Katz With A K
The first whisper on the proverbial grapevine that we heard of Katz was Dr. Syntax describing him as “If Cannibal Ox were from Sheffield, sort of.” If that’s not an urgent invitation to immediately go absorb a soundcloud rapper’s music then water isn’t wet.
After the first earful of the discordant yet banging, jarring yet witty, offensive yet insightful musical paradox that formed his small discography to date, we took a perplexed look at the fact that hardly anyone had noticed yet… Then went about signing him and scrubbing his existence from the net so that only the small cabal of faithful followers who had stumbled across the good word of Katz even remembered that Sheffield’s one true nihilistic rap-prophet had ever existed… Since then, the time in digital exile has been spent feeding steroids and acid to the starting roster of tunes, throwing one or two into the garbage compactor of history and birthing a couple new monsters that have yet to be heard by anyone. All of which make up a proudly weird debut EP, shortly to arrive on Brain Scran…
Who the fuck is Katz With a K?
Even prior to us doing the whole Men In Black number on his musical fingerprint, Katz was keeping shit enigmatic. Something of a ghost on social media, for somebody making bold music he’s not been shouting about it. The official Katz stance is that it’s because he’s been busy being a Toy Boy for a series of wealthy socialites, but it’s more likely down to an approach to writing that is what it is due to a long distilling process…
It’s lyricism that needed to wait until this stage of life to be said. Both rooted in the things witnessed from doing road as a younger, and after luckily avoiding the worst case scenarios, growing into a different kind of not giving a fuck that only comes with age. Drawing on unashamedly nerdy interests in cinema, literature and politics, deep rooted disdain and flippant humour, the stream of consciousness that emerges spawns quotables about fingering Tories, polygamy on heroin farms and selling fire to deities.
This verbal road-less-travelled is fittingly matched with the joyously bizarre beatscapes provided by producer Phoneutrian. In his own words, he doesn’t really make hip hop. Which is probably why the hip hop he’s making doesn’t sound anything like standard offerings from the genre. Prone to splicing styles and pinching sounds from unlikely places, it’s this eclectic ethic and a propensity for jagged snares and buzzing subs that (added to Katz’s off the wall lyricism) gives the duo a fiercely alternative sound. Nobody’s doing it quite like them. Sharing more in spirit with the kind of counter-scene that US label Def Jux embodied than it does with your average UK hip hop, the comparison to the likes of Ox is hitting the perversely angled nail as close to the head as possible.