Features : Tsychē introduces his underground hip-hop exploration of mind and music with “Illicit”

“Illicit,” one of the most recent of the many tracks he has released since 2017, is the one he has chosen to highlight in his move to take his hip-hop topside.

“I was coming out of a place of, I guess, psychedelic exploration whenever I made the song,” he said. “But it was the first song where I felt like, in the making of it, I was expressing my own essence. I just let the energy that was naturally within me exude onto the track. To me, it means, ‘Here I am.’ You know?”

Steamrollers and vapes, bonobos and apes
Silverback Silver haze, blaze with them for 50 days
If that’s what it takes to prove to the world
I’m stoned ape
Well, I’m stoned ape

The music begins acoustic, mystic and dreamy, the rap slow and precise before the beat kicks in and the rap flows fast and hard.

It’s a ride, for sure, intellectually and musically. His sound, he says in his bio, “blends the grittiness of Southern rap with the raw emotion and introspection of underground hip-hop.”

The movement in his lyrics does not come from violence. It is more psychedelic and philosophic. If not the only, he is surely one of the few hip-hop artists who has written an artistic manifesto (Ominous-Luminous). It is unpublished, but the fact that he wrote it sets him apart in the world of hip-hop and rap.

“‘Illicit’ is me stepping into my own in my perspective. It’s unapologetic. I’m claiming, ‘I take this stand, in this place, in this lane, as an individual, ultimate self.’”

His music is as he describes it — a “blend of dark, brooding beats and thought-provoking lyrics.”

Tsych? experiments and explores in his lyrics and his music. The bass beat in “Illicit” doesn’t come in until almost the halfway point.

“I was working with layering, trying to slowly open up a certain feeling,” he said, “and so I guess I kind of got carried away with that. But when the beat does hit at that point, I feel like the suspense is worth it, the way it enhances the original message.”

As the beat hits, Tsych?’s rap is:

Catch my drift, it’s 3 a.m. and I’m lit on that ethereal tip, spark a spliff

It comes at a point where the speed of his delivery suddenly ratchets down.

“I may or may not shift gears, depending on the point at which I do the vocals, because sometimes I’ll lay down two or three layers of the beat, then I’ll do vocals, and then I’ll continue adding to the beat.”

He doesn’t do all of his own production work, but he does most of it and the beats in “Illicit” are all his.

“With making beats, man, you just have to surrender to the feeling you have in your chest and your solar plexus. Then I just take layer for layer and paint the feeling out until it feels right.”

He was born and raised in San Antonio, in the hill country of Texas. He still lives in the same area — Stephenville-San Marcos-San Antonio — but claims San Marcos as his own.

His music began as a kind of catharsis, he said, “trying to cope with my reality, either by escapism or by lyric expression.”

“It became an outlet for me, and also an escape.”

At some point he had so many finished songs that he had to ask himself, “What are you going to do with all that music?”

“So, I just put them out.”

He thought for a few years that he could just put tracks out and they would somehow make their own way into the marketplace.

“I’ve been thinking I could do it one way and failing at it for a little while, and now my perspective has shifted a lot. Now, I’m trying something different — I’m trying to do it the right way.”

Which means putting music out and promoting it. In other words, making a career of it.

“That would be great,” he said, “to crystallize something in my practical reality and not just keep it kind of hoarded away. Somebody might relate to it. It may resonate somewhere.”

He has other work lined up, including a feature with the producer Taysty, who has produced work for Caskey.

But he also has, he says, “a hard drive full of beats and projects,” and while he is promoting “Illicit” and introducing people to the substantial body of work he already has out, he is going to go through the unpublished work, consolidating it and finding the ones he wants to produce and release.

“I’m going to focus on that, and when I feel the time is right, then I’m going to jump back in the recording booth.”

Go spelunking with Tsych? in the lyrical philosophy and profound beats of underground hip-hop and connect to him on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.

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