Paul Thompson knew that your man is a bird before you saw him in sandals and socks.
If you spend time in Los Angeles, you’ve spent time with Nobody’s music, even if you aren’t aware of it. The DJ and producer has been a fixture in the city’s hip-hop, electronic, and beat scenes for a decade and a half, as a solo artist and as a sort of ill-advised spirit guide for rappers and other producers. His fingerprints can be traced from records by Freestyle Fellowship to Anderson .Paak and through all points in between, including the art-rap nexus of Busdriver and Nocando. (Nobody and Nocan share time as residents at Low End Theory, the weekly institution that just celebrated its ninth anniversary and serves as ground zero for the intersection of beat and hip-hop.) Next Friday, he’s dropping a new EP, Prodigal Son, through fellow Low End magnate Daddy Kev’s Alpha Pup. To tease that, he taps another of the city’s most innovative underground MCs, Open Mike Eagle.
“Feel At Home” is the sort of disquieting theme that your Playstation 1 couldn’t quite conjure up. Where many of his peers try to bleed their tracks into one fluid whole, Nobody is unique for putting the component parts front and center. So while Mike tries to find somewhere to sit and siphon well drinks, you’re left to reconcile the keys and the synths as they toy with your anxieties. For the Prodigal Son’s closing song, it doesn’t offer much in the way of resolution—but that’s probably the point.
