THE BIRTH OF DEFRAG RAP

Notes on an emergent sub[terranean]genre

Defrag rap [dē-ˈfrag ˈrap] n. A discordant underground hip-hop formulashun that gathers the fragments of our entropic internet culture & political hellhaven and murderously magpies a sonic-somatics together. [Phew Hah!! Get yrselves in check.]

See also: “defragment rap”; “anti-stagnant rap”; “st[ri]atic rap”¹

Marc Ngui (2008)

Defrag Rap has been busy being born, assuredly, but the noisy nativity is now reaching a crescendo, and it can be heard in certain cyber corners—crevices, even; passionful crevasses; the crack of ya mutha’s ass. Cracks of doom. Shockadoom. Can you find the level of difficulty in this? Millennials and zoomers raised on video games, so the slang is “level up”—up, up, up until the sound distorts, deafens, feedback whines. Defrag Rap is built on the radical rap poetics of acts like Armand Hammer (ELUCID and his freeform EP releases, in particular); built on (but branching from) the slurry brevity-rap of Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE. Abbreviated-samples; memetically-charged; never mind magnum: these be minute opuses [/ˈminət/ and /mīnyüt/], though with reverence for verbosity. “Vocabulary spills, I’m ill,” Nas spit, but these rappers speak with a noo vocab, ill-begotten words of overskill & polluted overspills.

Here we have an actual|factual avant-garde, distinct from the stink of whatever Chief Keef | Lil Uzi Vert | Playboi Carti descendancy dregs Pitchfork or No Bells have been pushing, popularizing, proselytizing—false profits, like Gabe ‘Nandez says. And that pun be apropos as what we’re really seeing is commodity rap: assembly-lined into the ether for the sole purpose of consumption. [See also: “ephemeral rap”; “meme rap”; “market blip rap”; “rap with nary a hip-hop antecedent”; “rap-removed-from-rap” (removal rap)]. The hollowed-out, stupidly insipid, devoid & vapid music for mush-minded or straight-up mindless masses I’m talking about is the Nettspends, the Xaviersobaseds, the YhappoJJs, the jackzebras, the LAZER DIM 700s, et cetera, ad nauseum—purveyors of plugg | trap | jerk | rage. Musickally-janky, morally-jaundiced juvenile rap—Kris Kross-bearing with no Jermaine imprimatur. Germane only due to some algo-amalgamated approval. The OG Fredric Jameson once wrote, “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods…at ever greater rates of turnover.” That was in 1984. Consider the aforementioned individuals (certainly not “rappers,” or “acts,” or “performers,” or “talent”) may be part of the most unpardonable cultural propaganda psyop since the CIA infiltrated the literary publishing industry in the 1950s thanks to finks like Peter Matthiessen at The Paris Review. We can only hope for such coordination to explain away the dross we’re seeing today.

Back in the day (…Ahmad somewhere sings), the kids used to take it upon themselves to call out the schlock for what it was; now the terminally online gorge themselves on the drivel, choking and reaching for the LifeVac. This is rap for kids who use ChatGPT to complete their homework and critically think; rap for kids who don’t touch the grass-fields of the world, as Whitman says; rap for kids who’ve never been punched in the face and had to fear their nose bones stabbing their brains; rap for the cognitively atrophied, for the anesthetized generation. Which, when configured that way, sort of earns my sympathies. Their generation isn’t Beat, or Lost, or Blank, or X’d out—it’s Numb.

But Defrag Rap is raw-nerved and rhizomatically [in/con]fluenced—drippy with reverberations; renegading rather than rage-baiting. Defrag Rap is careworn in a careless world; a catalog of earworms evolved into screwworms [C. hominivorax]; dissymmetrical; not heartfelt, but dizzy-ventricled; Intermezzos of the Interzones; metric & gridded; not a sedentary definition of static, but static meaning a noisy, non-calm telecom.²³

Red, White, & Blue Has No Symphony (2025)
ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER & MILLENIUM

Listen closely, so your attention’s undivided—
many in the past have tried to do what I did.

—Masta Ace, “The Symphony” (1988)

Producer MILLENIUM and emcee ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER practice invocations in line with what Marley Marl arkestrated in 1988 with the emergent Juice Crew. In 2025, we witness more of a [link] juice crew wherein Old Glory [old gory] has “no symphony” (and no sympathy either) in a post-knelt amerikkka—no poetry after Kaepernick and Floyd. All cultural production, true to Adorno, is henceforth kurupted. If symphony be [harmony + sound], then ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER & MILLENIUM are laser-focused on the -phony, calling out the Caufieldian phoniness of the anthropocenery surrounding them. Even on the “Red, White, & Blue (Intro)” we can feel the resonance of Golden Era posse cut puissance with merciless panning, omen-ous ticks & tocks, and wraith wails. Gil Scott-Heron says, “Black Amerikans are the only real diehard Amerikans” because they “carried the process through the process.”

MILLENIUM: I was born in Mexico—specifically in Yucatán—but moved to the United States around thirteen years ago, currently living in Arizona. I’m twenty-years-old and have been making music for about two-and-a-half years. I started in January of 2023. I arrived at the type of music I’m making because I wanted to create something that ultimately was a defining feature for me; I wanted a style that was a one-to-one representation of my culture and my lens of it. I take a lot of inspiration from Mesoamerican iconography when it comes to things such as my album covers and several samples I often use. Being born in the state where the Yucatec Maya were found in, I do this as a way to not only reflect upon ancestral work but to honor the people who cultivated the land for future generations. Even post-colonization, their work, as well as the work of many indigenous populations, continues to be undermined and disregarded; thusly, I want to infuse that with my style of music to create a connection and to garner attention towards the people who deserve it.

ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER: I’m from Baltimore, Maryland—born & raised & still currently located here. I’m twenty-two years of age & I started to create music around late 2023. Originally, I was introduced to hip-hop from artists like Tha God Fahim, Earl Sweatshirt, even Griselda. They showed me that there’s many other lanes to go [into] involving self-production, drumless instrumentals, & authenticity in what one would or could write. You don’t find much in the creative space where I’m from, but through the years I’ve developed a hard love for industrial, harsh noise, & ambience coming from creators like Triosk, Jan Jelinek, Kammerflimmer Kollektief, & Gesellschaft zur Emanzipation des Samples. [These musicians] are a few that have mutated the line of hip-hop I was once on to get deeply experimental with sound.

MILLENIUM: We met around February of 2024. I started frequently posting beats on Twitter when Sunmundi told me that I should send some to amitai sno. So I reached out to them and we formed a really good friendship, and through them, I met the rest of the Absent Call of Response guys, including ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER. Since then, we’ve become very good friends and musical collaborators. A.C.O.R. is composed of amitai sno, ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER and Hidden Gem (who themselves compose a group called New Age Collective), Omari Dee, Joey300, BUDDHA!, and of course myself. We’re a hip-hop group that prioritizes politically-dense music whilst venturing into numerous different styles and ideas. We all have something unique to offer with ideas and motifs often synthesizing with one another—i.e., ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER and I’s radical beliefs which created Red, White, & Blue Has No Symphony—to create music that speaks against the conformities of things such as capitalism and imperialism.

ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER: We all have the same criteria in not being afraid to openly express our beliefs in radical issues & the unfairness in discrimination in all areas. I believe in the members of A.C.O.R. to be the next to move the barrier in the field of expressionism & unfiltered delivery in all problems throughout the world.

MILLENIUM: The most pivotal thing that has led to the radicalization of my beliefs is electoralism and its consequences upon not just the domestic landscape but the global stage as a whole. Time and time again, we hear of elections being the most “important” moments of our lives, yet when a “savior” is at the helm of the imperial core, it all remains within hegemonic standards. Viewing this time, and time, and time again helped to further solidify the idea that remaining docile to ideas of the status quo won’t be enough; thusly, it caused me to become more outspoken about so many pivotal issues in and out of music. I’ve been pretty open about my condemnation of the imperialist state of Israel and the genocide it’s committing, and that is visible within my music as well. That I believe serves as another byproduct of docility because leaders continue to be trusted while they send billions to kill families overseas. It’s a continuous cycle that’s yet to be fully broken and I want to speak out on that as much as possible. Of course, the reading of more leftist literature has further solidified these viewpoints for me as well, but also VISUALIZING everything and seeing the atrocities committed made me angry at the system.

The five songs [a disquieting quintet] that makes up Red, White, & Blue Has No Symphony is a reflection of Scott-Heron’s mention of process, or perhaps overprocess. The specter-soundz subside on the introduction for only the final twenty seconds, allowing birdsong, or “bioacoustic signals,” as David Toop would say, falsifying a fainter note. Even the cover art is something spectrographic.

herratic: MILLENIUM approached me for [the Red, White, & Blue Has No Symphony cover] with a few snippets that I could work off of—a noisy political piece. I wanted to depict a kind of dysphoria of cultural and national identity. A very distorted American flag was the base that I started with—that was the central motif that I already had in mind. The layering with the other elements of it came afterwards—just improvising on whatever the base led me to aesthetically, and then making thematic sense of it after the fact: the kind of bloated humanoid physiognomy set on flames, and the blue bleeding into the center of the flag and the borders. The column on the right and the face are separate pieces that I laid on top of the first completed piece. The face is like a contrasted decaying lattice of tissues, like melting identity under a hovering star. The column design was more of a purely design element, but you can imagine it as a mangled tapestry of pulled-out guts.

“Can’t Take Me Out This Skin” transforms Scott-Heron’s diehard Amerikans into hardcore aggro-punk and finds ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER breathlessly shouting about crackers. “What’s new on the news?” he raps, feigning ignorance while also implying an ongoingness to the struggle. We wince, possibly hearing, “What’s new on the noose?” His nous-rap [a Wise Intelligence] amidst the noise. Ain’t nothing neu! and no room for neutrality. “The amplifier gets used and abused,” Kool G Rap said on “The Symphony,” and it “pumps so loud, we might blow a fuse, / This is anger, madness, ready to hang a rapper or singer.” ÅGP & MILLENIUM bring the baddest brains.

ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER, meanwhile, calls out how somebody’s been “crucified anew,” and his response?

I blacked out, blacked out everything, blacked out the walls.

Blacked out everything…
Better have mine!
The revolution hid under white sheets…
I can’t take me out this skin…
Melanin seeping…
Canttakemeoutthisskin, canttakemeoutthisskin, cantttakemeoutthisskin…

This is ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER (which, you’ll notice, is essentially a synonym for an INNERCITY GRIOT) in a flow state—locked in and blacking out. Blacked out like redacted paragraphs printed on government letterhead. Blacked out like the New York City blackout of ’77, when the necropolis blew a fuse and Babylon burned, baby, burned (word to Jeff Chang). “Better have mine!”—but of course!—looters boost the necessary equipment for when the juice would get turnt back on. ÅGHETTO-PHĮLOSØPHER & MILLENIUM’s oversaturated sonics like the twin lightning bolts striking the electrical transmission lines in summer ’77: system failure. An opportunity to subvert the Nazified NYC regime (or those Klan mans “under white sheets”) and their siegrune flash of benign neglect. “Broken down mics were the only traces,” Kane said on “The Symphony,” and ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER speaks into each and every one of ’em. Trauma mic grip.

MILLENIUM: It’s impossible to just sit where you are and go on about your day while children are being killed with their land being stolen from them. And I never want to be in such a position, so I always strive to remain as knowledgeable as I can be to ensure I can speak out about these issues. Outside of sample choices, transmitting these ideas comes from the rappers themselves or through the usage of cover art/titling. For the former, I always enlist rappers who have a lot of political writing in their catalogue or share parallels with my politics. That’s why I enlisted ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER. I know he’s a very politically conscious person who I’ve spoken with numerous times about these topics. For the latter, presentation is extremely important because titles are always what a listener notices first, and thus I want to evoke the feeling of, “Hey, this artist released a track leaning into leftist politics.” For instance, in May of 2024 I released an EP called Colonizer’s Tongue, with the cover being Mayan art. I immediately wanted to invoke this idea of combat against colonialism and the dissipation of indigenous languages.

ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER: Red, White, & Blue Has No Symphony came from a place of observation. Of masked profiling & harassment from stereotypes without a thought-out plan of action. Coming from a parent with a religious background, you’re often sheltered from the more distinctive racism one will face later in life when emotionally you’re more heightened. Conveying how schools function. The vexations of anxiety that are placed upon America. The sins in this country are formatted in a system of not only racial discrimination but self-hate on the prospering of one race. A battle of control confused with safe havens & cults that oppose the true design a nation is supposed to be. Everything was written but openly corrupted. Red, White, & Blue Has No Symphony is the reflection of my apprehension through oppression, lustfulness, & mental stressors that Blacks are absorbed into facing. Dealing with these situations without the proper go-around. Also for recognition that we will not stand for it.

MILLENIUM: I took direct inspiration from Pink Siifu’s punk and jazz-inspired opus from 2020 [NEGRO]. ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER and I began to conceptualize this project around election season last year, and that was the primary album I was listening to during that time. As a result, I began to experiment a lot with guitar-heavy soundscapes and brought up the idea of an EP in the same vein—politically-driven with a more radical identity. He, of course, agreed, and we made it super quick. I also took a lot of inspiration from Bad Brains—specifically their self-titled album—as well as other punk bands I was listening to.

The production on “Vacuum” is a Hoover gone haywire, but paranoid of the void as well, like soundtracking the False Vacuum Decay of the universe—“...with the help from demonic spirits,” clearly. “Pigs For Hire” hits with the heaviest metallest guitar overwhelmed by a circular [saw] chant of DON’T LOOK BACK and stump-grinding drums. Here, the high-fretwork, high-freq porcine squeals of Chuck Cornish’s “Ali Funky Thing” (1974) sampled on Cypress Hill’s “Pigs” (1991) gets clearcut for coppicing. “You weak… / You’re all asleep… / What you gon’ do about it?” ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER threatens. “Don’t start what you can’t begin.” The fire in which you burn slow has been ignited by “the fire in [his] heart hold[ing] the blazing star.” He flashes “financial war scars” and has zero tolerance for “obnoxious liberals on Basquiat.”

MILLENIUM: I’ve always been a really big fan of experimental hip-hop, free jazz, and improvisational pieces, which helped in shaping the direction my sound has taken. Mainly, my producer influences have been people like August Fanon, Madlib, Alchemist, Messiah Musik, Al.divino, Miles Davis, Peter Brotzmann, and my homie UURYDON who I dropped an album with two years ago named WIREPULLER. UURYDON put me onto Brotzmann. Checked out Machine Gun and it’s still such a mind-blowing album that’s shaped how I form a lot of my tracks, especially the more free jazz-centered ones. Any sort of radical artist—whether through their beliefs or the music itself—always appears in my rotation.

ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER: I first discovered MILLENIUM from their joint tape with UURYDON, another phenomenal producer, on a project called WIREPULLER after my good friend amitai sno connected us & said we would be a good match. He knew I was deeply embedded in free jazz & improv, so it was a great match & the chemistry kinda came instantly. I’m very grateful for our encounter. I developed a noise background around late 2024 doing a deep dive into people like ELUCID, A LARGE SHEET OF MUSCLE, Outside House , BRITISH MUSEUM, & many others. There’s something about the freedom [of noise] in developing & also writing towards it that gives feelings of vulnerability. It also expands the POV of escaping barriers of a kilter experience. Sometimes something off-pitch isn’t so bad.

MILLENIUM: Recently, I’ve been listening to music such as the new woods album, as well as a lot of Memphis work, which have helped to really influence what I do because of how boundary-pushing they are. I became a fan about four years ago. During the pandemic, I was peeping a lot of music, and I was put on to artists like Three 6 Mafia and Tommy Wright III. Since then, I’ve held immense love for that genre of the craft and its dark motifs have been another inspiration point for my own work. The way so many beats are formed with horror movie samples creates the same feeling I want to invoke through my own work; and I just love horror movies, so I knew it was work I would take a lot of inspiration from. The lo-fi style of the genre is also great. There’s a lot to take from such a rich sound, and I think every producer should study the greats from the South, [including] the originators like DJ Squeeky, DJ Zirk, DJ Spanish Fly. I really started making Memphis beats earlier this year when I went through a two-week phase of nonstop listening to Southern hip-hop. As I started becoming more comfortable with producing, I decided to try more styles out, with this being one of them. It’s good to not only expand my sound but because it’s fun to make the music I actively listen to.

ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER & MILLENIUM are “uncovering the what’s and how’s—blooming impossible meaning,” as is stated with gusto on “1627.” The onliest, loneliest chill-out room on Red, White, & Blue Has No Symphony arrives as a Malcolm X speech drenched in kosmische reverb that somehow highlights the growls of a responsive audience member more than el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz himself. “The police the same way—they put their club upside your head and then turn around and accuse you of attacking them.” ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER & MILLENIUM subvert the subversions, undo the logical undoings. Da club is tore up as they put it upside all our heads.

Samizdat EP (2024)
Snotnoze Saleem

Snotnoze Saleem’s work is more accurately magnitizdat—audio dissemination of his dopeman dissident material. His tapes are dubbed on dirty, grimed-over gear and shipped from the Illuminated Paths headquarters somewhere in Florida in mailers stuffed with papered ephemera. Where some have expressed dismay at what IP delivers to their door, tape traders of yore rejoice. Snotnoze Saleem’s work is crusty and Crass-ified—a diasporic Aus-Rotten; a lysergic acid diethylamide Darwish; a gutterpunk Ghassan Kanafani; Said with the sling. The title track features a spooked guitar loop that sounds as down as an after-school special tragedy. “Soon as the truck pull up we unload the barricades,” Snotnoze raps, and, sure enuff, soon as the track pull up he’s outfitted like Marighella in a ghillie suit, and “Samizdat” is his Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla. He introduces us to his “prose transgressive,” his Combat Rap, his Rebel Waltz, a whole-ass “Zapatista rebellion” in rhyme, and he’s Subcomandante Marcos with a pipe splitting his balaclava—smoking that “legal weed infected with pesticides.” Snotnoze Saleem seems raised on paraquat, but he’s scraped and fought, and this is him flourishing.

Snotnoze Saleem: I’ve always thought rap and punk are sister genres—they often espouse similar emotions and rhetoric. If anything, rap is sometimes more punk than punk due to the things they’re saying and the context from which it came. Noise can be seen as basically the ultimate punk music, though, because of how alienating and uncompromisingly anti-commercial it is. I like 80s bands like Black Flag and powerviolence from the 90s. I sample really strange and obscure punk/adjacent music to pay respect to the artists and scenes and just because I like it. It feels like I’m collaborating with them. The term “punk” more captures an ethos than a specific “sound” of a “genre,” so it doesn’t necessarily need to have fast guitars and drums like the Ramones (although I like that band). I absorbed the transgressive nature and the ethics that are ideally involved [in punk] and the heavy themes of overcoming oppression, oftentimes explicitly political. It importantly transgresses against corruption and bigotry, or at least is supposed to. It seems a lot of people now think transgression and going against the norm means to be a dickhead for no reason and support transphobia and MAGA and stuff. [Those people] are reactionary and don’t seem to understand they’re just supporting the status quo. Seems like they feel victimized by people different from them sharing that they are actual systemic victims.

Lord Balfour’s November 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild requested a “declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations.” The signatory held the pen and with “a sleight of [his] hand, a flick of the wrists” relegated the Palestinian people to constant catastrophe [nakba]. In March 2024, a student at the University of Cambridge “spray-painted and slashed” a portrait of Lord Balfour (another “sleight,” another “flick”)—a smear of red representing “the bloodshed of the Palestinian people,” not unlike the glowy and flowy and varicosed red that seeps sideways into the Samizdat cover image. But the sleight of the hand and the flick of the wrist is Snotnoze Saleem’s vengeance. He “dig[s] the knife in the neck and give[s] it a nice twist,” but not much is nice when he “cut[s] the veins” and “blood spurts.” Nonetheless, he’s Gene Kelly swinging from the lamppost—“singin’ in the rain,” he raps, and what a glorious feeling! He’s hacking throats like DJs hacked lampposts for park jams. If one were to find this off-putting, remember it’s a song, a text—a revenge fantasy for him to Titus Andronicus his way to better mental health and acuity, to a semblance of sanity. He’ll leave his enemies “choking in the street, / No joking—ain’t shit sweet,” but “that’s what you get, and don’t forget the reason.” Israel’s “presence is pollution,” expanding over the map like a pool of blood widening, and so no, there “ain’t no two-state solution.”

If a Technicolor musical won’t suffice, Snotnoze offers a Sergio Leone spaghetti western scenario. “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” he warns, but “don’t get the sheriff involved” or “make it a Mexican standoff, / The good, the bad, and the fucking fall off the face of the planet.” His vision clouded by an incessant Peckinpah arterial spray. His threats appropriate IDF talking points: “You should know better than to come around these parts”; “All your civilians a legitimate military target”; “Get you dead center in the sight of the marksmen”; “Your continued existence is a humiliation ritual”; “Cleanse the land of your entire essence”; “Livestream your screams.” Snotnoze’s self-produced strident squeaks are suitably matched by the consonantal harshness of his heckles and hectoring—the way the soldiers patrol villages with armaments, message parliaments, and rip apart written armistice. He appropriates the Winthropian “shining city” on the hill and displaces it “upon the expanse of darkness.” Zionism is “a virus incarnate” and he’s “ready to bring the carnage.”

“Lord Balfour” isn’t victim rap; it’s VENGEANCE RAP, RECKONING RAP. Catching wreck allows Snotnoze Saleem to feel empowered in an otherwise paralyzed plight. He can take out every conscripted “Poindexter with a pistol” through his pen. He summons Ra and reads passages from The Book of the Dead, rocking a heart scarab like a Native Tongues black medallion: “A gang of dung beetles suck your brain matter through a straw.” Hear the slurp slurp slurp and the stillness of synapses. Snot’s synapses, meanwhile, are snapping tracks to the grid of his DAW. He cites “pre-Christian gnostic” gospels, critiques the profiteering “Teflon Don at BlackRock” for their killer investments, and name-checks blood-and-guts lusting Cormac McCarthy (“not to get off-topic!”). His gaze extends everywhere, and he gets “nauseous operating the panopticon.” Overwhelmed as a “light-speed Nabokov” and “Sartre in a fever dream.” It seems as though every volume in Borges’s library of Babel collapses in on him—entombed in a ruin of hexagonal rooms.

In his own words, Snotnoze Saleem’s “Lord Balfour” is “comically grotesque.” He disposes of any would-be detractors by claiming their positions are “only justifiable through Olympic-level mental leaps, / [A] logarithmic paradox of excuses.” The tragic tone turns comic with his ooh-ing assonance of “squeez[ing] the pimple of its juices,” “for your entire institution,” and “Puritan prudence.” Still, these are “sordid scenes,” but Snot sorts them out. “Lord Balfour brought white death like tuberculosis” through colonial conduits—like smallpox, influenza, and measles—and so Snotnoze’s “candlelight vigil explosive wick vanish” image evokes both the sorrow and spitting mad suicide vestments. Counter to the track, Snotnoze wants to ensure the retribution is slow so he can “savor every second.” He turns up the decibel levels like Britney Spears “Baby One More Time” blasted against the walls of a CIA black site. “Your death rattle my medicine,” he raps. His last words deny mercy with a “don’t make me laugh” cackle and, finally, an exhausted exhale. A horrified horn solo escorts the bodies off the land.

Snotnoze Saleem: Most of [“Lord Balfour”] was written in 2021. The feelings I express are the natural byproduct of seeing heavily armed ethno-supremacists threatening you with murder when you’re just trying to visit your aunt, and I was hoping it would fit into the longstanding rap tradition of wishing ill on racists. I wanted to channel the shock I felt when I first heard Prodigy say his fist would stab my brain with my own nose bone.

On “Nymphs,” Saleem goes full-on snotnozed—transgressive teen-type angst as he “hit[s] you with the bait and switch.” “Nothing’s ever sacred,” he screams, barely keeping up with the beat.

Snotnoze Saleem: People like RXKNephew who do that style of rap where they punch-in every line—I thought it would be fun to do for that beat. (It was.)

Thought you could pin him down like Nabokov’s lepidoptery, but he’s a bullet with butterfly wings. He’s out of his gourd, far more phlegmy-throated than phlegmatic. The “za got [him] tracing ancient geometry and tautological statements, / A flurry of furious ions got caught in a structural matrix”—saywhatnow? “The world’s in a permanent state of revolution,” he says, sounding more like the ice pick itself than Trotsky in Sverdlov Square. He Corgan-squeals when invoking a “succubus” at the point of indicting her for “suck[ing] [his] diiiiick” and burning “through all [his] savings.” The narrative feels nonsensical. Never mind the Commonly accepted notion that one day it’ll all make sense; Snotnoze raps that “making sense is overrated.”

The naiads drag Snotnoze into the undertow and the rip currents render him into a Bataillean mode. “I took the bitch to Denny’s and the bitch gimme sloppy top,” he raps, with the bitch serving as a vituperative refrain. “Now the bitch tripping,” he explains.

I had to block her ’cause it’s Ramadan.
I told the bitch, “Keep this one a secret—what we have’s haram.”
The bitch now has an OnlyFans; she shakes her ass and reads Quran.

The lines unspool like Mohamed Atta’s bar tab at the Pink Pony strip club in Hollywood, Florida; swell and give a sinking feeling like Bin Laden’s porn folder on his Abbottabad hard drive. Snotnoze Saleem as Too $hort, as the “Bantustan bandit back on that Bolshevik bullshit.” We could call the style he kickflips “gut-rot corrosive,” and he brings it back to a succession of settler colonialism similes:

Bitch I’ll kick you out your house like I’m an Israeli.
I’m pointing guns at your kids, bitch, like I’m an Israeli.
I feel like killing a lot of innocent people, bitch, like I’m an Israeli.

Kill My Landlord to Party Music (2024)
KLG Klergé and xdeadbeat

On “(G)Riot,” KLG Klergé lets us know, “First things first—not your servant! / This our house.” A griot rendering riots from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E play—a Cameroonian Clark Coolidge birthing cool | Cool Breeze hook watchin’ by crooked lettaz | Freon coolant spitting tinctures. His flow herks & jerks—he growls and gravels intimately close to the microphone, so much so that it draws you deeper/closer. “Traitors/traders try to translate the lexicon with my accent,” he raps—and, yes, Western ears attuned to Western Automatic Music need to adjust to a polyglot style, but Klergé kindly avails listeners with transcriptions of his words, which demonstrate how deconstructive dude gets when he goes dummy: “If you come to Cameroon or other mothersand. (REMEMBER !) / The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We” [Editor’s note: his transcription].

KLG Klergé: I’m from and stay at Africa—Cameroon, particularly the east and coastal part of it. I’m older than thirty but a li’l younger than fifty. I been making music for more than ten years—thirteen, at least. I would say I really started making music on the recording aspect in 2007 and actually being good/great by 2017-2018. I always been writing. My uncle introduced me to hip-hop through Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers and everything from the ’80s and ’90s. I had more feet in classical French/European/Asian music from my mother. Indian-oriented stuff especially since she loved Bollywood movies. Country genres such as makossa, bikutsi, or gospel from my grandma were points of reference. I never really felt influenced by particular things more than inspired. Like Ghostface’s flow never made me want to spit like him more than spit as myself. Same for the French singer Garou—his rough way of singing. My trajectory as a listener is just a melting pot of cultures I’m glad that I bathed into as a child. Like eating a musical buffet with all spices and flavors from a multinational restaurant.

xdeadbeat: I’ve been in Texas since I was seven and consider that to be home. I’m thirty-three and have been producing for something like seven years, but I started out playing guitar and piano as a teen. Hip-hop, funk, and blues are my foundations. Around high school, I got into folk. Sonically, though, I’m drawing from everywhere. Kill My Landlord to Party Music is a reference to two albums by The Coup I find myself indebted to. Klergé knew about that [woods line]. I had forgotten he said that. I just like The Coup and wanted to name our album after theirs. Influences really come from all over, though. Nine Inch Nails is big for me, but so is Sly and the Family Stone. Fela Kuti is as important to what I think I’m doing as Limp Bizkit. I’m inspired by my soft spot for provocateurs and genre-defiance in art. There are a lot of imaginary lines drawn between sonics that I’m attempting to challenge.

KLG Klergé: One of the great things about my geographical zone is I have access to albums before most of the West. So I had We Buy Diabetic Test Strips by Armand Hammer early. I did a guessing game of who spit which verses on the timeline and xdeadbeat was receptive. From there we started talking, arguing about politics, connecting through our liking for radical thoughts and being both old shit talkers with activist backgrounds. I found his production really affirming and full of character while being based in so many aspects of hip-hop that I like. He’s a guy not afraid to put a melody into noise, trap drums through rock or boom bap shit that Alchemist would die to do. We turned into brothers of company. I did most of the conceptual and sequencing work for Kill My Landlord to Party Music and actually pushed the album and features involvement since he was on an EP affair. I thought, “Nah, that theme—if we really want to fuck up tenants, we gotta do it for real.” He’s definitely the greatest knucklehead I ever met and he makes magic on the boards.

xdeadbeat: I’ve got a laptop and a Yamaha PSR-EW310 keyboard. Kill My Landlord to Party Music was made almost entirely on my laptop with no outboard gear—just tons of samples chopped directly in FL Studio. The synths are made in a few different softsynths. For “Reparations Scams,” that’s entirely VST guitars and synths I made with drums from Mandisi (The Dark Cow). “Reparations Scams” was made because I was thinking about woods’ verse on Noname’s “gospel?”

Klergé is a transatlantic frantic rap griot amidst xdeadbeat’s rhythmic hiss—a fellow of a fouled-up Freestyle Fellowship, especially if the closing track’s title—“To Whom It May Constern-Hate of Natives”—is to be trusted. Like Myka9 scatt[er]ing to an Anthony Braxton alto sax composition, Klergé shows his work. (Just as he does with his references to Super Chron Flight Brothers-era woods for the album title and slantedly to ELUCID on “Devil Music, DOOM Gospel & Other Lovely Things.”)

KLG Klergé: There’s intention as far as recollecting experiences in potent and effective ways, but weaving languages is just second nature. If the moment I want to paint needs Spanish, it will have it. If it needs Pidgin, it will just come out—for the accuracy and authenticity of what I want to make you feel. Where I stay, speaking some languages can literally save your life, so if your tongue or ears aren’t tuned like that for what I do, it’s not it and my body/spirit will tell it.

On “Devil Music, DOOM Gospel & Other Lovely Things,” Klergé shares his own personal ars poetica, inadvertent-like, rapping, “You think he skip, syllables / While the tongue dodge traumas rehearsal.” Klergé’s lyrics are often stacked, stumbling over one another, propelling forward, forsaking the beat. His verbosity is monstrosity. “Devil Music, DOOM Gospel & Other Lovely Things” hybridizes pop culture imagery alongside torn & torched Bible pages and the History of Empire.

Gospel Spells
Hazy Lazy Leviticus
For those who never GOT notice
When the God, lose it to Congo Congo Kongossa
No Soul Makossa even Massa/Mansa Musa

Kill My Landlord to Party Music is the raw refusal of an Awesome Tapes from Africa cassette covered in filiform warts and smashed under the heel of a military boot. Inconceivably, the song’s a love ballad but in a Hughesian “Ballad of the Landlord” mode, a “No Hard Feelings” final verse re-write. Where woods promised to “pay rent on the tenth like they stealin’,” Klergé opts to “pay the fifth like they robbin’ him.” Exploration of an ex as eviction notice.

KLG Klergé: For the art selection [by herratic] for Kill My Landlord to Party Music, I had this idea of defeated kings and barely standing individuals. Being stripped away from your home is destroying your core, your identity, but also finding community in it. Everybody’s struggle coming together.

“Lost In Translation” [mis]speaks to the disorientation of a “27-hours flight filled with cowards in hype.” Like woods in Maps mode, tripping balls and globetrotting, Klergé can’t be located with “visa brains,” where he exchanges currency for “bread brand new” and must “calibrate” to new culture | community | customs. He must calibrate “to a country where no ID” exists—an identification card is “just another way for the passageway” to disidentification. “Lost In Translation” devolves into a flurry of French before Klergé decides to “fuck it, forget it.” He transmits Mahmoud Darwish’s “Identity Card” (1964), which declared, “I have a name without a title / Patient in a country / Where people are enraged.”

xdeadbeat collabs with The Dead Cow on the pulverizatic production for “Reparations Scams.” We’re encircled in a humming, a whirring, or what the track’s featured guest Snotnoze Saleem would maybe call a “blacksmith rhythmically banging outdated blue screen TVs,” or even “misinformed discordant.”

xdeadbeat: Noise is found in distortion/harshness but also in lingering “too long” on something. I want some people to say, Turn that shit off. I don’t have a concrete idea of how much any of that matters. Can art be left-wing? I don’t really know. I think art is perceived, so maybe not. I’d like to pretend there is while I’m creating as a sort of impulse to work, but art just represents. I don’t think art itself is enough action to have a real ability for me to really express that largely enough. If you were to rip apart my process and the sounds I lean on, with enough context you’d say, “Yeah, that’s got ideology to it,” but people are very good at decontextualizing.

Snotnoze Saleem: Klergé has a very elastic flow and his writing style and wordplay is some of the most unique I’ve ever heard.

KLG Klergé: Snotnoze hit me up. I released a song on my YouTube page back in 2023 and he fucked with it so much that he asked that I check some of his work and if we could work together. I had been a fan of him since I heard his track with TreDoes and Rap Man Gavin, which pretty much makes my team up. Snotnoze is quirky, frontal, and absurd—both from a fun and brutal reality aspect and just rapper rapper things that only he can do approach-wise. He connected me to Illuminated Paths, which has been really great so far. Supportive and attentive weirdos are always cool to work with.

By the end of his verse, Snot’s vocals are “psycho babbling” in the havoc of what Klergé mentions as “compliment ground like a mooooaaaaannnnn.” On the following song, “Accountability is a Queen That Kiss like a Bitch,” Klergé keeps stating his sub-surface purpose: “Non-sequitur the reason I’m not yet dead, / Collateral governmental—fuck them Feds…fuck them Feds…fuck them Feds…” He needs, in language (in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E), to evade. So he licks/links together labyrinthine rimes like dianetics literature. He’s “been (spitting) on Elizabeth tombstone” for his own personal jubilee down the River Thames. Klergé’s decolonial raps do irreparable damage, acting as if words do wield raw power. His parenthetical addendums (again: read his transcriptions; more than just lyric sheets—they are a whole-ass poetry chapbook with coptic stitching) go full apocaloid. His anti-flow can be called “offbeat, jagged, ragged” but “form the pattern,” as El-P once delineated for the Board of Community Hatred. “The mere thought of sounding like those who you revere fills me with sadness,” El-P explained on “Delorean,” and one can’t help but believe Klergé feels similar to that.

(Desist !) On the Base, question :
What is a Genocide, to Dutch clutch of economics ?
Take aside, my genetics. Dream (D) of Neat (N) Allowance (A)

KLG Klergé: My country has been an urgent and weird place since I was born, and it got into my DNA. Taking the importance of words that my teachers both from in school and out of school have laid down to me. If you got to say something that matters, you have to say it like your life depends on it, ’cause it may as well. Oppression and barriers on freedom of speech prove it. I’m lucky to be able to speak—I can’t waste that. I am ready to fight for all syllables. I know that my tongue better put it as real as it is, no matter your definition of reality. Ready, aim, shoot kinda stuff.

On “Somewhere, Nowhere, All At The Same Time,” Klergé warns not to add noise to the echo chamberrr, but his only reverberation is insurrectionary. Like Snotnoze and ÅGHETTOPHĮLOSØPHER, Klergé enacts a radical rap poetics that slurs respectability and clinches victories between verses.

Grandma as definition of OG, odd Tree
Family Roots blinking, at Hood Poetry
Most Black Heroes barely function as people’s or too brave to stay alive !
Recognize ! The white ones might keep you in a sequel.
If you act with lies & fury funny how, the race is not the drive but still ride the same script
(ID for all slaves in a Miles away) baiting so many souls on the break device, hélices of mayday play pelvis & wait the wrong savior
(Jesus can suck a Dick !)

If billy woods spoke of “com[ing] home like Okonkwo at the end” on “checkpoints” in 2019, then Klergé’s invocation of Achebe (“found out that Things Fall Apart in the center of Church Choir”) is the protagonist sputtering and spitting blood and fury back at the District Commissioner through corpse-speak. He zombie-nods to the past and his lineage (“Grandma as definition of OG, odd Tree, / Family roots blinking”) while distrustful of “the stirring words of dead revolutionaries who were wrong,” as woods recently said on “Pitchforks & Halos.” For Klergé, Western education is forbidden, so he tears apart the pulp pages of The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, the KJV, and The Portable Conrad. He ingests what remains and retches the same Religious Vomit the Dead Kennedys used to heave, only he’s a “Warman with Mobb Deep on the playlist.” Or, as Prodigy said on “No Religion” (2017), “I don’t wanna hear about your spiritual epiphanies.”

KLG Klergé: I was raised on standing for principles and ideologies. I was raised on communism, community management, and communal work. My grandmother did so much for my village as a worker for both her family and our surroundings—same for my mother, same for my father. I just got [my revolutionary ideology] from the environment, but the nuance of deserving freedom isn’t lost on me. Most supremacy and oppression are based on insecurity, and the best way of fighting insecurity is being outspoken in the way of living, talking, thinking. I’m a pretty low-key and discrete person, but you have to know when to be loud.

xdeadbeat: I was already an annoying kid. Much of what people see now was there early. I really like questions. I like arguing about the answers. There was an uptick in Islamophobia that as a young child with brown friends was apparent to me—that post-9/11 milieu. It was sort of the atmosphere of the 2000s. There was the ramp ups in DHS and the forming of ICE. Kids came to school crying because their grandmothers were sent away. There’s a moment I reference occasionally as my sort of “what do I believe” moment. I was in eleventh grade. I was actively political but very messily. A kid wore a Che shirt to school to which I said, “Cool idea but fails,” and he said, “Why?” And I honestly just didn’t really have an answer I liked. That’s when I started actively engaging with political literature and not just poetry and music that was charged. I don’t know if I’m purposefully working to make art with political rappers, but I will be less likely to work with you if I hate your politics. I do feel obligated to include my politics in my work. You don’t always get a choice what vocal is on the beat. Sometimes it’s speaking for me. There’s a thing I’m trying to say in certain approaches and a certain reaction has a political undertone. I pull in a lot of sounds from things I think audiences think are competing—what are these trap snares doing in my boom bap reaction or vice versa? I like to mix harshly. There’s some influence from movements like noise. John Cage, philosophically, is really important to me. The question of What is song? What is music? What is the purpose of making things? What does it mean to make something? Something like Merzbow or Pedestrian Deposit. Godflesh and Nine Inch Nails have some really pivotal industrial sounds. Backxwash. B L A C K I E. Dreamcrusher. These sort of brash, unapologetic sounds. I tried to include pieces of all this influence into Kill My Landlord to Party Music. There’s sort of a begging the question of the industry, or a defiance of it. A sort of self-determination of beauty. I’m willing to apologize, sure, but my art isn’t.

KLG Klergé: Influence means models or idols. I killed all my idols, my family ones included. Being aware enough of the fuckery to recognize where people’s limits of thinking are and how to push it by being more informed, more educated. It’s a privilege to know shit, but a blessing to keep learning, which most legends tend to not do ’cause of one thing: comfort. Once you let comfort take hold of your life, you’re done for. That’s why you need to wake your punk ass up mentally and body-wise. I also keep empathy close to me. When you scream at the sky, sometimes the rain pisses you off when you realize your umbrella ain’t that great. We have to know, as individuals, when to participate in conversations. It’s so easy to be reactionary even when we know better. People die because we do or don’t. Being an MC as a way to sort out the mess instead of participating in it.

xdeadbeat: I don’t believe in having idols. I found out a long time ago it was easier to kill the concept of idols rather than individually targeting idolized figures. I will not be “art over artist-ing” a human being who is alive. People hesitate [to speak their minds] because they want to remain likable. I don’t even know how much I want to be liked. That’s the simplest answer. I’m not even intolerant of bullshit. I believe in restoration and rehabilitation of most things, but unless there are honest and bold conversations, I feel more like I’m acquiescing to people’s patterns. I don’t mind being the person willing to say what I think. We’re on a social platform and I make very socially driven music. I knew that if I were going to have a brand I’d have to have social media, and so there was a choice to make—do I be bold and brash and let it cost me shit if it does, or do I pretend I’m not disgusted by things? I might just lack self-control.

KLG Klergé: MESS Productions is a label perspective/idea; F.U.C.C Générations is a movement/philosophy. Both started from a need to represent something bigger than me. I’ve always considered what I’m doing as organized chaos, something that is a mess to figure out but has intention and purpose to it. I’m working on the resources to make it more concrete label-wise, but if we exclude Backwoodz and a few others, labels with rappers at their head rarely succeed. So I’ve gotta be right myself before putting people’s art in my hands. I know how important it is. F.U.C.C. Générations is a Cameroonian movement I built for the youth as a means of expression for them. I can’t really tell too much right now about that since it’s always a fight to make things work in my country, but it’s a way to remind us that being fucked up ain’t a fatality.

Good fences don’t make good neighbors on Kill My Landlord to Party Music; fences are trampled, concertina wire stomped on, and bollards uprooted from concrete as guests like Hester Valentine, SKECH185, Rap Man Gavin, and others join the motherfucking ruckus. As Hester says on “Black Neighbours Zouk V2,” they all “rhyme with the angst of every missed meal,” united in a demented desire to not only eat the rich but “twist [their] heel[s] on they necks like cigarette butts.” On “Homemade Middle Finger,” Klergé and SKECH185 trade verses that indicate exactly why these indices entwine like a visco fuse with a black powder core. “These think pieces are killing me quicker than the tap water,” SKECH spits, and so more action—a rapping praxis—feels refreshing. Klergé picks up the flaming coil and depicts a “real scene of a lynch kill that please,” exhibiting historical and everpresent atrocities with a master plan, with a trauma mic inside his hand filmed with sweat, his money spent, absented from his residence, wading through the mangroves “until you realize the lies that never left the mold.”

emerge “n” see (2025)
shemar

…louder sings the boom-sound louder…
—Henry Dumas, “Ngoma” (1974)

On emerge “n” see, shemar hollers himself hoarse, sounding like post-crash D.O.C., larynx dislodged but lovely. shemar sweats and cusses his roustabout tunes, to paraphrase Henry Dumas, but they’re also Dumas as printing operator at IBM for a stint | dummy nice with it | emerge “n” see is a Kef Jam record, and shemar an inhabitant of PTP’s shook world [note the “sonic optimization” responsibilities handled by Geng Griz]. “s.o.a.r. c.r.e.s.t.” finds shemar wielding backronyms on the battlements, atonally shifting with a s.o.u.r. s.p.i.r.i.t. A messy-all confessional from their first some-sung words: “Keep my heart ooooopen.” They angle in with an Emerge “N” See &[/-ing] Eye—a planned dismemberment of linguistics and oppressive systems. shemar seeks security and sneaks and secrets it where they can, either with an issue or episode of an “X-Men reunion” or the armagideon time of “2Pacalypse Now.” At this meeting-place, this mind meadow, shemar’s a Young Black Male like Pac in ’91 who’s asking us to follow him into a flow—I’m sure you know which way to go. If we’ve been attentive, we should know it’s an OBTUSE way where shemar’s concerned; where “allegories [are] soaked in they origins,” and words embed in their own sounds—just as “origins” submerges itself in “allegories” and “soaked in.” Just as they bury “rune escape” within the “X-Men reunion.” Just as, later, “Kevesi grind rail” will transform into “North Star crucified on grail.” Syllables split and gather again with generosity. They cohabitate and collaborate—working together—which might explain why Sirius Blvck took a similar Kirby/Shakur turn on “Dreamcatchr” earlier this year; where—like shemar—he was “coastin’ with a damsel on [his] Silver Surfer” and told us he “look up in the sky and don’t see Makaveli.” Something like an anarcho-kollectivist unconscious, ancestrally [are you] experienced [R U Still Down? (remember me)] moment[um]. “My own myths based around working memory,” shemar raps on “a theory, yo (chaos orchestra).”

shemar: Certain works were pretty important to the album’s creation at different parts of the process. The most obvious ones are the Joy James interview [“Professors & Social Movements”] which appears in clips throughout the album and Mo’ Better Blues. Against the Loveless World [by Susan Abulhawa] was a beautiful read and really started the album process for me. Joints like “a theory, yo,” “i’m not a doctor…,” and “s.o.a.r. c.r.e.s.t.” were really based on reading that. Monologue [1987, dir. Adoor Gopalakrishnan] is a movie I been kinda obsessed with for a few years. I usually revisit it and see how it lands with my psyche at a given time. Focusing more on musical influences, a huge one is Metal Lung from ShrapKnel. I enjoyed it when it dropped but randomly decided to revisit it in early 2024, and it’s honestly one of my favorite albums of all-time at this point. Another is definitely Preaching In Havana from Sharif and noface. Geng’s work on the mixing really influenced the mix of emerge “n” see. Hence me asking for his guidance when it came to optimizing the album. He really gave a lot of insight and enhanced the music in a way that I think will have a profound impact on my music moving forward. Lastly, and honestly, just my friends—Jay Cinema and Chow on Alchemy, which is definitely emerge “n” see’s big brother in some ways, Sasco’s work on The Hottest Year on Record, Hester’s everything, Outside House, MILLENIUM, etc. And that’s not including convos with non-music friends regarding the album’s context.

Outside House: You can really hear shemar’s words meaning things and being uttered. I think he’s got this refrain on obtuse ways [“drew st. (be keepers!)”] that I adore which is like this loop of “THAT’S THE PART, MAN—THAT’S THE BEST PART, THAT’S THE POINT, THAT’S THE PART, MAN, THAT’S THE BEST PART…” for like a minute, and it is the best part of that album, and that’s saying a lot! You can just hear his diaphragm on that. I don’t even know the term to use, but expectorate it, spell it out! ’Cause it is exactly what that is.

shemar: I’m pretty satisfied with my voice, which is interesting because (pre-rapping) I used to hate my voice. I went to a high school where we did declamations multiple times a semester, and I was a theater kid so that got beat outta me hella. “hypertension” just sounds like me talking, obviously with musical considerations. I really like my vocals sounding dry. Child Actor’s sunscreen mixes showed me that. There’s mad delays on emerge “n” see but more so because I fuck with delay heavy. I’ve been slowly experimenting with doing more with my vocals to push myself. That’ll be an important aspect of whatever full project comes next. There’s a rawness to my voice I’ve grown to really fuck with. I want people to listen to a shemar song or project and understand the mood of the song off how my vocals are hitting.

Outside House: There’s this urgency to get the message out, despite every single sentence/word group being given heaviness and weight. It was very cool being involved in this, ’cause we just had conversations on the raps a lot—where they came from, hyping every line, seeing how the text evolved, and how the speaking of it came to be and moved along. Being surprised at the beat picks, different approaches, always pursuing that proper merging—it was a very fun process. One of the main influences is noise—it’s all noise at the end of the day. Loud Black and brown people noise especially—that’s the influence and it’ll always be. Fire music, free jazz, so many tidbits of all kinds of avant-garde traditions are used throughout the album, but then also just “young people music”—I don’t know how to call it—but just stuff you’d blast and would be called noise, even though it’s not that.

shemar: emerge “n” see was recorded the same place I recorded everything prior—my bedroom. Usually in a bonnet and pj’s. I always record standing, and the mini-booth I use is a bit bulky, so it’s easiest for me to memorize the whole verse before I record versus reading off my phone. My bedroom faced the driveway right by the front door, so I had to be a bit conscious of when I recorded—usually early afternoons. I almost always record in the dark—the only light being from my laptop screen. I figured out a nice setup to give my recordings minimal echo and I’d do that again and again. My parents wound up moving away not long after I finished recording emerge “n” see, so it’ll probably be a few years before I get the opportunity to record in my own space like that again. Now I record with Sasco.

Outside House: shemar is really personable and a pleasure to interact with regularly. And as for the music, that they also are a producer—and a damn good one at that—there’s a lot of producer attention to the making of this album. shemar mixed this, so there were many demos and back and forths there, and adjustments—ideation and progress and some little scrapped pieces too, lots of samples added (mostly by them). The extra sheen and cohesion on emerge “n” see is all them and Geng, who’s outstanding and a dream come true too. I just sent beats and was a remote personality hire. Feeling like a little kid in a gift shop. I’m out here casting unmixed joints into the ether and one of them comes back with Deleteeglitch and an insane verse from Defcee on it. That’s my favorite Defcee verse of all time now—it’s a little surreal.

Constructivist, too, as shemar gets Flexi wit da Architecting—building an urban block like a rebuttal to blockbusting realtors, their realness (that which they have got us stuck with) erasing redlines. “We playing house with whiteness,” they say, with “military grade picket fencing.” Structural integrity modeled on Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room where we can acknowledge “home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” Whether it’s as the keepers of Drew Street, leaving footprints on Essex Street, or packing the block “like Latin on [a] museum frieze” on Albany Avenue—these are monochrome roads. Like shemar says on “Gargoyles,” they steer with “steady streetlight echolocation.” We circle back with them as they circumnavigate NY City full of nothing but stressed cats, as Vordul Megallah once spoke it, but “linearity has never been [shemar’s] friend.” He lives, works, and relations here, and sometimes the F-Word chronicles still have you catch her like a sickness, a psychosexual setup: “Latex free in the glove compartment—still hit it raw, / More embarrassed at the pharmacy—Tsundere blush, / Essays for my deadpan mistress.” Through the stresses, shemar takes sibilant direction from the song itself—the Song Speaks: “Stay sane, / The song says stay sane, / Stay sane.”

Outside House: This album is almost entirely sample-based, but very transformative sampling. Breaking down the sample until it’s a mass of texture and making do with that what you will. It almost becomes like its own synth at that point and can be shaped and affected further and become anything. It’s like removing the constraint that drums have to play this role or basses do that and sit this far apart. Boiling it down to sound and texture and not just highlighting interesting things but painting with that—shaping and adding to that formless matter. The beat for “heropon” is really fun in that way. Not necessarily the best example, but I’ve been lugging that thing around for years. It made me so happy when shemar picked it and what it became. It’s like one of the more straightforward rap cuts now, and I don’t think it necessarily gave that at first. Another one is “foxhole”—also is a very old beat (many actually, and the singing part is so perfect to it—loved that addition). “i’m not a doctor i’m a physicist” with the random percussive elements merged with the kicks and snares themselves being the pad elements. On the title track—which was much more recent—there’s this elongated drum trick I love doing: trailing delayed distorted drums off and hitting every beat with them as they go on their way out, li’l kisses.

shemar: For me, rapping over Child Actor joints was honestly super seamless. In part because I study his production so much, and we approach rhythm with a similar looseness. Outside House, on the other hand, forces me to be really intentional. I think of myself as the metronome when I’m rapping over Outside House beats, or maybe like the listener’s guide through the beats would be a bit more accurate. I’m catching flows on the album and it was a skill I really worked at through the process. It’s cool seeing how it’s translated into post emerge “n” see work. With the vocal approach, I really figured out how to “put bass in my voice” on sunscreen. There’s a force to joints like “skytrain! skytrain!” or the title track that I really appreciate. On emerge “n” see those more forceful moments are a lot more unhinged. Outside House really pushed me to show restraint at times or match the words of the song vocally. For example, my original takes on “foxhole” had a lot more oomph to it that Outside House asked me to dial back.

Outside House: I’m using all software, too—I’m broke, so that’s what we got and that’s what we do. A lot of thought goes into capturing “analogical warmth” and fuzziness (whatever that means), but it’s all made up and I’m making it. I use Renoise as a DAW, which is like a tracker thing. I like the super precision it offers and the workflow. Other than that, I use Reaktor to manipulate most sounds. Sometimes a hint of VCV Rack, but it’s more and more just Reaktor. It offers a lot of flexibility and feels like a different program at any slight adjustment of the setup. I love it. Also, the Airwindows plugins—shoutout to Airwindows! I love audio nerds and hearing them talk, and that guy’s one if I’ve ever seen one and is super into sharing what’s going on under the hood, which goes a long way to make me feel like I know anything.

On their holiday in Stankonia, shemar manifests a rebirth/afterbirth of conventional images. Jello Biafra’s condemnation of rich white youth playing “ethnicky jazz to parade [their] snazz” becomes a genuine avantjazzfreakout for shemar to parade their buzz. Where Run-DMC innocently rapped of “Christmas in Hollis, Queens” with Mom “cookin’ chicken and collard greens,” shemar introduces “Santa through black gates, / Like a thief in the night.” They whistle the thief’s theme; they don’t act right. So “we make due without chimneys” and turn to “artificial flame.” shemar’s “fireplace vibrate” like Baldwin’s dungeon shook. As shemar freex it, their nativity scene is not unlike billy woods’ on “BLK XMAS” where Yuletide takes a Dickensian turn for the worse. Big Daddy Kane saw the connection on “The Symphony,” claiming that “if rap was a house, you’d be evicted!” woods smoothly operates outside of rapworld on “BLK XMAS,” though. His “neighbors just got evicted,” and he’s appalled. “How you gon’ put folks out a week before Christmas and they got kids?” he asks, his voice slick with incredulity. The landlords are “people sick in they head,” and woods’ narrator finds it “sickening.” Something’s gotta give—it’s SICK!—the consumption within lungs and the consumption under capitalist thumbs. woods’ narrator watches “everything niggas got” get “tossed in the street.” He sees the “crying kids” and concludes, “it’s wicked.” As though in empathy with these tenants from these tumbledown digs, woods’ language is terse. After packing what they “could fit in a cousin whip in two trips,” the remainder of the tenants’ belongings “just sit.” woods repeats it for emphasis, for the exhausted empathy, for the endless, nameless feel of Well, fuck: “Nobody wants to be the first, but it’s just sit.”

Sympathies aside, the onlookers take to scavenging. “Eventually people start picking, sifting through,” woods raps, “—not proud.” “Eventually,” which he invokes twice, for the inexorable scene is a sure bet, a gamble guaranteed, “I was with ’em too.” He builds as the rag-and-bone man in residence: “Pots and pans for the kitchen, / Few old clothes—my kids is little, / They won’t know the difference.” He beats back shame as he enacts replaceability—of objects, of renters, of neighbors. But nothing fits right or feels righteous; it’s only “dolls with their heads missing” and a “wild-eyed rocking horse [with a] mouth carved into a frown.” Still, he knows better than to gather the scattered family photos; he knows better than to face his former and future self—so those photos…he “put ’em down” like a bad penny determined to find its own way to hell.

“Back inside the house”—where the conflicted feelings of woods’ narrator are evidenced by the juxtaposition of “light drizzle” that “drives” him there—he “barred the door” and wished he had shemar’s aforementioned “military grade picket fencing.” The “stuff on the floor,” his spoils, are spread “everywhere”—a blanket of remorse, a “gnawing doubt” set against the scene of “hungry mouths.” First food, then morals, as Brecht said. He’s invited the curse in—that which is sickening, that which is wicked. Taunted by nightmares of “teeth falling out”; feasting on hamburger meat that “taste type foul”; a premonition of a still and silent “something awful on the ultrasound.” Foul is fairly fucked. Something [hear the drummer get] wicked this way comes: “storm drains full of clowns.” Penny-wise and pound-foolish. The light drizzle clogged the sewers and leaves the narrator, the scavenger, “fit to drown.” The weight of what he took will never be lessened. He listens for the “squeaky wheel on the shopping cart” (is that Bubs all the way in from Baltimore?). Call them the homeless, call them the unhoused—either way, “you know they comin’ around” looking to replace you.

shemar saw those stricken spirits staring. They’re not ghosts to shemar, though, but concretized presences: gargoyles. “Bone of bone, flesh of flesh—stone,” they rap at the start of “gargoyles,” and bloomcycle’s beat sounds like stone shuffling to sentience. Sounds like it was produced in church catacombs—[thirty-six] chamber music. Much of emerge “n” see’s sonic landscape shares this rutted topography. Outside House, especially, possesses a musique concrète aesthos [“aesthetic + ethos”] but in a Trayvonian “armed with concrète” sense.

shemar: I had an encounter with a police officer as I was coming back from the park with my younger bro. Looking back, it was on some surveillance shit, and my parents clocked it as such when I told them about it. My parents aren’t leftists by any means, but they real niggas, so you know they got a contentious relationship with pigs. That was the first time anything besides “cops good/wholesome/helpful” was exposed to me. Fast forward to the last day of the [Trayvon Martin] trial. I remember watching it with my parents, and my dad being so confident Zimmerman was getting the “not guilty” verdict, but it was so mind-blowing to me—that someone could kill a child and get away with it. That’s the core fear I exist with. It’s morphed over time to me knowing that my blackness is inherently seen as a threat to these systems, regardless of what I do. My life struggle is navigating that fear. So much of the album is about how it exists and how hard it is to maneuver around. My music gives me hope that I can be more than what I feel I am now. Honestly, it helps that people I love or admire are able to see parts of me in the music that I can’t see. I know it’s all me in the music even if I can’t see all the answers right now.

shemar was instructed to keep his distance from the street dwellers on cardboard mattresses sleeping under newspaper linens. “No feeding the gargoyles no matter how thankful, / No matter how grateful,” they were told. But shemar can see themself in the statues with extended palms. shemar problematizes the arrangement. When Samuel Beckett wrote “Lessness” (1969), he did so by rearranging randomized sentences. Inspired by John Cage, he fragmented the seeming rigidity of have and have not, of possession and dispossession, of more and less.

Ruins true refuge long last towards which so many false time out of mind. All sides endlessness earth sky as one no sound no stir. Grey face two pale blue little body heart beating only up right. Blacked out fallen open four walls over backwards true refuge issueless.

Beckett’s “ruin true refuge” isn’t dissimilar to shemar’s shelter on “foxhole”: “I watch the unknown from prostrate / I watch the unknown from ruin, / Babel Tower sundown, drowned in muddied state.” Smothered in mud, prostrate before God and blind-eye passersby, shemar erects their Tower of Babel in every sundown town.

The centerpiece [centered peace] of emerge “n” see is “i’m not a doctor i’m a physicist.” At first, shemar lulls us with a juggaknot weightiness, a hefty shifting of consonance: “I’ll solve all your problems, / I’ll solve all your woes.” The I’ll and the solve and the all are a somnolent spell. shemar becomes Ishmael watching the try-works on the Pequod, watching the “Tartarean shapes” burning oil from blubber and slicing the blubber to Bible pages. “There is a wisdom that is woe,” Ishmael says, “but there is a woe that is madness.” shemar was bestowed with the “baby Bible like codex giga,” a simple knowledge absorbed to gargantuan thoughts. “You fuckin’ better,” ELUCID growls on Armand Hammer’s own “Codex Giga,”⁴ where “sulfur stench filled the room.” On “i’m not a doctor i’m a physicist,” shemar announces, “The white man’s my stench.”

“Born made from boombox, / Resting atop Doomsday Clock,” shemar howls—booming and dooming us all. These bars are shemar’s “hydrogen jukebox,” Allen Ginsberg’s exercise in parataxis (what he personally called “gapping”)—bridging the gap between two disparate words, forcing them to work in tension with one another. On “hypertension (muttley laughter),” shemar does it again as he invokes a diabolical image of “G.I. Joe new millennium suicide bomber” and again on the title track with “insomnia s’more cookies like water for chocolate,” simultaneously referencing Esquivel and Common. But the “boombox”/“Doomsday Clock” is the keystone. Boomboxes, which the New York Times once called “totems of power,” elevate shemar’s music. emerge “n” see Radio Raheeming through Brooklyn—an étude of D-battery defiance; a prelude to riotsong; Duracell-hellions. The first image we see in Beat Street is a boombox set on the perimeter of b-boy linoleum. The boombox on the canary yellow cover of Schoolly D’s debut album invites shouts of “Turn that sheet off!!” from literal squares. The boombox, the ghettoblaster (which some feel is pejorative, but I read as a weaponization) launching big audio dynamite skyward. In his book Boombox Project: The Machines, the Music, and the Urban Underground, photographer Lyle Owerko called them “almost militaristic”—angular, ammo-fill’d, behemoths. This is the same photographer who snapped a shot of the exploding Twin Towers, an image which appeared on the cover of TIME on September 14, 2001 with the memorial black border. “I sat closely in her womb, permeable, as the towers fell,” shemars raps on “gargoyles.” shemar is “born with a pen for a blade,” we learn on “what i learned in boating school is…” shemar has “stories God born!” In “Ngoma” (which is the Swahili word for “drum”), Henry Dumas describes a pregnant woman’s request that her husband put an “ear to [her] belly.”

see see O man who is my husband
see the wiggle beneath my belly
what song is beating there?

The “god-sound trembles in her belly,” which is the boombox of shemar’s voice looking for an opening. shemar’s boombox resembles Robert Rauschenberg’s “Music Box (Elemental Sculpture)”: a “[w]ood crate with traces of metallic paint, nails, three pebbles, and two feathers.” A gnarly confinement. A rugged casing. The official 2025 Doomsday Clock statement from The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reads: “Blindly continuing on the current path is a form of madness. The United States, China, and Russia have the collective power to destroy civilization.” shemar eyes the clock, too. “Few minutes before seven, decaying night shift,” they rap on “destroy build destroy.” His version of Organized Konfusion’s crush | kill | destroy | stress mantra. No worries, though—the “clock strikes more than twelve numbers,” as we’re informed on “heropon.”

shemar: Before I just wanted to serve the song live—like translate the feelings directly to the crowd and boom, it’s they problem now. That’s still true to an extent. If I do “albany ave.” or “location: origin” I’mma probably cry. But now I care about fun—me having fun, Sasco having fun, whatever friends I bring up with me having fun. The crowd having fun is a plus. Fun lets me laugh at the very occasional fuck ups, but fun also lets me play around with how I do songs live. Lately, I’ve been super duper anxious at shows and I don’t know why. So fun helps me feel sane for a few minutes. I just did the album release show a couple weeks ago [June 18] and it was so fucking stressful. Deleteeglitch coming from Florida, venue being a little weird, performers running late… So I sat on stage and meditated for a second before my set. My friends were like I was “aura farming.” The set felt like the best I’ve done yet. Child Actor was saying how I get better every set. I just unlock a new way to have joy onstage despite how bullshit my personal life has been lately. My best friend came through to the show, which was his first time seeing me live. My mom happened to come up from North Carolina to see me—it was a really nice celebration.

Outside House: I’m from that African diaspora, as an experience, through and through. From Zimbabwe originally, born there and from there but too young to remember. I also grew up in Congo during childhood and am also from Congo, as well, and Italy too as a wildcard, though never really been there. I’ve spent a good third of my life in the DRC—currently writing this from Kinshasa—but I’m also pretty much based in Belgium most of the time, so far. I’m twenty-six and started making music through hip-hop—freestyling to Jay-Z records pretending that was really me. Later, I picked up beatboxing but like…seriously. During my young adult years, I travelled and busked beatboxing at times, among other things, so that was the living! I’m a very nomadic person, so the body being the instrument has always been major to me. I only started thinking about sitting down and “making/writing/recording” music during quarantine, so it’s been around five years now.

At times and in tinctures, the production on emerge “n” see sounds like a reclamation of vaporwave; mallsoft wrested from the iron crossed arms of white nationalists. Vapor in a Biz sense, though; mallsoft in an Albee Square Mall Kane versus Biz way [henceforth: maulsoft]. On a track like “a theory, yo (chaos orchestra),” Outside House eccojams from the newcleus of her vision, eckoing unlimitedly, using Ghost Hardware and operating hauntologically.

Outside House: “nature is supposedly all algorithms” is a messed up house song essentially, and you can play it loud. Or, “a theory, yo (chaos orchestra)” with the silly drums and Jersey beatish suggestions behind the textures—that’s the idea. Even when the main approach and the sound tools aren’t off-kilter, the way it’s the brushes of the drums that gets emphasized or the double bass string twangs behind delays, and how haphazardly time stretched it all is, plus the sound you hear that you’re not sure what part of what sample/distortion/artifact or noise making thing it’s from and then remember that pianos can do that if you mess around them and just assume because at this point who the hell knows. The process of producing, for me, is still just as experimental as day one opening software that I can barely find documentation or tutorials for and just pressing buttons, grouping things, and seeing what happens. Seeing what my favorite things do together in that context, but slightly better informed. Over time, that kind of sound collage pile just becomes its own instrument and gets refined. It’s like starting with strange mouth sounds, getting obsessed with the minutiae of rhythm, and then making literal noise and way too fast drum music, which ends up sounding like noise—as it should—and then most of the people I used to play the beats and songs to, it’s also noise to them, even if there’s a soul singer screaming their guts and someone screaming the meaning of the song repeatedly in their face. It’s still noise and hard to get. It’s about embracing that and loving the way things can be plainly spoken and made and still be wrapped in this feeling of a world being created, even though the world’s right there! I mess with the myth building and the gut feeling and it’s what I try to evoke in any of the music I make. It sounds cliche, but it’s the feeling first. The music is still physical. A large part of the beats are made live, so to speak, then touched up a little, and that comes from studying and guessing and trying to reverse engineer what was happening when dub was born or refined and adapting it to my setup and available tools. It’s a big part of the sound and what makes the grooves so far from quantized. There is a world where the beats and the rap show are heavily improvised, and I’m trying to live there! That’s the goal anyway: a universe that keeps expanding.

In the same way Outside House’s production sways and sashays into irregular and defamiliarized realms, shemar’s words wend in directions undetermined. That is to say, shemar deviates [from the Latin de via—they pursue the off way, the obtuse way]. To the language prescriptivists, they are anathema. To the proponents of the typical and the trite, they are deviant. Devia[n]tions are a means to write through the trauma. “My shame in sheep’s clothes,” shemar raps on “foxhole,” and so we know all the wolves have been slaughtered. What’s left is a wool-draped self-consciousness. Only the shame remains and it throbs with petite mort convulsions and death-sex danger. “Dominatrix play along rope,” shemar says on “fightinggg,” “tied to bed frame with keys to the coffin.” This is the Rodinian thinking man’s kink. A bed of nails; a crossbody carrying belladonna; pockets full of pennyroyal tea. Deadly nightshade hopes of terminating the pregnancy before the Towers fall.

Outside House: The topics often approached in shemar’s raps really mesh with me well. There’s a lot of very TALK THAT TALK lines around gendered interactions and intersectional dynamics that I love, and it’s done with a kind of sure hand that can really be appreciated, at least I know I do. It’s a consistent throughline I found in most of their work, or at least what I’ve been exposed to, and it immediately stood out to me. It was immediately a good pairing and catalyzed the flow of collaboration.

shemar: This album really formed itself through the realization that I endured a trauma that fucked up some of my interpersonal relationships. Not only that lone realization, but pondering on me denying myself of that truth for as long as I did. That ties into the gender aspect of [the album]—adjacent gender essentialist thinking plaguing my life in severely harmful ways. I’ve dabbled with the idea of being nonbinary for a long time but struggled with it because I’m not androgynous in any way. Surrounding all of this was a short but important romantic relationship that ended really abruptly and got soured by what happened to me. Just a complicated mess of guilt, self-loathing, and an identity crisis of sorts. Just so much struggle regarding accepting myself and (more importantly on a gender front) rejecting what’s traditional. “nature is supposedly all algorithms” touches on gender the most upfront, in the sense of “being a man because that’s ‘easier’.” There’s a lot of weaving experiences in this tape, in a way I haven’t done before. And, of course, nobody else would have this context besides me and close friends, but I find it interesting. On “s.o.a.r. c.r.e.s.t.,” for example, there are lines about two different people that I got very different relationships with but felt urgent to intertwine the intimacy. Things that might not have happened as I tell it. Truths that only happened in my dreams scattered throughout the tape in a way I haven’t really done prior. That’s just off the album being so internal—our memories influenced by our feelings about said memories at a certain point.

Outside House: A lot of the founders of these abstract electronic and sound manipulation projects have their own relationship to gender and many are fellow transfolk, so it inscribes itself in this communal shared understanding and tradition. There’s some demos we worked on where it’s very, “Okay, this could be a hyperpop anthem,” and there’s also my own nods to many artists and sounds to various layers of this music. I do think there’s a lot of very interesting soundworlds that could be conjured up that have even more of this quality of seeking wider futures. It’s also just the universal struggle for freedom. shemar’s a whole being, in a way, or at least that’s what comes through the art. A huge part of my attraction to more daring music and art is a current search for freedom and actually daring to imagine and crystallize futures, in their totality, without compromise. There are many things to say and that need to be spoken, and at the same time it’s also a lot of power in this casual embodiment and carrying of it. Like, “What’s up—this the space, this the place, you’re here, your attention and ears and creative ideations are going here now, and we’re aiming to go there—no flubs, no pauses, no hold ons. Let’s make a freedom realm.”

shemar: I called my first album [obtuse ways to say that i love you] a time capsule because I didn’t really know how else to present it, but I truly feel every tape I do is a collection of the moment. sunscreen is so interesting because a lot of the recent context that informed emerge “n” see already happened. So sunscreen was really like two weeks of bliss before all the realizations hit and we get this album. More than any project, I want emerge “n” see to feel wrong in a few years. It’s interesting having sunscreen and emerge “n” see in close proximity, at least when it came to the writing process. It can almost feel like whiplash, but life treated me that way especially in that mid-to-late 2023 period of time.

Distortions of language are often depictions of anguish. A nonbinary personal is political: a noisy fusion of fucks given and frayed nerves. shemar ushers away intolerance. “Blackness in response to gender essentialism,” they say on “what i learned in boating school…” Or on “heropon” where they call out hotep dunces and nonces who are “all pseudoscience ’til it’s gender involved.” And on “i’m not a doctor i’m a physicist,” shemar notes that “surveillance prowls what’s intimate” and nods knowingly. Psychosexual dev[hell]opment under society’s ills. emerge “n” see is as much a struggle for trust. “Her fangs to my wrist,” shemar raps at one point, pointy vampiric bloodlust apparently re-writing favorite fairytales: “Glass slipper present foot, / Spit fluid wire transfer DNA affectionate, / But malice sustain the self.” shemar slings Marquis de Sade bars and safewords throughout. “Dick’s out for agency when sex feel like a power struggle,” they say on “heropon.” “Bitey, bitey, / My body’s happy dance play dead.” Once again, the death-sex danger fills the scene. “Born alone, live tonight,” shemar raps on “a theory, yo (chaos orchestra),” and we fear they might die alone no matter who their mans is—the DOOMwoods descendancy properly in place. Acting as though they’re hovering above Armand Hammer’s switchboard of sounds with Sebb Bash’s modem squealing, shemar cops to sometimes “miss[ing] the destructive texts [and] phone sex” on “mo’ better blues.” Nonetheless, any act, any gesture, any utterance feels fraught with risk. “Another’s pain a vessel for pleasure,” shemar sings masochistic. Resistant still, “you won’t bleed [them]” with “dopamine fixtures,” especially when the “petty automated messages switch to deadname,” as they explain on “nature is supposedly all algorithms.” Name-death. Breath-death. Self-death. Death-death. “My inner child femme me,” shemar raps on album closer “location: origin.” “North Star crucified on grail, / Exalt spirit from gender performance.”

1. I am more than familiar with the sorry | sordid | so so tone deaf history of [white] writers defining and categorizing musicians and their work. So why have I concocted this “Defrag Rap” tag? Well, I see some utility—not in categorization, but in an effort to distinguish. To categorize is to limit, undoubtedly, which is why musicians are rightfully defensive when they find they’ve been labeled. Here, I label in order to draw a distinction—to highlight, to emphasize—with the purpose of noting how singular these voices and sounds are within the wider underground rap scene. They do not all work in concert, though many do collaborate and cross electrical currents. They will likely atomize, digress, and deviate according to their individual artistic desires and drives—splintering and splicing as befits them. With “Defrag Rap,” I’m merely speaking to this moment in time—marking it for its meaningfulness. Am I a fool for doing so, falling into established traps? Maybe. But if so, so be it. Slings and arrows come as they may.

2. I allude to Deleuze and Guattari’s striation theory so loosely or suited to my own means that it might present as nonsense. Like the foremost Defrag Rap, I’m making new sense. I’m making [a] nuisance. I comfort in the discomfiting | the discombobulated fitting | the Houstonian loose screw that might beget or be begotten from a codeine overdose.

3. As an addendum: Okay, okay, okay—I’m killing it. “Defrag Rap,” I deem, is too controversial. To smash the State is to also smash an article such as this into particulate. The [bir/dea]th of Defrag Rap is upon us.

4. On “mo’ better blues,” shemar raps, “She settled for some of that mo’ better, / Do more better!” In doing so, they call back to that hedonistic houngan Hester Valentine’s memorable yawp on “Leaks” from Sasco’s The Hottest Year on Record (2024): “My side bitch like my music better,” as his voice drops octaves on the word.