Los Angeles, CA · art-pop · experimental hip hop · art pop · experimental rap

Quadeca

1 upcoming festival

Left a YouTube career behind to make genuinely ambitious, orchestral experimental rap about death and dissolution — one of the internet's great reinventions.

Quadeca is the recording name of Ben Lasky, a Los Angeles musician who first built an audience on YouTube making rap videos and diss tracks as a teenager. He gradually shifted away from that world toward more ambitious music, and by the early 2020s was releasing records that had little in common with his origins.

His later work draws on experimental hip hop, art pop and ambient production, often built from layered vocals, orchestral and choral textures, and abrupt structural shifts. Lasky writes, produces and mixes much of the material himself, and the albums tend to be conceptual, circling grief, mortality and self-erasure. The reinvention has been unusual enough that it is often discussed as much as the music itself.

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