by Dash Lewis (@gardenerjams)
The first rapped words on The Crashing Sound of How It Goes, Cities Aviv’s excellent 2021 record, are “let’s make the day intentional.” Over the course of 26 songs, the psychedelic Memphian offers a hallucinatory vision of achieving presence of mind in an age of calming apps, Instagram infographics, and the fear of societal collapse. Through a diaristic look at millennial yearning and unease, Cities constructs an hour-long meditation.
Musically, Cities approaches the carefully curated loops of a veteran crate digger with a wide-eyed curiosity. He creates a kaleidoscopic journey through touchstones as disparate as Panda Bear, The Field, 8Ball & MJG, Galcher Lustwerk, and Earl Sweatshirt. Bathing his vocals in distortion, delay, and reverb, the stream-of-consciousness lyrics feel like they’re being beamed from the furthest reaches of his mind. It’s a stargazing record, one that searches for answers in the depths of space—both inner and outer.
Crashing Sound has enjoyed a longer shelf life than most records in 2021, thanks in part to a multi-pronged roll out. Cities released it digitally on Bandcamp back in April, then followed it up with a cassette designed by GENG PTP, the artist and curator of forward-thinking New York label Purple Tape Pedigree. Earlier this month, stalwart German hip hop label FXCK RXP gave it the LP treatment a record of its magnitude deserves.
I spoke with Cities shortly before the vinyl drop about how he crafted Crashing Sound, whether or not he considers his music experimental, and his endless prolificacy. His insatiable appetite for music ranges widely, swinging from Japanese sludge rockers Boris to free jazz pioneer Milford Graves. He spends as much time as possible soaking up all the sounds he can, synthesizing them into a vision of rap music that’s as free as it is formal.
Dash Lewis: You put out three albums in 2020: Accompanied by a Blazing Solo, Gum, and Immortal Flame. Those feel kind of diaristic, impressionistic—like you're dissecting various processes that you've used over the years. Crashing Sound sounds like you glued those things back together after figuring out which things work. Can you walk me through the process of how Crashing Sound came to be?
Cities Aviv: Yeah, those other three albums, I did all those at the same time. I was just like, posted at my homie's spot. We would meet up at six or seven in the evening. I would just make beats and freestyle—we'd do that until like three or four in the morning. So all three of those records were just freestyle—I didn't write anything on there. Maybe a few of the beats I had sitting around. There's a track on Gum called "Over" that was a beat I made years ago, but for the most part it was just jammin’. There might even be like six people in the room drinking, smoking, and kicking it and I would have the mic in the corner, just recording nonstop. I would do that all night.
But then for Crashing Sound, I was doing a lot of that more during the pandemic, just at the crib. I was like,"I'm gonna get back into writing." Lukah had a part in that too because he wanted me to be on his album as well. He was like, "Alright, if you get on my album, you've gotta write," so I just got back into getting my pen up. I wanted to explore structural songs in a traditional sense and I was like, “Damn, this is actually fun again.” For a while, I was just like, "I don't even want to stare at paper, I don't want to stare at the phone, I just want to say whatever I feel in the moment." That's how those three albums came about, but with this one, I was like, “Let me get back into putting my pen out there.”
Dash Lewis: So those three albums were kind of like an exercise in being present.
Cities Aviv: Yeah, for the most part. I was also thinking a lot about that John Frusciante album, Smile from the Streets You Hold. I really dug how he was just on a bender and zoned out and was just like, "Fuck it, this how I'm feeling, this how I'm gonna play it." That was the energy I was feeling with those records. I really wanted to deconstruct shit and peel the layers back—I wanted it as raw as possible. Crashing Sound is a more constructed version of that energy.
Dash Lewis: What do you think you learned production-wise from making those three records that you brought to producing Crashing Sound?
Cities Aviv: With the jamming, I had always done that but I hadn't really put that on record. It was very liberating. That "Power Approaches" song is literally like 40 minutes. That was a jam session—there was maybe like 15 minutes that got spliced in, but that was even part of a larger jam session. I think the original file might have been like an hour and a half long. Just jamming and going off—samples and chopping and warping. I wanted to keep the sort of incomplete or unhinged structure there.
Dash Lewis: Once you decided to get more structural with it for Crashing Sound, how did you approach the production side of that record?
Cities Aviv: Man, it was just total obsession. I wanted to put something together that just sounds fresh, that's very extreme and at the same time is funky. I feel like there's all this sad ass shit coming out, so I was like I want something that's kind of runs the whole gamut of human emotion but isn't just stuck in one little pocket. Let me put everything on there.
As far as writing, the process was just wake up and drink some coffee. I got a set up at my house—tons of wood grain, old school speakers, like five of them plugged up at once. Just full volume, chopping the beat, boom that's it. Boom, write the verse real quick. Boom, record it.
Dash Lewis: Did you just record constantly and whittle it down?
Cities Aviv: Oh yeah, I was just knocking songs out nonstop and then picked the best of the best that I felt got the point across. Also I've been in a habit of just recording and mixing all my shit myself. For this one, the process was more of keeping everything raw, doing it at the crib, and then bringing in Hollow Sol for his piece on mixing. It was me letting go a little bit, letting somebody else have a little say on the process. He definitely has that ear for how shit should be. I'm more like, "Let me fuck it up and then you do your piece of how you feel like it should be and then I put my last little say on it at the end."
Dash Lewis: What kind of equipment do you use?
Cities Aviv: I really don't want to speak on how I chop. [Laughs]
My thesis on it is, in nature it is experimental but sometimes I feel like people remove my music from the essence, which is hip hop. Hip hop is beat and vocal. That's how I make my shit. I can DJ, so a lot of the tactics I'm using are having fun with the art form of DJing and chopping, pushing that to the brink and then you bring the emcee in. It's not a lot of crazy toy toys at play, if that makes any sense.
During that process, I remember I bought a more expensive kind of condenser mic, and I recorded with it for like a couple of days. Then I returned it and the guys were looking at me crazy. They were like, "This is a great mic. What's wrong with this mic? What are you using?" The mic I recorded the whole album on was a mic that I got from Lukah that we used to use when we'd record in his attic like 10 years ago. It's just a shitty early condenser mic for home recording. But I was like, "I like the sound of this shit more than the expensive shit." I just wanted it to be as raw as possible but then have Hollow put his flavor on it.
Dash Lewis: What is it about the raw immediacy that you love so much?
Cities Aviv: I just feel like you can capture the human element in its purest form. As far as all the effects, I just like how that shit sounds. I like the psychedelic shit.
I've recorded in nice studios but it just never felt like home to me. I always felt like I was a visitor—and you're on the clock, too. The last record I did in a proper studio was Come to Life, which was fun. I tried to make that as homey as possible. Me and the guy would meet up, smoke some weed, and then kick it for like an hour before we would even jump into tracks. The songs would get done in 10 to 15 minutes—it was like boom, boom, boom, knocking them out. But I prefer the comfort you get from doing it in your dwelling space. The mind can travel and be relaxed and the mania can come out. Whereas if you're locked in some weird ass studio, you're subject to their rules, you know what I mean?
Dash Lewis: You can get to a more honest place when you just record it by yourself.
Cities Aviv: Exactly.
Dash Lewis: One thing I've been intrigued about is on the Bandcamp page for Crashing Sound, there's a little phrase that says "an open love letter to the source of all things." What is that source to you?
Cities Aviv: To me, it's just everything. Some people say Allah, God, the infinite, the beyond, all that is. We get so weighed down sometimes with these concepts. If you listen to spiritual jazz records, when motherfuckers are zooming on the drums, like Milford Graves or somebody, they're sending that shit up to the beyond. I did the three where I was just zoned and really just sending it up and [Crashing Sound] was definitely a similar energy. I was just like, "Yo, I just want to shine the brightest and put the highest emotion out there."
Dash Lewis: Did you have a particular palette of influences you were mining when making Crashing Sound? Was it just instinct?
Cities Aviv: I definitely was thinking about DOOM. It was funny because I was talking to [Lukah] while I was starting the songs on the album, and I was like, "Man, it's about to be some like down south DOOM shit."
We trade rhymes all the time. We'll get on the phone and I'll rap him my shit, he'll rap his shit. Being from where we're from, it's not like we have the luxury of the coasts. We're from Memphis—it's some Dirty South shit. You kind of feel isolated; you're like, "Man I'm just in my zone doing my thing." So that's pretty much where that was coming from. This is my pocket, this my bag, this how I'm bout to hit 'em, you know what I mean?
Dash Lewis: You and Lukah definitely have really great chemistry, especially since you have pretty distinctly different styles. How did your musical partnership start?
Cities Aviv: There used to be a place called The Smoking Caterpillar. One of my homies that used to be in this group called Tunnel Clones hit me up and was like, "We're doing this show. Come through and do your shit." This was one of the first few times I was able to do the songs that I was making at home out in public. I did "Coastin" and a few other tracks. Lukah was there—he was going by Royal T at that point— and he was like, "Yo, you nice, let's link up." I was seeing this girl at the time and we were about to go to Mexico. I was like, “I'll hit you when I get back.” Sure enough, when I got back into town, I hit him up. I would go to his house in South Memphis and just stay there. We'd wake up, go get weed, and then be in the attic all day, going through beats and writing songs. We just stayed linked up over the years. I moved to New York for a while, and I was coming back to town to do some shit. I was like, "As soon as I get back, we're gonna start working on your album. I see this open window. No one's really rapping like you, so this will be crazy." That's how we did Chickenwire.
Dash Lewis: It's hard to talk about Memphis without mentioning Three Six Mafia, but that's kind of the easy question. When I talked to Lukah I asked him who besides Three Six Mafia or Playa Fly did he look up to, and I'll ask you the same question. I know that stuff is really ubiquitous, but there's so much more to Memphis.
Cities Aviv: When I started the Cities Aviv stuff, I told myself I didn't really want to get too involved with any of the Memphis music. As far as people that we were interacting with, Lukah's uncle, Fathom 9, put the battery in our backs to really just go for it and express ourselves. My peers are more of the people who I looked up to. I felt like we were in our own little world.
The Three Six shit was more pedestrian—it's everywhere; you grow up with that. It's funny, sometimes I'll see people be like, "Cities Aviv: influenced by Three Six Mafia" and it's just like, “not really.” I mean I fuck with that shit; I grew up with it and I have infinite respect for Paul and Juicy. They were DJs that were in their own little world that were producing and rapping and making their own little lexicon. I've encountered rappers over the years that were like, "I'm working with the same producer [Yo] Gotti working with so I'm gonna make it!" I never want to be that person. I'm doing my own shit. It's no diss to any of any of that stuff; I'm creating this because I don't really see myself out here.
Dash Lewis: Was there a moment where you knew you wanted to make music? Was there something that you heard or saw where it clicked for you?
Cities Aviv: I can't really pinpoint a time. I mean, it was everywhere. Music was all around. My parents bumping Stevie Wonder, Sade, Marvin Gaye. And then kicking it with my cousins and listening to Bone Thugs, Tupac, Playa Fly and all that shit. Music was just always around. I do remember in school I would recite Busta Rhymes verses. I would come to school and rap that stuff and kids were like, "Oh shit, he spittin’!" But I was just doing Busta Rhymes verses. [Laughs] I just liked the expression of it.
As far as rapping publicly, I was a roadie for some of my homies that would play in straight edge hardcore bands. On the side, I would write raps. At their shows, they would have me come out and I would do a couple of my songs. Like, they might just hit the drum and the bass and I would just rap over that shit. People were like, "Damn, this shit kind of tight." [Laughs] Over time, I started exploring it more. I had a project called Black Savior, where I would be at the house with the mic straight into the laptop and just rap over beats I would find. That was my first foray into doing it.
Dash Lewis: When you first started doing the Cities Aviv stuff, how did you determine what you wanted your sound to be?
Cities Aviv: When I was starting the project, a band I really respected was Boris. I used to work a job at FedEx and we’d get paid every Friday. As soon as the check came, I was buying Boris records on eBay or I was in the record store spending like $100 on a single record. A game changing moment for me was when they did Pink. That was such a great record and people were like, "Alright, give us that 10 more times," and they were just like, "No." [Laughs] They were like, "Fuck that, we're doing whatever we want." That was something that really stuck with me. They were so dedicated to their craft, their music, their art, that they were like, "It's never going to be dictated by other people's expectations."
For me, when I got into it, I almost didn't even really want to do rap. Like I said, I was exploring it a little bit and also was playing in some bands. So finally, when I jumped into the Cities Aviv thing, I wanted it to be everything. I wanted it to be all of my expressive moments. I wanted it to be an outlet for everything to shine through.
Dash Lewis: I guess I'm trying to get at whether it feels experimental to you the way that people write about your music being experimental. Do you know what I'm saying? I wonder if you bristle at that at all.
Cities Aviv: Yeah, I know what you mean. What's comedic to me is when people start tapping into my shit, they gotta start talking about Death Grips or whoever. In my mind, I'm like, "Damn, the fact you've never talked about, like, Dilla," that's the comedy. [Laughs] I'm shouting out the people that schooled me. I love Dilla, I love Madlib. To me, it's that—just turned the fuck up.
I guess it's me experimenting with sounds that I like. If you're at home jamming, you're experimenting. You're banging on a drum or a keyboard or whatever, you're experimenting. So yeah, it's experimental in nature, but some of the terms that get thrown around with it, I just be like, "that shit's funny." They be like, vaporwave I'm like, what the fuck? I don't listen to no vaporwave. I don't listen to no hypnagogic, whatever the fuck that shit is. Lo fi—that shit's stupid. Glitch hop—that shit's wack. [Laughs] Cut that shit out!
Dash Lewis: That's what I mean. You're making rap music from Memphis, and since it may not fall into what people think of as Memphis rap, it gets labeled experimental. I've been trying to think about that especially as I write about music. Why am I considering this experimental or like, who gets to say what's experimental?
Cities Aviv: No, I feel you. I mean, it's experimental in nature.
Dash Lewis: So therefore all music is, right?
Cities Aviv: Exactly! I don't know, I just think this shit is hard. Like, this shit slaps. Play this shit loud as fuck. [Laughs]
Dash Lewis: It's funny, the more I talk to people in interviews like this, I find that very few of them want to ascribe any one thing to their music. It's always the simplest explanation, like, "I just make shit that I think sounds dope." As a music journalist, it's interesting to think about what I'm "supposed" to read into music.
Cities Aviv: I was watching this Miles Davis documentary a few months back and they asked him about his music, and he was like, "Man, all that shit they be saying, they come up with that. I'm over here playing this shit." He was like, "Whatever they talking about, they making that shit up. I don't know nothing about that." And that's how I feel about it, too. They be like, "Oh, yeah, I can hear the vaporwave influence." I'm like, "I've never bumped no vaporwave nothing in my life." If you want to draw a line, whatever happened to DJ Screw? Motherfuckers been slowing shit down for years, but now it's like, "Oh it's vaporwave. It's plunderphonics." I don't know nothing about none of that. I want to slow it down because it sounds fresh. I want to speed it up because it's how I'm feeling.
Dash Lewis: I'll bring it back to collaborations. Besides Lukah, is there anybody else in Memphis that you're actively working with?
Cities Aviv: Yeah, my homie Q—Outside Source—he's real dope. My homie Frank, Beneviolence, he's real dope. Pretty much just all my homies. It's very communal. All of us go back to our own chambers and work on our own stuff, but we do have those communal moments where we just zone out and jam. We were doing this project called Unit Creative Power Group. I put it out with my label, D.O.T. The whole idea of that was just that everyone is cold as hell at guitar, bass, drums, sampling, so we would get together and just start jamming. We would do some sets where it's like me and Q, he's maybe on a 303, I'm on a laptop. Then we also got another laptop. We got two mics. We got my homie Mattie, who does Composer 4, he's hitting guitar. My other homie, James Walker from Texas also hitting guitar. Someone else might just get the spirit, hop in with a horn, and start playing that shit. We're just jamming, just trying to send the energy up.
Dash Lewis: It seems like you just chase whatever sounds interest you or whatever mode of creation interests you at the moment. Sounds like a very freewheeling mode of expression for you.
Cities Aviv: Yeah, pretty much, man. I had a realization a year or two ago where I was like, "man, I'll die for the music." It's like that song "Life's Only Valid Expression" [from Crashing Sound], which is "love" if you put it in short. This is my outlet so let me put it out there in many different ways and just send it up, you know?
Dash Lewis: Is there any direction or kind of sound in particular that's been bugging you that you want to chase down even further?
Cities Aviv: I'm working on a new record right now and I'm excited about it. The songs are sounding cool. I went to Massachusetts over the summer and recorded about 15, 16 songs. I got back to town and I recorded another 15 or 16 songs, so I'm just stacking them. It's a lot of different flavors on this new record. It's never necessarily like, "I can't really tap the sound down." It's more of like, through progress and expansion, and just expressing yourself, you'll land on these different plateaus.
Dash Lewis: I remember reading this 33 1/3 book about David Bowie's Low and the first chapter talks about when he was making Station to Station. He says the last song on that album dictated how he made Low, that there's always one song on the record that tells you how you're going to make the next one. Does that resonate with you at all?
Cities Aviv: I mean, every now and then. Everything intersects. I do identify with it in that you have this body of work. At one point, you created the door. With the next release, the door has opened and then you just jumped into this whole other realm with it.
Dash Lewis: So you've recorded about 30 or so songs for this new record. When do you find the moment where you're like, "Okay, now I have to trim this down."
Cities Aviv: When you're just at that brink of insanity or beyond it. [Laughs] That's pretty much when it's time. Like, "All right, let me shut the fuck up and put this together and get it out there." Lukah clowns on me cuz he's like, "Bro, you will just do that shit forever. You’ll just keep stacking songs."
Dash Lewis: Do you take breaks at all?
Cities Aviv: So to speak. I more so have moments where I'm just studying. Recently, I had a moment where I wasn't really recording, I was just listening to only Brian Eno. I was like, "Let me go through every Eno record pre ambient era." I'm familiar with the ambient shit but I never really bumped his glam rock shit. Before and After Science, Warm Jets, Green World. I was bumping all that stuff like nonstop—I was obsessed. During those times, I'm just absorbing, thinking, kind of meditating on it. Just feeling it. I love music, so I'm just trying to bump shit all the time. Lately it's just been Wu-Tang. I grew up with Wu and I was obsessed with it when I was younger—specifically Ghostface. As of late I’ve been like, "Let me just get back into that and absorb." I've been studying RZA, but specifically the era that everyone hates: pre Wu-Tang Forever RZA when everyone was bashing him. For instance, that Bobby Digital record, I know that record got trashed.
Dash Lewis: [Laughs] People hated that record.
Cities Aviv: People hated that record so much, but I grew up on that album! I used to see the “Holocaust” video on TV and was like, "This shit hard as fuck! Shit is insane!" So I've been revisiting that. I only want to hear the stuff that was getting trashed on. If people was fucking with it, I don't want to hear that. I only want to bump all the weird ass, in between shit.
Dash Lewis: Are you gonna go back to Immobilarity?
Cities Aviv: Dude, Immobilarity is hard! Me and Lukah were talking about that the other day. He was like, "Man, you know what album was hard? Immobilarity." [Laughs] I was like, "Yeah, that shit's sick!"
I feel like people forget about the power of discographies as full bodies of work. They're just like, "I want new product." They want the update as opposed to thinking about the body of work. That's why I was talking about Boris. I like how they have an album that's all ambient or when they did the record where it's all on clear vinyl but one version is the crust punk record and the other one's just noise. I like how they're dedicated to building a body of work. With rap music, I feel like people don't really get that luxury. People attach rap music with a new car they're buying, or jewelry, or sex. They don't really see it as an art; it's more like the backdrop to these fleeting moments.