.png)
5 hours ago
4
Seated opposite me in the Dream House, New York rapper and producer Elucid leans against the wall, crosses his ankles and shuts his eyes. Perfumed by incense, the long-running installation in a Manhattan loft, from composer La Monte Young and artist Marian Zazeela, is an otherworldly experience: a fridge-sized speaker cabinet occupies each corner, and pink and purple stage lights illuminate curly mobiles hanging from the ceiling. Violet-tinted film covers the three west-facing windows, making it hard to tell what time it is, or if time is passing at all. Each speaker plays distinct parts of a long drone composition; the emphasis shifts as you tilt your head or move through the space. Eventually, Elucid gets up and slowly walks around, finding a spot to lie down and let it all wash over him.
An hour later, as we sip cocktails in a nearby bar, he tells me that he drifted off a bit. This was his first visit to the Dream House in at least a decade, but his years of frequenting floatation tanks – at least once a season, always after coming home from tour – had him primed for the installation’s meditative properties. “It takes a minute to get into another space, but I definitely got there,” he says. As he settled into the cascading tone, his eyes closed, words like “engine room” and “turbine” came to mind, unconsciously mirroring his songwriting process. “Rappers always be like, ‘The beat tells me what to do,’” he says, and he is no different. “Sound has colour, emotion and force, and everyone who hears the same sound interprets it differently. I’ve developed a sound vocabulary, and oftentimes words pop in. Sometimes it’s a whole sentence.”
A native New Yorker who grew up in South Jamaica, Queens, Elucid found the sounds he heard in the Dream House familiar, even comforting. His first childhood home was near JFK international airport, and plates would rattle in the cabinet as planes flew overhead; railroad tracks stood above the back yard of another place he and his family lived.
Much of the music Elucid makes – both solo and as one half of the duo Armand Hammer with rapper Billy Woods – has elements of New York’s perpetual din. Solo, largely self-produced albums such as Revelator and Valley of Grace feature spiky, sandblasted loops; his production on Paraffin, Armand Hammer’s 2018 breakout record, is as blunt and bulky as a rush hour crowd exiting the subway. For Elucid, that living racket is a part of his being; naturally, it shows up in his work. “I just like those sounds,” he admits. “I like the harmony of the city. Everybody’s got a little solo at some point.” He tells me that a few days before, on a drive through Brooklyn, he was listening to Throbbing Gristle’s Hamburger Lady and a nearby car alarm aligned with the song’s rhythm. “The outside environment bleeds into the music and it all syncs up.”
There are plenty of counterbalancing moments in his catalogue, though, including Colony, a droning track where Elucid raps over nothing more than a repeated bass figure and sustained organ chord. “It’s important to find pockets, like what we just did, to slow down and be in the moment,” he says.
He relinquishes production duties on his newest record, I Guess U Had to Be There, a collaboration with Swiss producer Sebb Bash, “a super talented guy with an exceptional ear,” Elucid says. “There’s a studio full of instruments that he says he can’t play, but all of a sudden, you got xylophone in the beat.” It’s not as serrated as some of Elucid’s own production, but it retains the woozy, layered, psychedelic feel of being enveloped by sound. “I think that’s what’s special about our thing,” Elucid says. “I’m rapping over sounds that maybe don’t make sense to some people.”
Elucid worked on the record between sessions for the much heavier Revelator, and Mercy, Armand Hammer’s latest album with the Alchemist. On those albums, Elucid is concerned with resilience among the daily horrors of state violence, systemic racism and the capitalistic death-drive of the daily grind. Returning to the Sebb Bash project felt like a place to channel his more upbeat, celebratory feelings about life. “My morning starts in service,” a line from opener First Light, is directly about making his children breakfast, and there’s joy in his malleable rhythms and wordplay: this is an artist fascinated with their tools. “You can’t ever discount rapping about rapping,” he says. “You’re putting words together stylishly and it doesn’t have to have a structure or moral centre. It just has to sound fly.”
Elucid’s verses spill out in a stream of consciousness, as if each successive word appears from the ether. As complex and esoteric as his work can be, it’s not particularly important for him that his audience always follow along. “When it don’t rhyme, there’s a reason / I climbed a tree before they flattened all meaning,” he raps on Fainting Goats. We both agree that searching for deeper import in music can sometimes sap it of life. “Shout out to simple cocktails,” he says with a smile and a laugh, raising his daiquiri for a toast.
