TROPES HOLLOWS

Here you are and here I am and here we go again. Some musics for ya. Musique. Um... so here—oh I've done that. So anyway. Some new thing from a person who started following me on Twitter. Yep because sometimes it doesn't take the formalities of sending someone an email saying, "Dear Sir, here is a music submission..." – not at all. In this modern age, no interaction goes unnoticed, many avenues of communication open up and send information and appreciation both ways and everything is very easy these days. The internet retains its Wild-West-feel, its feudal connotations in clans, cliques and collectives, and you naturally meet travellers on similar journeys to yourself, chat, discover things. It's maybe been said 9,999 times or more but I've said it again: the internet really does connect us. Call it obvious or whatever but it IS true. Or at least, I think it is.

After all that, I'd like to introduce Tropes. I don't know anything about this person other than they are from the US. Following in the same vein as the vaporwavers who sample whatever the hell music want to sample and to whatever degree they please, Tropes lifts hard-edged rap from its original environment and puts it in new, lush encasings – the musical equivalent of taking animals from the wild and placing them in a nice zoo. Except the zoos in which Tropes exhibits the music he likes are synthetic sample-heavy skate-hop environments with fresh canopies comprised of the gleaming sounds of yesteryear. As he does in 'Hollows'.

This one is essentially an edit/remix of Clipse's 'Cot' Damn', featuring Ab-Liva and Pharrell. I didn't mention the other guy it features, Roscoe P. Coldchain, cause Tropes cut the song short after Pusha T's verse. Whether that means anything or not I don't know, but what is for sure is that Tropes certainly has an ear for what sounds good underneath these insatiable flows. The beat skiffles along like a thin ghost of boom-bap whilst reverbing muffled bell sounds chime like old memories in the air. A supreme head-nodder, Tropes treats the raps with lashings of echo and subtle sidechaining that gives it a real laid-back appeal, as if the track is moving slower than your ears want it to – yet it sounds so good.

So good. Such fresh. Like a cloud of sunny nostalgia, harps playing as you hark back to summers whisked with hip-hop and endless blissful days just hanging around. It's a new take on old stuff, an expression of the music that Tropes likes, like a collage – if you come across a song you love so much that it's almost as if you wished you'd made it, what can you do but make a contribution to it, create an homage to what you love?

PS. This guy has made so many tracks like this, I just happened to like this one. You should definitely check out his Bandcamp – endless tracks on offer there.

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TONI WILLZ HYPEBEAST [FREE DOWNLOAD]

This is sounding so very sublime this morning. It's pretty cold outside, well, it's cold, like 1°C outside, but the sun is bright, coming in through the windows, hitting its edges and making long angles of light on the walls. For some reason, a nice fresh slice of rap goes with this kind of morning just as perfectly as next-to-frozen apple juice and a bowl of your favourite cereal. Ya it's a beautiful sleepy morning and this song 'HypeBeast' matches up just perfectly.

But who has made this lovely tune? It comes from 20-year-old Los Angeles-based rapper Toni Willz and producer AbJo, purveyor of smooth sounds and fine beats. Put these two elements together and you get something pretty magical – it's an exercise in a chilled out, horizontal vibe augmented with a few hits of nostalgic skate-rap's easy-peasy no-sweat attitude. I urge you to treat your ears to this right now.

With laid-back liquid precision, the sounds of the track flow out in a head-nodding medley of boom-bap flavoured drums combined with shiftling glitch-induced percussion and unrecognisable snippet samples that ripple in slow-motion kickflip aesthetic, backed up by subtle, glassy bass. It's wholly fresh yet summons the spirit of the ever-present endless summer – the kind of thing that oozes effortlessly out of sunny places like California. Field recorded conversations about being a "hypebeast" raise up like a kind of cultural backdrop for the song, and it certainly works in placing the song, i.e. giving it even more of a sense of coming from a place in space and time.

Toni Willz exhales his bars with nonchalant confidence, sticking with a po-faced low-register tone that flutters just around the same note for the whole song – exudes a certain swagger. His words defame "hypebeasts", presumably rappers completely wrapped up in hype and celebrity, citing himself as a contrast as someone who just lives their life and raps. For instance "All these new waves form like the ocean / No more one hit wonders, we need true devotion" – "In just reality you learn a life-lesson: true rappers live, hypebeasts go to heaven." The point is made with his "new Nirvana flow" making religious metaphors throughout, ultimately coming across with untouchable poetic lilt as someone who will continue to rap with consistent ear-pleasing quality.

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Listen to Toni Willz on SoundCloud
Follow Toni Willz on Twitter

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