Cult MC Max B is currently serving a 75 stretch on murder and kidnapping charges. Being behind bars, however, hasn’t stopped Max from laying them down.

Max is currently recording a full mixtape with garish mash-up artists The Hood Internet and rapper Isaiah Toothtaker. Rather incredibly, the Dipset affiliate has been recording his raps over the phone, using collect calls to dial in his verses from jail. Equally interestingly, the track was made using the Legitmix website, which crowdsources sample material in order to circumvent potential copyright infringement. The software searches a user’s hard-drive for the original song that the track was sampled from, and then, if the user owns it, recreates the track using their own copy. Complicated, but nifty.

‘Hold On’ centres around a sample of Madonna’s ‘Live To Tell’. Max’s hyper-compressed lyrics are quite hard to make out (not surprising considering his verses arrived via telephone wire). Particularly when juxtaposed with Toothtaker’s studio-recorded verse, the effect is eerie, almost elegiac – Max is only spectrally present on his own track. There’s certainly something hypnotic about hearing Max intoning that there ‘ain’t nobody stopping me’ from a confined cell. ‘Hold On’ shows that Max’s career, for now at least, isn’t on hold yet.

The EP, called Toothy Wave, will drop on Mishka Records in May.