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Liam Armstrong

We spoke with the DJs for First Avenue’s 50 Years of Hip-Hop Celebration to learn what the occasion meant to them.


Liam Armstrong for MPR

Minneapolis Celebrates 50 Years of Hip-Hop

Joely Kelzer

The Jock, the Stoner, the Final Girl… Which rapper fits best into each horror movie trope?


Tim Graham/Tim Graham/Getty Images

Hip-Hop Cabin in the Woods - Which rapper is most likely to survive a horror movie?

Each week, we add new music, older tracks, which are known as “Gold adds”, and tracks that might not fit our general format, but still deserve a place in rotation because they serve our mission of showing the depth, breadth, and influence of Black musical expression - These are known as “Variety adds.”

. If you make music and want it considered for rotation, 

 If you want to give feedback directly, reach out to me at jgreen@mpr.org.

Tune in to hear our host Sanni B. live on The Message from 10 AM to 1 PM Monday through Thursday!

Keep all these tracks in one place with the 

 Spotify playlist. This playlist is updated weekly with all the new adds. When that playlist is cycled with new tracks, the tracks live forever on the 

 playlist. That playlist contains all of the music that we've added since the week of July 11, 2022 in chronological order of when it was added. All of the tracks available on Spotify, at least.

“When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You”

Julian Green built and manages the music library for Carbon Sound and oversees content creation.  


Julian Green

All of the tracks added to rotation on Carbon Sound the week of Oct. 23, 2023.


Image for New on Carbon Sound Spotify playlist

Natalia Toledo

New on Carbon Sound

Old on Carbon Sound

New Music on Carbon Sound - Week of Oct. 23, 2023

I write to you first and foremost as a fangirl. I was so excited to finally be able to talk with one of my favorite local musicians, k3ko. Keah Washington makes “k3ko-type music,” as she puts it, blending R&B, pop, hyperpop, and Jersey Club influences. With only around a year of releasing music so far, she has already made some of my favorite songs. When I sat down with her for some coffee at Minneapolis’ beloved Hard Times Cafe, it was like meeting up with an old friend. She carries the same expressive and comforting energy in person that can be found in her music. 

Born and raised in Minneapolis, k3ko has always felt connected to music. Since she was little, she has been singing. “I remember singing was just something I knew I could do. Adults around me would be crying and being weird, making sure I knew that I could sing. They were always wanting me to perform at open mics and things like that,” says k3ko. 

Her long-time friend Ashley Franklin shares a memory of k3ko singing at her high school graduation, “That was the first time I really heard her sing, she had everyone in the audience crying, I was crying,” says Franklin. “I wasn’t just hopping on a wave, I’m a real singer,” explained k3ko. 

k3ko started making and releasing original music in May of 2022. In just over a year, she has created a discography that captures what some pop stars spend their whole lives trying to achieve. In this short time she has collaborated with many other artists including Almighty D on her song 

 and other local artists such as seventhirtyatmorning and 4KUltra on songs

“I’ve always been a singer, but I never really thought about writing when I was younger,” says k3ko. “I started by writing songs in my Notes app, but when I had the music down it wasn’t encouraging. I couldn’t see the finished piece with just the lyrics, so I didn't care about the songs. I’ve been in studios with engineers, but they didn’t really see my vision. I felt like I wasn’t doing as much as I could. It was boring.” 

When she started making music on her own with the app Beat Lab, it was a real turning point in her process. “I was able to do a lot with the background and layering in my music. I stopped writing my lyrics beforehand, everything became a lot easier. It became a lot easier to have patience with myself and just go with the flow,” she says. “It’s kind of like a painting, you have to keep mixing your colors, putting on layers, redoing some parts, and you might have to draw over that part again or whatever. But eventually, it comes together. I think of music and visual art as very similar in that way.” 

Her first memory of making her own music was an R&B song called “What You Been On?” Laying out lyrics and verses took “a long time.” She estimates it was about a week of working on that song every day for a couple of hours. “I don’t know what happened, I was listening to it on repeat every single day, over and over. I was obsessed,” says k3ko. “I’ve heard artists say they can’t listen to their own music, [but] I love listening to my own music. That was the first time I felt like I was hearing my song from an outside perspective. I just felt like what I was making was meaningful, I felt like it was all coming to life. I knew I couldn’t just make this song and never make music again, that’s when I really knew I could do it for real.”

Since then, k3ko has become very efficient in her process. She describes the process of making the standout track 

 “[Collaborator and friend Matthew Mikell of 4KUltra] sent me a beat. I remember thinking the name ‘Blush’ was really clever. I sent him back my verse right away, maybe within a couple of hours. I was just really excited and motivated,” she says. 

“She’s just a very easy-going person. She makes the process really fun. She’s one of the most refreshing and inspiring people to work with for that reason, it’s not about the release for her, it’s about the fun of it all,” says Mikell. 

k3ko has her own genre that she calls “expression.” “I feel like I’m a very expressive person, I’m very verbal in my emotions. I feel like we’re losing that in music, especially in ‘fun’ music,” she says. “If you want to listen to emotional music, you’d have to listen to a sad song. I said ‘No, I’m about to bring love songs back to pop and Jersey Club.’ I sing about deep emotions on a fun beat. I’m just reminding people that it’s cool to embrace your own expression, reminding people that people still feel like this, people still think like this, and it’s OK.”

“She’s just very open to working with people, she’s a people person,” says Franklin. All the praise k3ko’s friends gave to her came through during my interactions with her. She welcomed me with hugs at her most recent show, a performance at Seward Cafe on Oct. 13, and gave the crowd such positive energy, smiling through her shades on stage. It is clear that music is not only a way to showcase her talent, but to connect with her friends and community members. 

At shows, she brings her friends on stage, or they’re right next to the stage dancing, and taking photos and videos. She is surrounded by a supportive group of loving friends, and she loves to support her friends just as much. “I think everyone could benefit from some advice from Keah,” says Franklin. “It’s so refreshing to be around her. She brings a relaxed energy to the space. She made things a little less serious in a scene that can be unnecessarily intense sometimes,” says Mikell. “She’s so free-spirited and spontaneous. We could just sit in a room together and have fun,” adds another close friend, Veronica Gilbert.

“Inspiration is spontaneous, I just get the vibe. With my friends, we could be kicking it right now and if I feel like I’m gonna make a song, I’ll make a song,” says k3ko. She credits her friends as big inspirations for her music, gushing about their shared creativity, and the love and support she receives from them.  

Her friends can attest to this: “There’s never a time where she’s planning a song, it’s always spur of the moment. She used to be over at my tiny studio apartment for weeks at a time and we’d be hanging out and she’d just randomly start making a song,” shares Gilbert. 

“I broke my ankle last year and I had to change my ice pack every 30 minutes,” recalls Franklin. “She was at my place in the bathroom recording a song, and every 30 minutes on the dot she would pause and get an ice pack for me. She is really dedicated to everything in her life, whether that be her relationships or her music.”

k3ko describes music and the rest of her life as intertwined, not separate. She spends so much time being creative with her friends that she created a whole EP in the company of good friends Franklin and Gilbert. She recorded the songs 

 around them. Her friends described helping her name the EP, and k3ko even dropped it on Gilbert’s birthday. 

Her friends’ creativity inspires her music as well, “I really like being around my friends, we’ll randomly start cutting up clothes, or making jewelry, or drawing together,” she says. 

“We love to sit around and draw for hours and ask each other advice on what color we should use and stuff like that,” Franklin says.

What music does she listen to to get inspired? “Justin Bieber for sure, I used to sing his songs and basically try to mimic him. I feel like I learned to sing from him,” expresses k3ko. “Juice Wrld! You need to include him!... skaiwater, especially his Jersey Club mixes. He kinda inspired me to play a little more with my beats. He was the first person that was singing on rage beats and singing on harder beats.”

“My favorite song to sing is ‘Thinking About You’ by Frank Ocean,” she adds. “I feel like if you’re a singer and you didn’t have a phase of that then you’re not a singer. I love to sing Justin Bieber, anything off of 

. I love Rihanna, my mom loved that. When I was young my mom would be obsessed with me singing and she’d be like, ‘Sing Alicia Keys!’ and stuff like that. Sometimes I’ll hear music and it’ll motivate me to want to make a song, but mostly it comes from just hearing beats, especially Jersey Club beats. That’s where I get the most ideas.”

Friendship and community are very important to k3ko. She has a deep passion for music and her personality effortlessly shines through her music. She brings so much light to a space and there is nothing more fun than dancing to her music. After seeing her perform at shows with multiple friends on stage hyping her up, it is obvious how beloved she is by the community and how bright her future is. 

“I can develop and grow, I can be better. I know how to sing, it’s not that, I just want to do more,” she says. “I breathe music. Every word, every note, every run, every harmony, everything's intentional and everything is put there to make you feel like something.”

The Minneapolis artists mixes Jersey club, R&B, and hyperpop influences.


bearBOI for MPR

k3ko brings her unique style to the Minneapolis scene

All of the tracks added to rotation on Carbon Sound the week of Oct. 9, 2023.


New Music on Carbon Sound - Week of Oct. 9, 2023

Carbon Sound caught up with Kari Faux before her concert at 7th St Entry in Minneapolis on Wednesday, August 23. Watch the full interview above.

Carbon Sound caught up with the prolific and influential artist during her tour stop in the Twin Cities


EricXu Romani

Kari Faux talks about her new album and dealing with grief (Interview at Carbon Sound)

Video: Kari Faux talks about her new album and dealing with grief with Carbon Sound

Black Kray, along with his long list of aliases, is a prolific rapper, producer, filmmaker, and founding member of the collective Goth Money Records. He is the master behind many of my favorite songs and the influence behind many of the trends in the underground rap scene. He is most well known as Black Kray but has explored many other pseudonyms, each with unique characteristics and style. I have scoured the internet to trace Black Kray’s journey through the underground, leading to where he is today.  

Black Kray, born Timothy O'Neal on February 23, 1994, is from Richmond, Virginia, a place he refers to as the “Durt Road.” He dropped his first song on MySpace when he was in the 7th grade, and has been making music ever since. Goth Money members met over the internet in 2012, and Kray has since moved to LA to collaborate with them in person. 

He has over 41 solo EPs, mixtapes, and albums combined solely under ‘Black Kray’, excluding all of the other side projects and collaborations. You could say he’s using the Lil B Method, with the sheer volume of his work comparable to the other underground legend, Lil B. Through his body of work, he has explored many different genres, themes, and aesthetics and with that, alter egos. 

Kray’s evolution has been completely natural, you can see him experimenting and finding himself through his music. His progression as an artist can be seen through each name change. It started in 2011 with his era as The Black Kreayshawn. 

The beginning of The Black Kreayshawn era can be traced back to his YouTube presence. You get a glimpse into his world, with the various skate clips, short films, music videos, and song uploads he posted to his channel. His upload of Kreayshawn’s song 

 has amassed over 1 million views. During this time, Kray had a short-lived time as a part of 

, with members like SpaceGhostPurrp, Xavier Wulf, and Denzel Curry. He left in 2012 to pursue his group which was at the time known as 

By the end of 2012, Kray was an icon of the SoundCloud rap scene and a recurring character in underground rap folklore. He was creating a new sound, mixing witch house, trap, cloud rap, and horrorcore. It was like a goth Cash Money, who Kray himself says was an inspiration.

Kray founded Goth Money Records in 2013 with the original roster consisting of himself, Marcy Mane, Kane Grocerys, Luckaleannn, Karmah, and Hunned Mill. Following his move from Virginia to LA and the birth of Goth Money, his music started to gain traction. 

 was his own “Ginseng Strip” music video, complete with the bucket hat and all. Kray showed us his world; metal tee shirts, silk scarves, basketball jerseys, gold teeth, piercings, nature footage, and shutter effects. The unique backdrops for the video were referred to as Flexico by Marcy Mane. By this time, he was going by Black Kray pretty consistently.  

, his first full release under Goth Money Records.  Songs like 

, the release showcased Kray’s style of glitzy, cloudy, and nonchalant trap music. This album is seen as his quintessential release. It solidified his place in the scene and laid the groundwork for many rappers to come. Rappers like Cartier God, Surf Gang, and even Playboi Carti. 

 was where the Goth Money swag was established, and listeners were introduced to the world of “positive thuggin”.

 many coined Kray as “Chief Keef meets Lil B” which I think is an accurate description. Though Kray is more than just the child of two existing, legendary rappers, he was paving the way for something new.

Kray’s most experimental and groundbreaking period was his witch house era, during which he went by lilwitchhouseshawdy. Witch house is a genre known for its trap-influenced beats, ethereal vocals, and goth or witch aesthetics. Kray was creating something completely new, he was the original witch house rapper.

He was ethereal, goth, darker, and cloudier than ever during this era. One of my favorite projects that shows the breadth of Black Kray’s talent is 

 which is also where he coined his name ‘lilwitchhouseshawdy’. Though, he also coined a few of his other names on this album with songs titled 

 as the final track on the album, tying together his style of witch house and ambient trap music. 

Kray was a big fan of the witch house genre himself, he even cites three big witch-house artists as his main influences in a 

, talking about Salem, Crim3s, and White Ring. 

By 2014, Kray had met up with Drain Gang, and he was releasing songs with Yung Lean and Bladee such as 

 which are all now considered classics of the time. He released his album 

 before embarking on an international tour with SadBoys/Drain Gang. Kray has continued to collaborate with Drain Gang and could even be considered an honorary member, but Kray has elevated his sound as well. 

 which was not only the reason I started watching Love and Hip Hop: Atlanta, but a huge stepping stone in his career. The video is now approaching half a million views. The song is a great example of Kray’s themes in his music. The references and aesthetics are never forced, his music is nonchalant. A song like this that references a reality TV couple truly makes you feel like you’re hanging out and watching TV with him. During this time he also started to go by Persian Cellphone Prince. 

He also continued his other artistic ventures during this time, such as filmmaking. With the release of his 

 “Hood Doves,” he features witch house legend Salem’s song “Mine Mine” and lives up to his name lilwitchouseshawdy. 

After collaborations with Drain Gang, Kray was on his way up. He spent time in Atlanta with artists like Lil Yachty and Metro Boomin. Barron Machat, who helped launch the careers of Yung Lean and Grimes, had Kray as his next project. In tragic circumstances, Machat passed and Yung Lean and Drain Gang members took a break from music. Kray transitioned to more solo work during this time. 

At this time, he started to go by Sickboyrari, he explains the name choice as partly because he is ‘sick’ and partly because he ‘stays in his lane like a rari’. He released 

 which leaned even more into the horrorcore sound. With songs like “

Kray aka Sickboyrari dropped three more albums and by the end of 2017, he was considered an underground king. With his song 

 featured on World Star Hip Hop, he was on track to perform internationally alongside his girlfriend and collaborator Bootychaaain. 

Tread was a term coined by Bootychaaain to describe the high BPM, hard-hitting beats of Working On Dying production, and producers such as F1lthy and Kray himself. ‘Tread’ is characterized by distinctive 808 patterns, often off-beat hi-hats and trap triplets with icy synths and lethargic rapping. Kray could be called the ‘King of Tread’. His tape as Sickboyrari, 

, illustrates the realization of this genre. 

Kray is inventive, continuously experimental, and original. He has paved the way for rappers to come with his fearless experimentation and innovation. Through all his different aliases and projects, we can see his experimentation in real time and get a glimpse into his world. He is the definition of an underground king, your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper, and an iconic figure in rap music. 

We take a deep dive into Black Kray, an influential figure in underground rap of many names.


Black Kray

Who is Black Kray? (AKA Sickboyrari, AKA Gvcci Kray, AKA La Goth, AKA...)

Carbon Sound and Purewateradio hosted the State Fair Producer Showdown at the Minnesota State Fair on Saturday, August 26. 

Eight of the best producers from the Twin Cities battled it out live on stage for a $500 gift card to Down In the Valley. 

Contestants: Brainw0rm, Dave Kellner, Don Belly, Eslicky, Euphoria's Room, Roc Barboza, Somburd, Wan Guru 

Watch the full video of our State Fair Producer Showdown.


Eric Xu Romani

Carbon Sound x Purewateradio State Fair Producer Showdown

“Do You Know Where You're Coming From”

All of the tracks added to rotation on Carbon Sound the week of Sept. 25, 2023.


New Music on Carbon Sound - Week of Sept. 25, 2023

 points to one thing: 2023 is the year to show up and show out. Fueled by post-COVID delirium, we’ve flocked to stadiums and theaters alike in our finest, glitteriest attire, and the Walker Art Museum’s 

The museum’s annual party for the ages serves as both a fundraiser as well as a Minnesotan take on the Met Gala. Decked out in 

, visitors come in droves to enjoy a night of drinking, dining, and dancing. Aside from enjoying some reliably great live music (previous Avant Garden performers include Questlove and Dessa), event goers can also bid on 

“It’s the party of the year,” outgoing Walker board president Seena Hodges shared over a phone call. “It’s a celebration of summer moving into fall, and it’s this last moment of unbridled joy before we hunker down for the winter. You get to be your full self and turn out. It’s a really good time, for a really good cause.” 

If supporting the Walker’s educational and cultural programming isn’t enough of a draw, this year’s festivities boast a particularly impressive lineup. Alongside local DJs Tricky Miki and Dub Minus, lauded indie singer-songwriter 

 will perform a set at this year’s afterparty.

“To me, it’s important from a curatorial perspective when it comes to picking live performers,” Hodges went on. “It’s crucial to bring people of color into these spaces and give them the opportunity to be in a museum setting. Plus they play the music that we all know and love. [Avant Garden] has hosted artists like MC Light, Biz Markie, and DJ Jazzy Jeff. We just want people that make you want to dance and, you know, not afraid to sweat your hair out.”

Hodges serves as a member of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums (BTA), and notes that Avant Garden wasn’t always this accessible: “When I joined the Walker’s board of directors in 2016, I remember hearing the price of [Avant Garden] tickets and bursting out laughing.” 

In the years since a flurry of changes has followed: Aside from booking diverse musical talent, there is a yearly initiative to set aside Avant Garden tickets specifically for BIPOC artists. In addition, the art being auctioned off is now set at affordable price points.

“It’s our responsibility to broaden the tent at every turn,” Hodges continued. “Every year we invite artists who may not have a relationship with the Walker to celebrate with us. Now the event really feels like a microcosm of the Twin Cities — people forget that we have the largest Somali and Hmong populations outside of their homelands here. Minneapolis really is a diverse place, and you can see that diversity at [Avant Garden].” 

Avant Garden takes place this Saturday, September 23, at the Walker Art Center. The cocktail reception is at 5 and the after-party, including performances from Vagabon, Tricky Miki, and Dub Minus, starts at 8:30.

Fatima Rahman

Walker Art Center’s event is Minnesota’s Met Gala.


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