XINA stopped by to talk to Carbon Sound’s host Sanni about her IRON X EP, opening up for Duckwrth in Chicago, XINAVERSE, and more.


XINA stopped by to talk to Carbon Sound’s host Sanni about her ‘IRON X’ EP, opening up for Duckwrth in Chicago, XINAVERSE, and more.

The Message - XINA

XINA - Runnin Visual

IRON X

XINA - PURE POTENTIALITY (Official Video)

John Kueppers | MPR

Interview: XINA

Every 1st of the month, we’re creating a roundup of our favorite tracks, projects, and music videos that were released by Minnesota artists from that previous month. 

Keep our favorite tracks in one place with “Carbon Sound’s 1st of the Month” Spotify playlist. Expect an updated 1st of the Month Playlist on……every 1st of the Month.  Mark your calendars accordingly.

Essjay TheAfrocentricRatchet - A Masterpiece

High School For Recording Arts - Tune in Speak Out

Treyson Green - JOHN WALL “Official Music Video”

Ness Nite - Tell Me (Official Music Video)

Global Broken Beat mix from Angel Beloved | Carbon Sound

Gladiator School Vol. 6: The All Star Cypher

Gladiator School Vol. 6: The All Star Cypher | Shot by Alec Baenen

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Author

John Kueppers

Natalia Toledo

Highlighting Carbon Sound’s Favorite Minnesota made tracks, projects, and music videos released over the month of September, 2025.


Carbon Sound's Best Minnesota Music from September graphic

Natalia Toledo | MPR

I'll be back soon

Be More Chill

WYO?

Carbon Sound's 1st of the Month

A Masterpiece

Tune in Speak Out

Grown Ass Kids

Treyson Green - JOHN WALL “Official Music Video” 

seventhirtyatmorning - bad situation (Official Video)

Daisy Music Video

Gladiator School Vol. 6: The All Star Cypher | Shot by Alec Baenen 

TRaprite 2025 CypHer OFFICIAL Video #rap #music #hiphop #female #cypher 

TRaprite 2025 Mens Cypher OFFICIAL #rap #music #hiphop

Minnesota Music Releases to check out from September 2025

For those of us (like me) who wear the term "chronically online" like a badge of honor, 

' world is our everything. When we close our eyes, her glossy voice and Y2K nostalgia is a comfort. With a single roller in her bangs and the purse she's never without, PinkPantheress has become our soundtrack, vision board and guide.

For this set, the once anonymous dance-pop star sheds the electronic sounds that we know her for; to our complete delight, her voice is just as glossy and her presence just as entrancing in these new arrangements. Dressed in her signature tartan (with matching tea pot), PinkPantheress' band expands her sound, swapping the glitched-out samples in "Girl Like Me" for heavier guitar riffs. She shapes the moments that we crave in songs like "Pain" and "Illegal" as softer, jazzier ones.

As she performs, she nonchalantly cycles through the instruments laid out before her: some harmonica here, a bit of cowbell there, chimes once or twice. Her comedic timing is deadpan, yet precise — a reminder of why fans obsess over her digital footprint. It's always a gift when artists reimagine their discography alongside us at the Desk. PinkPantheress dives into this challenge, yet maintains her magnetic aura, which is just another reason we still can't seem to look away.

Dora Levite

For the chronically online, PinkPantheress has become a soundtrack, vision board and guide. Backed by a band (and sans autotune), the pop star swaps out glitched-out samples for guitar riffs and softer, jazzier moments.


Harry Durrant

PinkPantheress: Tiny Desk Concert

Angel Beloved is the co-founder, creative director, and resident DJ of artist collective 

. This collective contributes to the robust house music scene in Minneapolis through collaborations with local producers and DJs, like 

. Angel is a longstanding community-driven DJ who aims to create connection through his soulful and global sets.  

We chatted with Angel about his background and intentions for the mix. Read a transcript of the interview edited for length and clarity below:

I am spirit. I am a human. But I go by Angel Beloved of MPLSHOUSE, which is a collective in Minneapolis. We do many things — we throw parties, DJ production. Just on a journey of music and DJing.

 Well, I dibbled and dabbled like early 2000s. But when I really got serious with vinyl and digital was in 2017.

I was a professional dancer for a really long time. So I did ballet, modern, and I was a break dancer. I was in a crew called Battle Cats, and we would open up for Rhymesayers at Soundset when it was at First Avenue. So I kind of stopped dancing, and then music's everything, so I was like, 'oh, maybe DJing might be something that I'm interested in.' And so my friend and I, Marcus Rice, he and I bought some decks together.

What's been the most gratifying experience when it comes to being a DJ?

Just seeing my growth, and then watching other DJs and their talent and what they play, and creating a community. When I first started, like really getting into gigging, what really helped was throwing sessions at the studio and just DMing DJs and having a community DJ session. That was beautiful. That was a way to get into the game and learn about different gigs, music, and just networking.

Speaking of different gigs, this itself could be seen as a different gig. What do you have in store for us?

I'm actually gonna be playing some broken beats and some world music. That's kind of like my favorite genres right now. I would have played some house, but I just want to go on a different, left turn. So some broken beats, some world music.

A Global Broken Beat mix from a South Minneapolis veteran.


Broken beats and world music from Angel Beloved of MPLS HOUSE.

Angel Beloved (9/3/25)

man poses for polaroid with face in his hand

 maintains hope in dark times. For this Tiny Desk, the Sudanese Canadian artist features material from 

, plus "Stay Alive," an earlier song of his that he says became "the thesis of everything that I believe in."

A talented poet and songwriter, Mustafa has written for stars like 

 — but as you see here, his artistry shines most when he sings heart-wrenchingly beautiful songs about his community. "I was born and raised in the largest housing project in North America," he tells us. The depth of his emotions are palpable here: joy as he playfully interacts with a Sudanese choir assembled for this performance, pain as his soft voice pleads over oud, guitar and cello, and devotion as he sings about his faith. Dylan Wiggins, a producer for 

, helped with these Tiny Desk arrangements.

On the Desk, you'll see a variety of objects that celebrate his Sudanese heritage, but also a press vest — the kind used by journalists reporting in combat zones. In Toronto, the police would call into venues and recommend canceling Mustafa's early shows, citing "safety risks." That's when Mustafa began to contrast the white of his thawb with the bulletproof material of a press vest emblazoned with the word 

. "When I'm asking my boys to stay alive," he says, "I'm asking that, when they return from a war, they don't lose what makes them soft and they don't lose what makes them tender. And that, to me, is a radical act."

Elle Mannion

For the Sudanese Canadian artist, tenderness is a radical act. Mustafa, along with a choir of Sudanese women, performs heart-wrenchingly beautiful songs about his community.


Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images for Jacquemus

Mustafa: Tiny Desk Concert

14HunnitVon - Are You Okay? (Official Music Video)

C Rose - Hit A Hat (Official Music Video)

Dammntc & Xhulooo - Movie Matinee (Official Music Video)

DMV - Komari Cloud ft Essjay TheAfrocentricRatchet (shot by jackson bates) (prod by stix)

Carbon Sound Host Sanni B. drops new album

Dizzy Fae song featured in Taco Bell commercial

Melly Mike becomes World Ambassador of Pacu Jalur

Melly Mike World Ambassador Of Pacu Jalur

Highlighting Carbon Sound’s Favorite Minnesota made tracks, projects, and music videos released over the month of August, 2025.


Carbon Sound's Best Minnesota Music from August 2025 graphic

No Water

ohmygod!

Honey & Dutches

Free Therapy

TYWC30

Insiders

The Red Project

CiRCA

Dizzy Fae - Blush (Official Music Video)

KelsTheGawd - 04 Vibes 

Late Bloomer (The Making of Big Cutie)

BASSment JAMS S01E10 ft. ECHO

Minnesota Music Releases to check out from August 2025

 is up-front about his own passions. The track is sparkling at first, its synth keys and sequenced drums sounding like a Whitney Houston song and a New Order song left in a pressure cooker to simmer together. But when Marcus Brown begins singing — his voice sounding lo-fi but tender, the way a bruise can be tender — you can feel the stinging vulnerability in every tugged-on syllable, as he weighs two forms of labor: "Working restaurants by day / Writing love songs every night / He can barely make it by." Brown has been writing love songs for many years, and while distorted in the way all of his music is — raw yet accomplished, identity-forward yet sonically elusive, wringing post-punk and synth-funk into bizarro R&B balladry — they are usually colored by the stories of people trying to make it by. Indeed, nothing has inspired the wandering style of Nourished by Time quite like work, be it the toil itself or just the condition of striving.

After stints in Los Angeles and the U.K., the 30-year-old Brown moved to New York City this year. Today he's traveled down to Baltimore, where he grew up, to meet me at R. House, a food court in the city's Remington neighborhood, not far from Johns Hopkins University. Brown slides in across the booth from me holding a beer, asserting that it takes more than moving to a new city to stoke one's creative fire. "Nothing should come from outside," he says, his hands flailing, even with one in a wrist wrap due to a nagging cyst issue. "Every choice should be an internal choice — should come with some level of internal struggle."

Remington is one of Marcus Brown's hometown stomping grounds. His brother is a pastry chef at Gertrude's, a kitchen inside the Baltimore Museum of Art; the anarchist ex he was dating while writing 

his 2023 breakthrough release, works in the area as well. That album, a quietly released breakup record that scanned like irradiated dance music for the end times, made more noise than anticipated: Music press marked it as one of the best of the year, and the momentum facilitated a jump to the distinguished indie label XL Recordings, raising the curtain on Nourished by Time as a serious endeavor. "I never expected it to become this big thing. I wasn't really expecting anyone to hear it, and I was kind of just writing music," Brown says. "That's partly why it's maybe a little more discombobulated, and goes a lot of different places. I think it's an amazing album, but it wasn't necessarily me at 100%."

Brown has been gearing up to reach 100% for a long time, logging hours in various short-term gigs. "I've been working since I was like 14," he says, rattling off his CV — YouthWorks, Barnes & Noble, dog walker, amateur tennis coach, attendant at Floyd's Barbershop in Ellicott City and in-store shopper at Whole Foods in Los Angeles' Koreatown, which he calls his worst job ever. Brown jokes that he was radicalized in that supermarket, forced to come to terms with how little value his time and labor held to the company: "I was really just seeing the Matrix happen in real time." It was around then that he took a more active interest in progressive politics, following his curiosity from the news live stream TYT Network to journalist Aaron Maté to the political podcast 

. When COVID hit the U.S., he ditched LA and went back home to his parents, where he committed himself to his music.

 is far more intentional, the personal and political statement Brown has been building toward. "My goal is to reconceptualize work with this album," he explains. "You hear 'working,' you think negative. You think of oppression; you think of being exploited. But there's also the work your job doesn't want you to do, the work that sets you free — and that's creative work." These days, creative work is his full-time job, and his move to New York was prompted by a desire to follow the muse. "It's really expensive, but there's also a really romantic aspect about living there," he says. "Everyone, regardless of the medium, has come through in some way." When he does visit home, he's a scene regular again, going out to shows at beloved indie venue Ottobar and factory turned DIY art space The Compound, or browsing instrument shops for the gear he could never afford when he lived there. "So much of my experience here was so poor," he says, "so it's nice to have a little bit of spending money."

Brown grew up in Mount Washington, after a lucky break allowed his "lower-middle class" family to move from a Hamilton row house to the historic northwest district at the edge of Baltimore County. Stark class realities were right before his eyes: His grandmother lived in Mondawmin, a 12-minute drive away but a world of difference, and he attended public school but shadowed at the private Catholic prep schools Mount Saint Joseph and Calvert Hall. "Being able to have that safety and see how these older white people are living … when there's any city problem, the city comes that day to fix it. But when I go to see my grandmother, the same homes on her street had been run down and dilapidated since I was a baby. If you're paying attention, you see the two sides of it."

A performer was born in 2009 when Michael Jackson died, and videos made the rounds of his collaborations with Guns N' Roses axe man Slash. A dazzled 15-year-old Brown followed the breadcrumbs back to Jimi Hendrix, which prompted him to pick up guitar. "Everything I was learning about the guitar experience was Black to me," he says. "I'm obsessed with Eddie Hazel, and everyone else at the cafeteria is listening to Gucci and Flocka and Boosie and, like, Dom Kennedy. Which I also liked, but they couldn't get why I was listening to AC/DC." Toward the tail end of high school, a youth renaissance led by crews like Odd Future, Pro Era, A$AP Mob and Black Hippy turned the tide in hip-hop, seemingly granting an entire generation of teenagers permission to jump to the frequency Brown was already operating on. "Guitar and music, it gave me a pass to be myself — and the same people that were making fun of me for playing guitar were asking for lessons by 12th grade." He was convinced to stay the course. "By the end of it, I realized: As long as I'm myself, I'm Black," he explains. "The only people that I want acceptance from is the Black community. But I don't want it at the expense of me trying to be something I'm not."

At 17, Brown traveled to Boston to attend the Berklee College of Music. He knew he wanted to spend all his time on music but wasn't sure about the path, and going to school at least mimed the gestures of careerist ambitions. When he showed up as a freshman, the idea was to become a session guitarist on pop songs. Then his grandfather died, and grief unlocked a new challenge: "I tried to write a song about it, and it was so ass that I got obsessed with writing songs." Composition came quickly to Brown, but mostly as a "raw, intuitive" process, which set him apart from his classmates, in whom he saw a pervasive single-mindedness. "It felt like everyone's parents gave them the talk right before — like, 'You've 

make money.' "He pauses for the slightest moment. "My parents did that, too. But me even being at Berklee, they fell for my trap. Going to Berklee was just my version of not going to college.

"I'm not the biggest music theory guy," Brown admits. "I can talk about it, but when you go to a school like that, you're surrounded by the greatest musicians in the world." Music school became an opportunity to experiment, to push himself to the furthest corners and see what would happen. It's also where he met his friend and bassist 

, whom he counts among the reasons for his move to NYC. "I do get a little afraid to think about what I would be doing if I didn't go there, only because of the people that I met through that experience. It was very formative." Still, there are things about learning music that go beyond instruction, toward instinct. "At Berklee, everyone assumed that musicianship carries over into songwriting," he scoffs. "It doesn't. Some of the worst songwriters I know are amazing musicians. It's a completely different muscle. Not every doctor knows how to do brain surgery."

Brown's thoughts on education are part of a larger ambivalence he holds toward institutions. He calls himself an "anti-church" guy but loves religion, noting that it ushered his mom through a tough time. Politically, he has high regard for praxis and finds theory too abstract. "A lot of people on the academic left are so well-read, but their entrance into working-class rights and race is purely theoretical. They don't have any lived experience," he says. In our conversation, he touches frequently on progressive talking points: the Overton window, corporate donations to politicians, Gaza as a rare litmus test ("If you're a true leftist, this is a no-brainer," he says). He points to Baltimore as a clear corroboration of socialist ideas in practice: "We're seeing that community projects work, less policing works, more money reinvested into the community works."

One of Brown's primary tenets is that you can't let wage work get in the way of creative work — even in a creative economy that demands a superhuman work ethic. In Los Angeles, he'd get home from his job at 11 p.m. and then work on music until 2 a.m. every day. "For me, my thing is songwriting. That was my thing for 10 years, and no one knew about it. It was my way of learning about myself, and it was an obsession. I was, 

, possessed by this hunger to create. And I think what I'm trying to say with this record is, we should focus on our personal works," he says. "It's not going to be sexy. I had to move back with my parents. I was just like, 

." He gave himself two years to work it out, figuring that if it didn't happen, at least he could tell himself he made something. He thanks God it did, but says he was prepared to sacrifice a lot. "I'm willing to die for it. To me, my life was for 

Brown's singing voice has the kind of character you can't deepfake, gruff but velvety with a sheen like velour. It's the perfect pair for a production style that gathers and filters ideas learned slowly by osmosis, taking the necessary years of searching as a given. You can hear that voice locking in on a song like "

," its timbre riding the wave of crashing riffs as he howls, "If I'm gonna go insane, at least I'm loved by you." Following the breakup that defined 

 is a rehabilitation of sorts, not-so-stealthily yearning and romantic, insistent that neither the state, mental health or even time can stand in the way of pursuing love. "What hurt the most was the things you realize about yourself in that process," Brown says of the post-separation soul-searching. "You just do more self-reflection. 

 is less heartbreaky: I can find love again, but it doesn't have to look a certain way." That self-reflection has led him to write and sing with new purpose. "My whole life changed faster than a minute / I dreamed this life, now I'm scared to live it," he sings on "

." One thing he isn't scared to do: use his new platform to say his piece. "The evidence was haunting / The world kept revolving / If you can bomb Palestine / You can bomb Mondawmin," he raps on "

Musically, he calls the new album his crack at the alchemy of early Kanye West albums like 

: "The soul of the album is hip-hop, even if the music might not be exactly hip-hop." The palette is as broad as ever, moving from club styles to something he's referred to as "freaked-out soul," but the music is more focused, turning what he's learned along his journey into a more robust sound honoring his favorite music: Max Martin's supercharged pop choruses, SWV's relaxed twang, Meatloaf and Nicki Minaj's shared flair for the theatrical. "I identify this album as post-R&B," Brown declares. "

 are that, too, but this is my contribution to the genre. I just think Black music is the most expansive." He bucks "genreless" as a distinction, but shrugs when others try to mark out the references he's making in his songs: "new jack swing," "Baltimore club," "indie-pop," "neo-soul." By his analysis, a different, more vibrational kind of indexing is taking place. "If I broke this down into parts, I could use them individually for different things, right?" he says. "I think that's how I see genres. I see them as feelings — what job is this getting done?"

The Nourished by Time project seems to be balancing Berklee songcraft with something more visceral at every turn. When Brown writes, he always forces himself to create A and B sections, having routinely been unsatisfied with building around a single eight-bar loop: "It doesn't feel like a song," he says. "It feels like something for the ego." Every time he makes a record, he tries to do something he's never done before. For 

, he learned Ableton Live, the digital audio workstation. For 

, 40% of which was recorded in one month earlier this year thanks to an intensifying tour schedule, he taught himself how to sample in the classic rap tradition. "I was trying to make a more concise album, but I still wanted to have the avant-garde and experimental aspects to it," he says. "In this record, I really wanted to identify as the music — like, I wanted the music to have a voice, and I didn't want to talk as much." He compares songs to a Ouija board, saying they will tell you where to go. "What's more important to me than the lyrics is the feeling of them coming out of my mouth."

Still, there is plenty of intention in the writing, which conjures a search for the American Dream in the minefield of late-stage capitalism, and the quiet revolution of persisting amidst the decay of empire. "I need a girl to cause a little civil unrest," he raps on "Baby Baby." "Tryna beat the system / Manifest a vision," he sings on "9 2 5." Even at their most casual, the lyrics feel primal, which Brown says comes from a natural instinct to speak to the proletariat: "Not everyone went to school and took Marxist classes," he cautions. "Not everyone knows what 'dialectical materialism' is. When you write about things in music, you have to write about them a certain way." R&B is a music of such passion that it has long been technically maligned, but there is no better sound to furnish Brown's gut-based form of songwriting. Tweaking its intensity and melodrama to his frequency — attaching himself to tradition, as he puts it — not only keeps him anchored amid an intuitive, exploratory process, it connects him to a deeply fundamental mode of being.

More and more, people are getting the message. In February, Nourished by Time toured with two of his indie exemplars, 

. Last month, he hit the Lollapalooza stage, and he kicks off his first headlining tour on Sept. 11 in Baltimore. Brown beams as he recalls his experience on the road — gushing about his billmates, collecting mentors, soaking up game. "I feel like I'm a rookie in the NBA," he says. "The misconception when you get signed is that you're supposed to just go crazy, make all this money, ball out. Nah." He points to 

 as examples of indie artists whose true breakthroughs came only after staying the course and establishing themselves across several albums, and he seems to be charting a similar trajectory for himself in his mind's eye.

With new visibility comes an aspect of this work that can only be learned by doing: maintaining your artistic identity in spite of greater and greater expectations. "Something I learned on tour is that the audience can't open up until you open up," he says. "All of this is so absurd that I'm going to be more absurd. It opens me up. I would be remiss if I wasn't myself, with all this attention." In the process, he has become a case in point for his own thesis: Work can be creative labor, and creative labor can be both a way to make a living and a way to define oneself. For years, Brown defined success largely in terms of the grind, where the only indicator of progress was whether he'd made something or not on a given day. Now, his lived experience suggests a grander, subtler version of success is closer than he ever imagined. As he sings on the album cut "

," "It took me 10 years — but I'm on time."

Sheldon Pearce

Marcus Brown toiled for 10 years before stumbling into indie stardom. On his thrilling new album, he hears music in every hour worked — day jobs included.


artist nourished by time posing for a photo

Lauren Davis

Nourished By Time - 9 2 5

Nourished By Time - Max Potential

Nourished By Time - BABY BABY

Nourished By Time's blue-collar blues

" Thompson is a timekeeper by profession. As a drummer, he's the co-frontman of the Grammy-winning hip-hop band 

 and a maker of films that illuminate the ways in which music is shaped by time and culture, and shapes it in turn. So his relationship to time exists very much in the present — as a creator of rhythmic structure, controller of tempo and catalyst of energy — but also in the past, as each drumstroke recedes immediately into the echoes of history.

, won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2022; his latest film, 

, is a masterful portrait of the legendary funk innovator 

. There's a moment in that documentary when a young Maria Shriver, in footage from a 1982 interview, asks Sly about the songs he wrote in the late '60s, when, in her words: "Just about everything in this country was in disarray." She asks him: "Did that make your job as a musician more difficult, or easier?" Without missing a beat, Sly answers: "Easier! Those are the kinds of things that make you feel like working and writing, playing, doing what you do — really trying to say something."

Those words made me pause and rewind a few times. Because these days, disarray is a condition transforming the lives and work of artists around the world. It was shocking to me that Sly's answer was so confident and clear, while we are grappling with such confusion about navigating the chaos of our own time. There may be many reasons why response and resistance in 2025 pose different challenges than in 1968. But also, I realize, Sly's answer came with the benefit of hindsight. Maybe it was only by looking back across the years that he could understand what it had meant to bear artistic witness to such upheaval.

My conversation with Questlove kept circling back to one unchanging truth: Time moves so quickly. As we walk through this life, our ability to perceive the contours of the present that surrounds and sometimes overwhelms us is limited. It's only by looking backwards that we can see where we were and where we were going, and understand what we were doing and what we were trying to say.

Lara Downes

The Roots drummer and Oscar-winning filmmaker uncovers the connections between his recent Sly Stone documentary and his own life story.


Stories

Interview: XINA

Minnesota Music Releases to check out from September 2025

PinkPantheress: Tiny Desk Concert

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PinkPantheress: Tiny Desk Concert

Angel Beloved (9/3/25)

Mustafa: Tiny Desk Concert

Minnesota Music Releases to check out from August 2025

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Nourished By Time's blue-collar blues

Nourished By Time's blue-collar blues

Questlove is charting the history of America through its music

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