Ask any Millennial or post-Millennial and they'll tell you: going to college and university no longer guarantees success. Chillhop producer and visual artist RudeManners — born Dalton Mannerud — had exactly that experience. He pulls no punches about his disillusionment with higher education: "I personally hated college." A multimedia artist since childhood, he found that the coursework and dull rigour of academic life stifled his creativity — both as a producer and as a visual artist. Feeling cut off from his creative outlets took a personal toll on him and when a family emergency came up, he knew the time was right. He…
All posts in “Isaac Nikolai Fox”
Housing costs are ballooning in Canada's major cities. Driven out by the high price of living, many of the country's working creatives have scattered to the outskirts in search of affordable living. Wave producer Evan Passier, better known as Dyzphoria, counts himself among this group. He currently lives on Bowen Island — a small island in the Salish Sea, reachable only via a ferry from Vancouver's Horseshoe Bay. Being separated from mainland Vancouver's music scene hasn't dulled his work ethic though; Passier has a non-stop release schedule, and drops tracks both independently and via London wave label Liquid Ritual. And his…
Devaloop keeps a low profile. The industrious Austrian beatmaker — born Fabian Pfitzer in Salzburg — eschews most social media; besides his Soundcloud, Devaloop maintains only a bare-bones Instagram page and a small Facebook page. This may not appear noteworthy at first glance, but it is. As the beat community has expanded online and gained increasing attention, many producers have become just as extraverted on social media as rappers and singers — two groups that have always tended to be heavy self-promoters. An extensive social media presence for producers is now no longer an exception; it's essentially the norm. But Devaloop would rather…
Ntourage came up off the internet. The success he's seen to date is all online-driven, and it's a reminder of how the internet has forever decentralized the modern hip-hop industry. Artists like him no longer need to move to massive industry hubs like New York, London, or in Africa, cities like Lagos and Johannesburg. With the right conditions and the right music, they can now blow up organically despite living in cities that don't have internationally recognized hip-hop scenes. For Ntourage - government name: Nicolas Machado - that city is Luanda, the coastal capital of Angola. Luanda is not best…