TOWN LOVE is an online art museum dedicated to celebrating the vibrant past and present of Northwest Hip-Hop. You can browse by artist or browse by year.

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Tag: Dil Withers

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Studies

Studies is a mostly instrumental beat-tape-on-vinyl from Dil Withers that recalls the urban sounds of people on the street—walking talking and jostling—in a sun-dappled multicultural Latin city, as though listening to the sound of successive city blocks and open windows. A lot of this impression has to do with Dil’s deft integration of environmental noise. I was listening to this quietly on headphones while walking around and had trouble at times differentiating what was in the music and what was happening around me. I love the interplay between the bass with the off-kilter beat in “Flor,” and how midway through the record a choir sings a few bars from “Yesterday.” On “Drift,” distant jazz emerges from a cacophony of industrial noise, and oh! the descending horn in “Leaves.” This takes you on an imagined journey and leaves strong impressions of place.

Studies was created in and features appearances from:

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

BLK GLD

He’s releasing a new EP tomorrow, so today let me cast some love towards Porter Ray’s skeletal 2013 debut, BLK GLD. Mixing downtempo production with literary rhymes, spoken softly over loops and beats, this record took me a while to get into. But now it’s probably the hip-hop record I play the most, as it slowly reveals its sublime truths. (Also, beautiful cover art.)

Seattle hip-hop blog 206UP picked this record as one of the “Top 10 Albums of 2013,” saying that:

Porter Ray is the most buzzed-about MC in Seattle these days. Lofty comparisons have been thrown around — “raps like Nas”, “the next Ishmael Butler” — but when it all shakes out, the best thing about Porter is that he doesn’t really sound like anyone else rapping in the Town. BLK GLD is not your garden variety rap debut, the kind of record looking to chart on Billboard and rack up hits on YouTube. Porter takes his time, laying out visceral, observational bars about inner-city life, over dense, elemental beats featuring dusty percussion and rare sample flips. To draw yet another comparison, Porter’s rhyme ethos shares much in common with Earl Sweatshirt’s: Both are still-budding MCs whose only fear seems to be making mediocre hip-hop. The youth is not wasted on Porter Ray.

BLK GLD was created in and features appearances from:

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