Carter) is the primary production architect of ’93 ’til Infinity. He handled the bulk of the beat construction while still functioning as one of four MCs — a remarkable dual role that required him to think simultaneously about performance and arrangement.
The extended Hieroglyphics network contributed additional production. Del tha Funkee Homosapien’s influence on the overall aesthetic — his approach to sample selection and arrangement — shaped the album’s sonic palette even on tracks he didn’t directly produce.
The Sampling Approach
The hallmark of the album’s production is its jazz and soul sample choices. Where much early-1990s East Coast boom-bap sampled James Brown and soul breaks, ’93 ’til Infinity reached into jazz records with a different intent — using the harmonic complexity and space of jazz as the canvas rather than the rhythmic punch of funk.
The title track samples Dave Grusin’s “Mountain Dance” — a 1980 jazz-fusion track. The choice is illustrative: instead of a hard break, they built around a melodic, atmospheric piece. The result is a beat that feels different from virtually anything else being made at the time — more meditative, more spacious, more jazz-adjacent.
The Drums
The drum patterns on ’93 ’til Infinity are looser and more live-feeling than the rigid quantization of much contemporary boom-bap. There’s swing in the hi-hats, space between the kicks, a breathing quality that makes the tracks feel inhabited rather than mechanical. This looseness invites the listener to settle in — and then the MCs come in and demand attention.
Recording in Oakland
The album was recorded in Oakland, largely outside the major studio infrastructure of the era. Working in the Bay Area gave the production a geographic identity distinct from both New York and LA — neither the dense, hard-hitting East Coast sound nor the funk-heavy LA sound, but something in between that drew from jazz, soul, and the specific cultural environment of Oakland in the early 1990s.
Why It Still Sounds Current
The album’s timelessness comes from restraint. Producers who chase trends build records that expire when the trend does. A-Plus and the Souls MCs were building something from first principles — what sounds good, what serves the lyrics, what creates the feeling they’re after — rather than chasing what was commercially dominant in 1993.
That approach produces records that date less because they were never chasing a particular moment. They were trying to make something permanent. They succeeded.