ELUCID is one half of the pioneering hip-hop duo Armand Hammer with Billy Woods.
The New York rapper has been announced for The Workman’s Cellar on Wednesday February 5th 2025.
Tickets on sale now and cost €22 plus fees from Foggy Notions through Ticketmaster.
ELUCID’s new single “THE WORLD IS DOG” is out now on Fat Possum from his upcoming album REVELATOR which drops October 11th 2024.
ELUCID also features on ‘Remains’, the newest single from Samuel T. Herring’s Hemlock Ernst project, therap alter-ego of Future Islands singer.
Born in Jamaica, Queens, ELUCID has been on the cutting edge of New York’s underground scene since the mid-2000s. From the beginning, he has defied both convention and expectation. He ran with Okayplayer darlings Tanya Morgan, but his own music eschewed their throwback charm for glitchy noise experiments and bass-swamped culture jamming. His 2016 debut studio project Save Yourself (re-released in a deluxe edition last year) announced him in earnest. But in recent years, his Armand Hammer releases with partner-in-crime billy woods have received significant attention and acclaim. Serving as a follow-up to his last solo album – 2022’s comparatively balmy I Told Bessie – ELUCID hoped to “re-distinguish” himself with REVELATOR, setting himself apart amidst the increasing attention around the music he and his friends are making together.
For ELUCID, this meant setting bold new challenges for himself. One of these was diving further into live instrumentation than ever before – ”getting my Quincy Jones on,” as he puts it. The testing ground for this approach was Armand Hammer’s most recent project, 2023’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips’ Möbius strip soundscapes, warmed with instrumental flourishes and skin-shedding beat progressions. With REVELATOR, though, ELUCID strove to create an atmosphere of chaos, embracing experimental electronics and atonal sample bursts. He worked on much of the album with co-producer Jon Nellen, who comes from a background in avant-garde and Indian classical music. “I wanted to get as freaky as I could at this moment. I wanted people to hear things, maybe for the first time, or in a way they haven’t for a long while,” the rapper explains.
ELUCID arrived at the studio with a collection of noise sources: non-referential samples, glitches and noises. Together he, Nellen, and others created forms out of them and, as ELUCID recalls, “just started playing drums with it.” Their fried, distorted sound was directly inspired by Miles Davis at his most uncompromising – specifically, the tone-clustering funk track Rated X from his 1974 double LP Get Up With It. At times, the pairing of rap with avant- fusion sounds also brings Emergency! from The Tony Williams Lifetime to mind, perhaps in an alternate timeline where the late drummer was listening to Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.
REVELATOR’s lead single, The World Is Dog, functions as the album’s aesthetic thesis statement. Like the Davis track, the textures are punishing, the tonality is in free-fall, and the driving breakbeat of a groove cuts in and out unceremoniously. Avant-jazz bassist Luke Stewart, who appears throughout the record, holds the whole thing together just long enough for ELUCID to tightwalk over the beat. This tension is exactly where REVELATOR sets itself apart; in a time of drumless loops, and safe soul samples, this is a high-wire act with no safety net. Similarly, the song announces the themes of the album within just a few phrases, evoking the way societies accept and adjust to new levels of debasement and brutality while suffocating under the weight of history: “Can’t clock the kill, all a mystery / Forced past will eating everyone eventually / The world is dog.”
Many of the songs on REVELATOR grapple obliquely with dissolution and disenfranchisement in America and across the world—the grim realities of our domestic sociopolitical climate and our involvement in foreign conflicts. “Much of my artistic and political sensibility comes from the Black arts movement here in New York,” ELUCID explains. “Recognizing the interconnected global struggles against oppression, artists and thinkers created works and actions in solidarity with freedom movements in South Africa and Palestine.” ELUCID cites intellectuals like Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Kwame Nkrumah, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni among his heroes. (One track on the album is specifically inspired by Lorde’s work, SKP, citing the scholar’s paper Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power.) Songs like REVELATOR’s insistent closer ZIGZAGZIG, find ELUCID applying up-to-the-minute messaging, making explicit reference to the conflict in Gaza: “Feed a war machine…from river to sea, in lieu of peace.”
Despite ELUCID’s preference for cacophonous system overload, he also provides moments of respite. Recorded at The Alchemist’s Los Angeles studio, the laid-back, wheezing INSTANT TRANSFER is a collaboration with billy woods, which crystallizes their shared sense of creative determination. “With much momentum behind us and even more on the horizon, I knew a purpose, and that every step was ordered to that purpose,” ELUCID said of the experience. Meanwhile, the jittery HUSHPUPPIES is a playful anomaly on the track list, providing a snapshot of ELUCID watching his grandparents in the kitchen while preparing for Friday night fish fry dinners.
“Love still rules over on this side,” ELUCID says. ”I’m raising a family. We are making meaning and finding joy in the midst of all the fu*ked up-ness of everything around us because the alternative is cowardice and slow death. We remain rooted. We celebrate our people and our wins. Struggle is necessary.”
