Category: Featured

spiritrials is what happens when too many Saturday nights are blended seamlessly into Sunday morning. It’s for that time of the night when sobriety sets back in but the promise of salvation is still so far…“a dark gospel blue.”

Beginning at the onset of “the high”, the climax, dahLak descends into the dark backlash of hip-hop’s monotonic grand narrative: greed and lust, hedonism and materialism. Through the mess, through the muck and the mire, profound glory and residues of hope find their way back into the heart of the poet.

Are we still talking about a hip-hop album? Yes. But think “hip-hop album” in the sense of art rather than a collection of disposable mp3’s. The hip-hop industry is too fast. So is the music. So is the life in the music. But as life teaches us, as Spirit x Trials teaches us, “live fast and die young”. spiritrials is for sustainability. In music and in life.

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“The Process,” an introduction to Spiritrials

“Work” feat. Watsky

“Implant Fantasies”

Recording “Shots Go Off”

A lot can happen on the way back home. After three relentless years in New York City fighting rats, roaches, and robbers – like Dragonballs after a wish, the members of iLL-Literacy dispersed to separate corners of the globe.

Nico landed in Los Angeles, but immediately began feeling sick. He ignored it the best he could as he landed in LAX, drove past the palm trees, and landed in his Santa Monica yacht community. That night, he dreamt that a faction of his blood cells became discontent with the vessel in which it swam. “Come, comrades!” shouted the King White Cell. “Blood rivers yonder flow with scent of Scotch!” The cells climbed from his flesh, through his pores, and vanished as a single organism into the night.

The next morning, Nico awoke to a series of Youtube videos released by someone possessing the same face, voice, and late 90’s-era typewriter flow as himself. Donning the name TiVO (an acronym for “The Voice Of ignorance,”), Nico’s doppelgänger had found camaraderie with a pack of miscreants known by at least 25 followers as The Banger Bros.

Threatening to release club joints until Nico finishes his new album Macallan 18, the recent California returnee has been consumed by the production of his new solo project, instead of slurping oysters with Selena Gomez as he had originally hoped.

Banger Bros. webisode #1

Banger Bros. first music video, “PILLZ.”

After leaving Harlem last spring, DRZZL has found home in a myriad of settings – in Vienna, Austria – making music inspired by Cold War propaganda; in Oakland, California – coding websites for UC Berkeley; in Beijing, China – exploring neighboring countries and sharpening his tongue.

After a year of global hopscotch, Adriel Luis finally makes a nest in Washington, DC, as the digital and emerging media curator at the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center. Finding ways to blur the lines between digital and literal reality, DRZZL can be found sprinting across the National Mall – or casting artwork three stories high from projectors, like sideways UFOs.

Meanwhile, catch DRZZL moonlighting at DC venues like Busboys & Poets and the Kennedy Center, fine-tuning material from his musical project, BeastReality. Life at the museum is vastly different from globetrotting, but the goal remains to explore new terrain.

Current Exhibition – Art Intersections: Smithsonian Asian-Latino Pop-Up Museum