Today we’d like to introduce you to K. Solar.
So, before we jump into specific questions, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
The oldest, most vivid memories I have are of the drum circles in Leimert Park. My mother and father lived on McClung when I was born. We were in between 42nd and stocker in a duplex with a tall thin cactus in the front. The house was a peach. It’s now been turned an awfully vivid red. I remember the lady up the stairs having this amazing library that she would allow me to go in and just look around. She let me borrow some children’s books a few times. I do remember that vividly. We moved to 94th and Western when I was two, around that time my brother was born.
My father is a guitarist who has been playing the guitar for as long as we have known each other, he used to arrange the sheet music for Earth, Wind, & Fire. I grew up hearing their music OFTEN along with George Benson, Chick Corea/Return To Forever, and Quincy Jones just to name a few, his name is David. My mother does a lot of things and wears too many hats in for me to really truncate it. She used to be a social worker who worked for Imperial Courts and before that the Nickerson Gardens Housing Projects; to me she’s an angel who has always gone above and beyond to help others in need, her names Angela. Let’s just say she’s an art collector and music lover. None of this really held any significance to me until I got to high-school, but these details set the stage for everything that would come after January of 1994.
I always was around and fond of music. My mother has pictures of me banging on pots and pans with wooden spoons as a child, which I STILL think every child does. I thought a guitar was the instrument of a rockstar, so subsequently I used to think my father was a rockstar AND wanted to be a rockstar too. Other kids at my elementary school said things like “rockstars are gay”, which now being older is like, who cares ahahaha. My response was getting a guitar anyway. I was in an orchestra with my father and brother, my father and I played the guitar. My brother Xavier played, some type of horn??? That I don’t recall. We played “On Broadway by George Benson” among other things. Anyway, as time went on and I made the transition further up elementary towards middle school, I lost interest in learning guitar. I had become enthralled by video games and anime. Still, I was highly fascinated by the soundtracks/themes especially video games.
Still with me? Before 5th grade had ended my mom was looking into my options for middle school. I remember going to check out a bunch of ICEF schools. My mother and I went to this one seminar for a school with a name that seemed really long-winded at the time. It was called “Culture and Language Academy of Success” or CLAS for short. Needless to say they didn’t need da youts sitting around getting bored at such a long-winded seminar for a school with such a long-winded name. The kids were sent outside to play, but there wasn’t that many of us. It was just me and another kid that would be in my grade, and his slightly older brother. We played football and basketball in a fair effort to see who could best who. I played “Pop Warner” football at the time, and didn’t care for basketball, he played basketball and didn’t care for football. Man this lil fool crossed me up so bad. We each beat each other at the game we were more familiar with, go figure. It was fun, it was cool. We dapped each other up, said bye. I didn’t know if I would ever see him again but it was the most fun I had ever had with someone who I had just met. I was always shy, but that kid brought me out of my shell, in a real way.
A few months go by, I graduate from elementary, and before I know it the first day of 6th grade has arrives. Now I’m at CLAS. We go into our classrooms and there he is, the punk that crossed me up so bad, Myles Santifer. We dap each other up in excitement recognizing each other from that day. I really want to stress CLAS’s effect on my upbringing and my story but its already so long so I will just say it was a school formed by highly intelligent black scholars for EVERYBODY but with an emphasis to serve the black youth whose needs were not being met by the current education system, mind you this school was formed in 2003. It taught not only American history from not only the side of the colonizers but also from the indigenous, from the original, CLAS opened our minds and hearts to our ancestors. Learn more here >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3AbBFzIokg
We had enrichment programs on Wednesdays and a number of other after school programs like art and choir both of which I was apart of. One enrichment class I cannot recall the name of was taught a brother named Kareem. Let’s call Kareems class social consciousness for beginners because he really changed the way I look at America, he was a catalyst for diving deeper into hip hop lyrics. We were introduced to the art of music production in 7th grade during an after school program called The CLAS Cipher. There is too much history there to touch on everything but shout out to Dr. Dawn Norfleet and Anthony Jackson. Attendees of the CLAS Cipher were gifted with programs like FL Studio and Reason, on top of that we had once in a left time experiences to create music and be tutored by legends like Slimkid3 aka Tre from Pharcyde. I learned years down the line that Mr. Jacksons son, Jared Jackson of Soulection was the person who provided his father with these programs to give to us. Dr. Norfleet taught us music theory and rhythms, Mr. Jackson dove into rap lyrics, beats, sampling and rap history; together they gave us an intensely well rounded master class on black music as a whole and how things got to Hip Hop. If Hip is the knowledge, and Hop is the movement these 2 were Hip Hop personified, and instilled that in us, It was wild. Shoutout to everyone that was in CLAS Cipher.
I really started writing/rapping in 5th grade (2005). I remember rapping with Aaron (another person who was in CLAS Cipher) during an after school program a year before the Cipher even existed. I would write poems and make them fit into beats I liked. It wasn’t until somewhere down the line in 2008 or 09 I asked Hodgy Beats how much he was charging for beats and he said like $99 dollars, which is dope now because you see he knew his worth. However I was 14 years old and didn’t know what I was doing, I just really loved his music, after he asked for money I didn’t have thought and didn’t think I could get from my parents I really began to dive deeper into beats. Anyway, Myles Santifer and I recorded our first project together in 2007 towards the end of 7th grade using a USB stick a CD player and a karaoke machine. Mr. Jackson liked it more than my previous effort. I began to take myself a little more seriously. 8th grade was spent making beats, recording, and talking shit with Myles Santifer and our other close friend Ashton McCreight. We all gave each other feedback and helped each other refine our skills, this was still very early.
I arrived at New Roads High School in September 2008. New Roads is private school in Santa Monica that I was so privileged to attend. My parents wouldn’t have been able to afford it however I earned a scholarship by writing an essay about Lupe Fiasco’s second album “The Cool” and breaking it down to explore the story of Michael Young History (my cool young history), “The Streets”, and “The Game” and what Lupe was trying to really express. Every grade took a class trip at New Roads, freshman year was Ojai. New Roads wasn’t a place where there was a HUGE amount of POC and more specifically black kids, but there was a good amount of us and that was supposed to be the idea seeing as how the founder came from Crossroads High School which was like, wonder bread.
Freshman year 2008-2009 the black boys in attendance were Me, Jean-Emmanuel, Keylan, Eric, Noble, and Thebe Kgosistile which I will say is far too low. Six black boys in the allotment of this freshman class. Probably 20 young black men at the most attending the school, and some in the faculty, shout out my sisters too love y’all… The people I met there were awesome though, the administration split us up was both good and bad. I didn’t have classes with most of them, we would see each other at different times but that gave us the opportunity to really branch out and learn something about someone else’s culture. I wanted to be around them though. I was not aware of the kid named Thebe until our trip to Ojai when a friend introduced us and told him I made beats, he was more ecstatic at this fact than anyone I had ever met before. I think that introductory day we spent the night free-styling, Thebe, Jean and myself. We weren’t allowed to bring our phones or whatever but somehow (with his iPod he snuck out there) Thebe who is now more famously known as Earl Sweatshirt introduced me to A Kid Named Cudi that trip, the mixtape that really influenced my writing. As soon as we got back to LA we exchanged numbers and Thebe would call me multiple times a week to just freestyle over my novice beats which were the world to us at the time. It also meant the world to me, Myles was the closest friend I had and we were going through different things at this time at separate schools so the way we made music together changed, but having Thebe super eager to just rap over them really changed the way I saw what my beats could do. I would play them off of my sidekick into the phone and he would go off, for hours. I would RAVE about this kid and eventually got a three way call so Myles could hear him. Thus The Backpackerz were born. He finally made it over to my place one day, and his mom finally met my mom. I’m sure they wondered who their sons were talking to on the phone so late hahaha. They talked in our living room and watched WATTSTAX. I showed him this weird beat I had but didn’t know what to do with and he began to mumble words over it until he had his verse that started with, “yeah I’m your new fetish, rip through ciphers like rabbits chew lettuce” that became “WattStax” and was the first song Thebe had recorded and my first time totally just providing a beat and engineering. That brought me great joy. So much that my adlibs were stupid. Time went on, Thebe introduced me to so much music, I was hip to everyone on Stones Throw but Thebe showed me the MANY different sides of Madlib and his beats. We had a lot of the same music tastes, namely Odd Future who were my idols and he was not yet apart of. Thebe was my brother and had my back, he was a support system for me musically. 9th grade was a transformative year for my music thanks to him. The Summer came and Thebe and I would go to the Boys n Girls club in Santa Monica and record with Bradon Gruzen. I made the beat for Molliwopped there and a few days I stayed home and came back and it was a song.
Anyway, 10th grade came, a lot of great movements and music came, Thebe was on Odd Future now so he was busier but we still collaborated on some stuff. I began to grow tired of a lot of things at New Roads, I developed an intense depression and ill temperament and just disdain for people in general because I felt like an outcast at most times. Jean and Thebe seemed to fit in better around this new mix of people, including the other black kids. I had friends of all different backgrounds, shout out Jess and dem, but it wasn’t enough, and then Thebe left. This shook me terribly because up until this point we told each other everything and then he left in a flurry, giving me like a weeks notice and he didn’t care to get into detail. Selfish and immature I could not accept that and grew to resent him for it. Looking back, I’m glad he went and I wish I had time to go to a rehab clinic for habits and thought patterns I would later develop.
Thebe’s departure was the straw that broke the camels back, there was plenty of opportunity at New Roads but I wanted to be around more black people, and I wanted to go to a performing arts school, I heard the Kanye West Foundation had this program at a school similar to the “CLAS Cipher” it was called Loop Dreams. Fernando Pullum Performing Arts High School was where I started 11th grade and 11th grade really set the stage for me as a producer/beatmaker and engineer. I met a very brilliant and talented musician named Darnell Jones, who likened me to Dilla at age 16, he was teaching a traditional music theory class but when I told him I made beats and showed him my stuff he gave me a pass to do something different, he gave me my 1st MPC, the love of my life. The blue and red MPC 1000, man I made some BEATS on there. I also met a mentor there, multiple-time Grammy nominee Haskel Jackson who was running Loop Dreams at the time. I spent that whole year making beats and writing raps. Loop Dreams family had some joints man. I love them all and miss them dearly.
A lot happened between 11th and 12th grade. Through the years Myles Santifer had gone from rapping as JWxMijo to Mylo X, to Mylo MU. Since 2006 we had worked on music together and after Thebe’s departure “The Backpackerz” were effectively defunct, but in 2010 he had a great idea and formed a group with another friend of ours and the 3 of us were known as the “Ill Chilldren”. I went by Weird Eye when producing, and Loofy The Don when rapping, adopted from one of my favorite anime’s One Piece. We began hanging out in Leimert Park, performing at the art walk, throwing parties/rap shows at Jinga Jinga Cafe, and it was here, the neighborhood I was born in, that Mylo introduced me to the Nation of Gods and Earths. I worked under Ben Caldwell and a committee to plan the art walk which earned me an award at high school graduation because I had over 300 community service hours. This is where I met VerbS. At the time he would just book us for the art walk, I had no idea that three years later I would be running LA’s Best Hip Hop Night “Bananas” with him.
Before I knew it, everyone was going to college. Up until 12th grade, I was excited for college, by the time senior year came however I was not with it. I stayed home while everyone moved away. I worked at goodwill first, then after some nudging by my parents I went to SMC for a couple of semesters, but I wasn’t with it. I was well aware of what I wanted to do and began working at a studio under Mickey Munday, Duke Gutta, and Preach together they ran The Press Studios. I met Asad-Ill during the Ill Chilldren days because his father owned Jinga Jinga and now he had inserted me into a place where my artistry and engineer skills could grow with The Press. Shout-out Asad. However, The Press did not last long and I was back just working at goodwill again.
Less than a month later I got a call from my mentor Haskel Jackson, he invited me to come work for him at his studio in West Hollywood off of La Brea and Sunset. This era changed everything. I was making money engineering sessions, collaborating with different artist, cohosting and booking Bananas, hanging out in Hollywood. This crew from West LA came to Bananas one night and really stood out, they were a little younger than myself, I was 19 and a half I think. These kids were outside by a white jeep with the doors open and they were blasting mobb deep and quasimoto instrumentals and freestyling. This peaked my interest and I was eager to see their performance. There was no one in Leimert at this time with such an energy as these cats. I’d say aside from my own music and a couple of other people most fools were trying to get on that trap wave. That wasn’t the case for Smokey V, Bungie, Killam, and Niftee, The four member group at the time known as Villain Park. I spoke with Smoke shortly after behind the scenes about how fond I was of their style and how I wanted to work with them, offered the studio and everything, and from there we got to work. I DJ’d some shows and we worked on a lot of music, thanks to them I was in a lot of great spaces. From 2013-2015 I had the pleasure and privilege to record, engineer, produce for and work with artist like Villain Park, Hugh Augustine, Joy Postell, Skeme, Ubiquitous Love Tribe, and Tru Sound among many other artists. We would all perform Bananas like every other month, this was a good time for Bananas. We helped sharpen each other at sessions in Hollywood and then took that to Leimert and beyond. These years passed and I released my second full-length rap project Ghettonomics which featured Hugh and Joy among many others but overall I was not pleased with the outcome. Months went by and the opportunity presented itself with such divine alignment I couldn’t let the chance pass me by, I decided to move to New York. Financially I wasn’t in the most comfortable space, but I was ready to fly the coop and get out of my comfort zone, I followed the voice in my head or what Napoleon Hill would call my “other self”.
October 23rd 2015, the beginning of the rest of my life, little did I know just how deep I was in. I began working at Dr. Martens and a lot of the people I worked with once I got there became a second family to me in the realest way. I knew like two people in New York when I moved out there so at the beginning figuring out multiple shows was not easy, luckily my homie Bruce aka HOA Bossman put me onto some spots and from there I met some good folks in different rap circuits. However, it was through Dr. Martens that I would come into contact with an alien, a beatmaker/producer who would help me start something pivotal for my career and with that same energy also raise himself up as Brooklyns beat wizard. I was introduced to Omar Jones by my brother Orestes while I was still at Dr. Martens. At the time he was working at a studio down the street from the store I worked at, our relationship started off as two music nerds who liked each similar music and shared an interest making beats and various genres of music. Omar shared a lot of his wisdom with me, some of it regarding music, and some of it just life in general. He pulled up for support for a lot of my early shows and shared his time with me showing me and sending me beats he was working on and stuff he thought I would like. A lot of people know Omar as Nothing_Neue.
Now months pass and I’m just working on beats, working with Omar, Orestes, Bossman and some other cats in NYC. Mylo came out to visit a few times which was cool. I didn’t do a lot of writing from 2016-2017, I was just going through a lot of changes and weathering that storm, I had not done any beat sets yet, just rapping music from Ghettonomics, which I had produced all the beats on. I had also started a band with a guy who was my roommate when I first moved to NYC and my roommate before I came home, his name was Quitin Zoto, and along with some other crazy musicians we started Sol Dojo. We did a lot of shows together since our conception in 2016. They brought a lot of Ghettonomics into a different light, we took beats I had made with samples and transposed them / brought them to life with actual instruments, it added another dimension to my artistry.
I got a call mid-August 2016 after thrifting at my favorite spot “Urban Jungle” in Bushwick. I remember the call so vividly because for some reason the vocal quality of the call sucked. I don’t know if Salenta could hear me well but I couldn’t hear her, my phone was tripping. Anyway, get familiar with The PUSH, they’re an underground event series based in NYC founded by Salenta Baisden and Tatiana Spencer. Salenta reached out and gave me a call to basically tell me that Ras G had recommended me to open for him on show he was doing with a bunch of other all-stars. The line up included Foisey, VHVL, OhBliv, Swarvy and G, kind of crazy for a first beat set, straight off the deep end, thanks Ras haha. Though I went up with a DJ controller looking like a novice that show really fast-tracked me onto being hip to and understanding what a beat set should be like, but not without a lil flare from my own raps of course. Needless to say after that show a lot of other pieces came together for me and performing out there.
Schoolboy Q had released Blankface around this time, I went to the meet-n-greet and along with exchanging words with Q I was introduced to my future place of work, a record store by the name of Rough Trade NYC. If you’re in NYC go check them out, shout out Jen, George, Ed, Adrian, Jill, Dennis, Stewart, Tommy, I hope I’m not forgetting anyone but these are the music lovers I spent a lot of time with and some of them made it possible for me to take the format of a show I had done in LA and run it in New York. I am extremely grateful to George who showed interest in my past endeavors in LA and also loved of Hip Hop who helped me push this into existence. The first Bananas NYC was January 24th, 2017 the line up was Jalal Salaam, Hann_11, No. Comply, TheCainMarko and my brothers Mylo MU and Nothing_Neue. This opened the floodgates and before I knew it, I was surrounded by a beautiful community of beatmakers/producers and artists. I’m not gon’ hold you like all of us is dummy close but a lot of us shared camaraderie and supported each other, and it meant a lot to me as an out of towner to meet the extraordinary artists of the East Coast, the place I had obsessed over since late High School. Shout out to all of them, too many to name. Bananas NYC was not flawless, and coupled with my instability (both financially and mentally) in New York it was not easy to take on most of the responsibilities on my own but thanks to Nothing_Neue and some other homies we made it work. Time passed and Nothing_Neue started doing a show in his own backyard, I think it was that summer, it was called “In Plain Sight” and it was a beat show with a live stream via twitters periscope. Shit was genius. It now takes place at Father Knows Best in Bushwick, go check that out if you’re in NYC.
In the fall of 2017, I was invited to do a weekly residency at Cafe Erzulie in Brooklyn. I recruited Mylo MU and another DJ by the name of Samantha to help me run it. We called it Holy Water Sessions and I used that platform to basically have nights where I DJ shit I like and am not forced to conform to DJ the regular “club” stuff if you will. It’s a night to vibe and dance, I also began to put on other producers and DJ’s. It functions as more of a pop up in NYC and LA now as opposed to a residency.
2018 was a year of great progress. Somewhere between my computer crashing and spending an extended period at home I broke out of the writer’s block that seemed to plague me the first couple of years in New York, or maybe I had a lot to reflect on. I was so in love with my rapid creations I decided to do volumes. I released three projects in 2018 and just started performing them in their entirety in 2019 since moving back home.
Back home in LA now I have a monthly show that I do with Viva Mescal.
Has it been a smooth road?
In hindsight, I’d definitely say there were times I made it harder on myself. There have been actions that I took that resulted in a kind of tripping over my own shoelaces effect. Sometimes my business was not right and things blows up and I’m left with nothing but a song or album credit. I can’t complain because I’m here to make great music, but credits don’t pay my bills. Being on my own was not always as glorious as it ended up being, I moved out to New York with my girlfriend and when we parted ways it was initially cool but after a while the lack of support and not really knowing many people as well as I knew her kind of drove me crazy.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
K. Solar isn’t just the artist it’s the experience. I engineer, I produce, I make beats, I write songs, I rap, I sing, I’m a performer, and I curate shows as well. I have found a lot of pleasure over the years helping other artists record and get the sound that they want for their songs or albums. I have to thank Haskel Jackson for really providing me the space to grow as a producer and engineer. I’m known for making tight beats and blowing up the spot when I decide to get on the mic. I have many styles that I can do and many of them that I have mastered so I definitely would say what sets me apart is the subject matter or way that I choose to rap/write as well as the diverse array of beats that I make.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I want to do a festival in London and New York that is hip-hop oriented and just brings out the illest DJ’s/Producers/Beatmakers from the UK and the US to a legendary location for a day of dope and eclectic beats, rhymes, and rhythms, no regular-degular vibes. Aside from that, I see myself as an industry go to guy, I want to have a studio space where artist can come for all their audio needs, mixing, mastering, beats, recording, writing workshops, that type of thing.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://soundcloud.com/ksolar
- Phone: 3234343990
- Email: [email protected]
Image Credit:
Aaron Sample, Abel Argenziano, Abel Argenziano
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