ZULUZULUU
Twin Cities alt-weekly City Pages polled 100-plus critics around the metro area, asking them which local band held the most promise in 2016. ZULUZULUU ran away with the prize. A producers’ supergroup of sorts, ZULUZULUU has been synthesizing and streamlining enough collectivized inspiration (their covers album The Cover Up spans from The Stylistics to DJ Quik) to stand out as a more hip-hop-indebted heir to the classic ’80s Minneapolis sound—the classic DIY funk roots fused with a sample-searching cratedigger’s ear. Think of their mission as the geographical inverse of Jam and Lewis’s early production gigs that helped define the vintage boogie-funk sounds of L.A. and Atlanta; their Twin Cities g-funk feels like TDE and Organized Noize refitted for the Cities’ Midwest art-rap sensibilities. “Black excellence is always our goal, to inspire greatness through sonics and to pay homage to our ancestors,” explains co-producer and MC Greg Grease. “Our inspirations come from the tradition of great black music, jazz, soul, R&B, hip- hop, and reggae. We’re all students of this music and want to continue the legacy and culture.”
deM atlaS
deM atlaS by Beth Saravo
Prince, the Replacements, and Bob Dylan might be the kinds of locally-sourced pop icons Twin Cities musicians emulate, but deM atlaS is more apt to draw inspiration from a different St. Paul native—Charles Schulz. The poet-turned-MC made a striking early impression with 2013’s Charle Brwn EP, and once he was through channelling that character’s sense of existential tragedy, he expanded on it with angst-powered bangers like 2014’s DWNR and 2016’s mF deM. On the latter, the MC unfurls his Slug-via-Pharoahe Monch switch-up flow over a slate of MF DOOM beats that feel tailor-made for a lyrical classicist like deM. And he’ll keep finding ways to expand his horizons.”My music is always evolving, borrowing sounds from different genres and different times,” he says. “It’s an attempt to bring about a greater sense of awareness into what this life really is and means.”
Kill the Vultures
Alexei Casselle (aka Crescent Moon) and Stephen Lewis (aka DJ Anatomy) aren’t just veterans, they’re considered two of the longtime pillars of the Twin Cities hip-hop scene thanks to their involvement in turn-of-the-century crew Oddjobs. Kill the Vultures sprang from that group, and released their striking self-titled debut in 2005. It was an album that lurked in the grimy, close-quartered spaces between avant jazz and film noir, and the group have continued to stare into that abyss ever since. Their latest,Carnelian, is abstract, anxious, morally ambivalent music for a world that’s beginning to feel the same way. Anatomy describes the group as being, “in the Midwest tradition, in the sense that we stay raw and creative, but we don’t have a slick product”—or, as he also puts it, the Kill the Vultures are the sound of “urban purgatory.”
Ness Nite
Ness Nite by Jazmayne Lynn
The producer/singer born Vanessa Reliford had quit both college and her day job before she hit legal drinking age in favor of focusing on making music. Her summer ’16 debutNite Time validates that decision. A pop-friendly indie-R&B up-and-comer whose work is both wavily cutting-edge and collar-grabbingly immediate, Ness Nite commands a deep focused ability to bring out the eerie side of both her contemplative, open-spaced beats and her calmly detached yet unpredictably moving voice. She’s set up comfortable shop in that territory: “My music is a place,” she says. “I travel there and challenge the expectations that are placed on upon me anywhere else using words and sounds.”
—Nate Patrin
