Elucid, experimental hip-hop player in New York: “I love the harmony of the city. Everyone has a little solo | Rap

SWhile eating in front of me at Dream House, New York rapper and producer Elucid leaned against the wall, crossed his ankles and closed his eyes. This long-lasting, incense-scented installation in a Manhattan loft, by composer La Monte Young and artist Marian Zazela, is an otherworldly experience: a refrigerator-sized speaker cabinet occupies every corner, and pink and purple stage lights illuminate the winding cell phones hanging from the ceiling. Purple film covers the three west-facing windows, making it difficult to tell what time it is, or whether time is passing at all. Each speaker plays distinct parts of a long drone piece of music; The focus changes as you tilt your head or move through space. Eventually, Elucid gets up and slowly walks around, finding a place to lie down and let it all wash over him.

An hour later, as we were sipping cocktails at a nearby bar, he told me he’d gotten a little carried away. This was his first visit to the Dream House in at least a decade, but years spent frequenting the float tanks — at least once a season, and always after returning home from tour — had warmed him to the installation’s meditative qualities. “It takes a minute to get somewhere else, but I definitely got there,” he says. As he settled on the cascading note, and closed his eyes, words like “engine room” and “turbine” came to mind, subconsciously reflecting his own songwriting process. “Rappers always say, ‘The beat tells me what to do,’ and this is no different,” he says. “Sound has color, emotion, and power, and everyone who hears the same sound interprets it differently. I have developed a healthy vocabulary, and words often appear. Sometimes it’s a whole sentence.”

A native New Yorker who grew up in South Jamaica, Queens, Elucid found the sounds he heard at the Dream House familiar, even comforting. His first childhood home was near John F. Kennedy International Airport, and the panels rattled in the closet as planes flew overhead; The railroad tracks stood over the backyard of another place where he and his family lived.

Much of the music Elucid makes—solo or as one half of Armand Hammer’s duo with rapper Billy Woods—contains elements of the ever-present New York buzz. Largely self-produced solo albums like Revelator and Valley of Grace feature spiky, sandblasted loops. His production on Paraffin, Armand Hammer’s 2018 record, was as forthright and massive as a crowd of people emerging from the subway at rush hour. For Elucid, this living racket is part of his being; Of course, it shows in his work. “I like those sounds,” he admits. “I love the harmony of the city. Everyone has a little solo at some point.” He told me that a few days ago, during a drive through Brooklyn, he was listening to Throbbing Gristle’s “Hamburger Lady” and a nearby car alarm matched the beat of the song. “The external environment interferes with the music and everything is in sync.”

There are plenty of balancing moments in his catalog, including Colony, a flying track where Elucid raps over just a repeated bass figure and a sustained organ chord. “It’s important to find pockets, like we just did, of slowing down and being in the moment,” he says.

He relinquished production duties on his latest record, I Guess U Had to Be There, a collaboration with Swiss producer Sepp Bach, “an extremely talented guy with an exceptional ear,” says Elucid. “There’s a studio full of instruments he says he can’t play, but suddenly, you have a xylophone on the beat.” It’s not as jagged as some of Elucid’s own productions, but it retains the distorted, layered, psychedelic feeling of being surrounded by sound. “I think that’s what sets us apart,” Illucid says. “I rap over sounds that maybe don’t make sense to some people.”

Elucid worked on the recording between sessions for the much heavier Revelator album, and Mercy, Armand Hammer’s latest album with Alchemist. On those albums, Elucid is concerned with resilience amid the daily horrors of state violence, systemic racism, and the capitalist death drive of the daily grind. Returning to the Sebb Bash Project served as a place to channel his more optimistic and celebratory feelings of life. “My morning begins to serve,” a line from the opening credits of First Light, speaks directly about preparing breakfast for his children, and there is a joy in his fluid rhythms and wordplay: this is an artist fascinated by their instruments. “You can never take rap music out of rap music,” he says. “You put words together elegantly, and they don’t have to have a structure or a moral center. They just have to seem like they’re flying.”

The explanatory verses flow in a stream of consciousness, as if each successive word appears from the ether. Although his works are complex and esoteric, it is not particularly important to him that his audience always follows him. “When it doesn’t rhyme, there’s a reason/I climbed a tree before they settled all the meaning,” he sings on the swooning goats. We both agree that the search for a deeper import from music can sometimes drain its life. “I invite you to simple cocktails,” he says with a smile and a laugh, raising his daiquiri for a toast.