R.A.P. Ferreira / Crow Billiken Takes the High Road Tour @Havenhaus

About R.A.P. Ferreira

Sublimation compels the artist to beauty. Even the worker trafficking in ugly does so because they find the truth of the unattractive to be most gorgeous of all. As kindness becomes antiquated and paranoia the normal operating procedure, an art form as indulgent as rap can seem tasteless. Rap requires electricity, speakers, cables, stands, a table, lights, protection from the elements, an audience with at least one dollar. Rap grew with excess and is built from sampling buffet plates of perfection. The styles no longer ring free.

R.A.P. Ferreira takes the high road. His ambitions are an ever widening vocabulary, a full gas tank, the next tour’s itinerary. The rapper is evolving as you doomscroll. The years go by and he is becoming more bluesman, less Redman. Ferreira’s sound on slide guitar is gaining renown. Taking the high road, he ventures through the American South in support of his brand new album with Kenny Segal, “the Night Green Side of It”. The record is a reflection of 14 years relentless touring and releasing, researching and developing on the edges of the underground sound. These engagements promise to be a master class of 100 years of Black American music. From country blues to jazz rap, Ferreira is hitting targets no other artist alive sees. 

FB @modestmilo

Twitter & IG @hipcatscience

https://afrolab9000.bandcamp.com/

soulfolks.org

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2U1vwQRYQmG7ypKJF1JTEb

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About Crow Billiken

one had to find new methods of operating outside time. rap's positioning as a mouth form, the acquired slickness and the dusty ridge of the bap's boom are my native tongues. but what of the yawp's origin?

i'm from chicago. my blood line traces its way to the city of broad shoulders by way of arkansas like many other great migratory palm road riders. my grandfather would hambone and howl, he liked music played in minor pentatonic motions on acoustic instrumentation. getting your first pair of cowboy boots was a right of passage in my family, you'd go for a drive out west and come back with somn supposedly reptilian; dyed and stretched, pointy at the appropriate places, 1 inch taller. cold blooded. 

we a blues people. it's all in the hokum and the bop. my lazy eye and my drawl, my drawers and my teeth. no longer did i want to play the blues as a metaphor or an intimation of a style. the blues is not an evocation. it is breathwork and shadow play. cross colors at the crossroad crawling king snake moan. calloused on the tips of every finger and the sides of the thumbs. 

i wanted to learn songs that predated the music industry and everything that means, songs that are older than recording, than amplification, songs that are older than electricity in every home. it consumed me. a stream of ideas became a mighty river. what did Black American music sound like before white American business practices began to steal / shape our rhythms? my mind itched constant. 

enter crow billiken 

a bad character. a tennessee hustler.

student of lightskin hopkins,

learned the blues from samuel james

up to biddeford, maine. 

the old style, skrong mojo hand, sharp dress. 

acoustic country blues

from the delta quadrant 

hill country 

memfis to tejas

rhythm and lead

slide and singin

good for a 30 minute set

wherever you need me

IG & Twitter: @crowbilliken

Music

https://afrolab9000.bandcamp.com/album/if-i-dont-have-red-i-use-blue

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