Photo Credit: Pj Moody
It didn’t take Will Rose long to realize that his old stage name wasn’t working. “I used to make music under the name Airhythmatic, which is just a terribly long, difficult to spell and pronounce moniker,” says Rose, who has since started rapping under the more manageable name Airo Kwil (pronounced “Arrow Quill.”) These are the kind of adaptations that artists have to be open to early in their careers, Rose says. Sometimes your original vision for a project doesn’t pan out and you have to recalibrate. There’s more than a little trial and error involved.
“Finding your own voice is something that really takes a long time,” says Rose. “I see a lot of artist who have promise and talent but ultimately sound like someone else. It’s a long process of getting in tune with what you want to do to actually find your own voice. It’s like finding this needle that’s buried in a pile of cigarette butts.”
Like his stage name, Rose’s approach to rapping has also evolved since he first started performing about five years ago. Back then he was mostly rapping over prerecorded beats, but he’s since incorporated a live band into his routine, a setup that plays to his background as a percussionist.
That band is incorporated in some interesting ways on his debut full-length as Airo Kwil, Dark Cinema, A Study in Paradox , out this April 16. Most of the album was tracked live by the group, which includes Palmer Shah on guitar and Rose’s sister Johanna on upright bass and backing vocals. Rose then deconstructed those recordings, reworking them into terse hip-hop beats. As a result, Dark Cinema plays like a rap album, but has the unmistakable feel and texture of an indie-rock album. It’s hard to classify. You could call it art-rap, but as Rose rhymes on “Fifty Shades of Grey By Ernest Hemingway,” it’s “art-rap insofar as Fargo was an indie film.”
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The off-kilter hip-hop of Minneapolis’ Rhymesayers label serves as a particular influence on Dark Cinema , and like many of that label’s most prominent acts—Atmosphere, Eyedea and Blueprint, among them—Rose raps in a dense splatter of tangled metaphors, pop culture references and raw emotion. He’s a showy rapper, but even his most elaborate wordplay usually takes a backseat to his percussive delivery, which reflects his instincts as a drummer.
“I’ve gotten comments to the effect that people can really hear that I have a strong sense of rhythm, and that I carry the rhythm with my voice,” he says. “Not every hip-hop artist has that going for them, where they have the strong percussive element within their writing. I’m very exact in how I write rhythms and fit the pieces together.”
Airo Kwil’s Dark Cinema, A Study in Paradox will be streaming at http://airokwil.bandcamp.com beginning Thursday, April 16. He’ll play a release show that night at Mad Planet at 9 p.m. with D’Amato, MIGO and Bo Triplex and His Beautiful Band.
