A film about Northwest hip-hop from

NEWCOMER

This 82-minute feature film is an intimate introduction to Seattle’s vibrant hip-hop underground. It was assembled from hundreds of tiny performance clips—shot for Instagram—into a single, continuous concert mosaic, and stars 93 of the top hip-hop artists from The Town.

Here’s how KEXP describes it in their review: “NEWCOMER stretches the idea of the concert film to an artistic extreme: Sub-minute snippets artfully arranged to resemble a field recording of Seattle’s rap scene, the pieces fractured and pieced back together in a truly engrossing way. The narrative flows through venues like Barboza, Cha Cha Lounge, Vermillion, Lo-Fi, the Showbox, the Crocodile, and dozens more. It’s Khris P pouring Rainier into a Solo cup while he raps; bodies packed into regional landmark ETC Tacoma; SassyBlack improvising a song urging concertgoers to buy her merch; the delightfully awkward dance moves of white people in KEXP’s Gathering Space; Chong the Nomad beatboxing and playing harmonica simultaneously; Bruce Leroy bullying a beat next to the clothing racks at All-Star Vintage; Specswizard rhyming about his first time performing in front of a crowd while standing before The Dark Crystal playing on a projection screen. The film is about the moments we experience—as lovers of live performance—just as much as the performances themselves.”

NEWCOMER was directed by Gary Campbell and was an official selection at the 2020 New York Hip-Hop Film Festival and the 2020 Golden Sneakers International Hip-Hop Film Festival in Hamburg, Germany. Throughout November 2020, the film screened for four weeks on the Northwest Film Forum theatrical screening site in honor of Hip-Hop History Month.

You can watch the full movie below.

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Murder Me!

Anticipation for the MURDER ME! mixtape from Koga Shabazz has been high. He threw two completely different record release events: A listening party at Can’t Blame The Youth in the ID, and then a star-studded showcase at Chop Suey complete with a live band. In their review, Respect My Region focus on the literary aspects: “Pressing play feels like opening a book… Koga experiments with different flows and vocal approaches: raspy deep, light-hearted and quick spit, going from one vibe to the next, even smack in the middle of a song. It really blows your mind.”

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Overture To The Unknown

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about sources of energy—those wells from which we draw our creative sparks, and how wherever our top Seattle talents are digging lately is largely unmapped geography. I felt this strangeness with Porter Ray’s Watercolor earlier this year, and this new wavy energy is as good a preamble as any from which to discuss Overture To The Unknown, the brilliant seven-song debut EP from Koga Shabazz. On the first play, this record will strike you as distinctly alien: Distorted voices, beats, and verses that run parallel and not always together—and sometimes in reverse—alongside out-of-place samples that spar with bass notes so low they’re under the floor. And then during the decimating “Ol’ Faith” the drums drop away for a moment, and a clear voice speaks, “This is your conscience calling…” In that moment of waking you realize how much this rich playground has been tapping deep channels in your subconscious, haunting like the cover art. Koga’s wordplay operates like tightly knit Zen koans, unpacked through meditation. This record is a dense trip, and from each subsequent listen you emerge with new truths, and you’re so hungry and so thirsty for them you’ll replay and repeat, and replay again. (Yesterday I listened to this album five times in a row.) “Overture” pushes some of the town’s brightest stars to new heights—Jake Crocker, Gifted Gab, Dave B, Jake One, Max Moodie, Ralph Redmond IV, Vinciboy, and Samsara. You’ve heard little like this from any of them before. Bravo to executive producer Sam Lachow on the assemblage. Find a comfortable chair, fire this up, and be ready to rewire your brain.

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Salad Days The Mixtape

I first came across the music of rapper Koga Shabazz after hearing him open Sam Lachow’s birthday show at Neumos. Then, he caught the ear of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis who featured him in their Residency lineup at Chop Suey, alongside fellow up-and-comers Vic Daggs II and West Hell. Shabazz is a high-energy live performer, so this 2016 mixtape, Salad Days is something of a surprise. Here, he presents us with some Sunday afternoon headphones rap, the tracks like the tightly-packed (and cool) collage on the cover: short, dense, and bursting. This is a great listen for when you’re out walking around your district, wherever that may be. I read somewhere that the things you mutter under your breath are your real truths, and that’s true here: Shabazz has a quiet flow, almost buried in the mix behind the beats, such that his voice is just another texture in the palette. It’s a fresh sound and I suspect we’ll hear a lot more from him soon.

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