Artist Profile: Kudo Nyc

Written By G.C. Bellchamber

Kudo Nyc, the rapper and producer from Brooklyn, has found his personal voice and expression through the genre of hip-hop and, with his collective BLAK NOMADS, has blossomed into a multi-disciplinary artist, making sonic waves across the East Coast.

As a child with West African and Haitian roots, Kudo was exposed to a variety of ancestral sounds. Both his mother and father were drummers and dancers who specialized in African-rooted music, and Kudo grew up hearing the various Caribbean and African artists that permeated his parents’ musical scope.

As a middle schooler, Kudo began making DJ mixes, capitalizing upon the popular double tap dance scene of the time and spinning his songs at parties. However, this was a short-lived pursuit, as his brother quickly convinced him to begin making hip-hop beats instead that he could rap over.

Influenced by Nas, mixtape-era J. Cole, and N.W.A, Kudo began producing, using his brother’s wisdom to help him become more advanced in his soundscapes.

“I’ve always inputted that soundscape-y vibe and that grand sound from Nas' best songs or N.W.A.'s best songs or Wu-Tang's; just the environment of their music really inspired me. I only wanted to do things if it was grandiose, and my brother, he was very patient with me and I was very patient with him. We went for the biggest sound that we could achieve.”

However, shortly after gaining his chops at hip-hop production, Kudo moved to Baltimore with his father, where he was forced to find a new scene entirely to integrate himself into. Luckily, at the Baltimore School for the Arts, Kudo discovered a set of like-minded artists: ones that viewed rap as a unique means of expression and the creative process as an inherently transitory state.

Moreover, his experiences at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where he was able to study West African percussion, further diversified his musical horizons and introduced him to even more potential collaborators.

Yet, it was the forming of BLAK NOMADS, a collective that spawned from his friend group at Baltimore School for the Arts, that truly allowed him to pursue his artistic vision for the first time.

“I was couch surfing in high school with my musical friends up until I graduated and eventually got my own spot, but it was through that I found my collective… To this day, the dopest producers, the dopest artists, dancers that I know make up the collective, and it was really that that influenced my grungy side… It allowed me to have a purpose with my voice and become a vessel through the experiences I was going through.”

His first tracks, from the flute-driven “Bodega” to the experimental “Amistad”, bear the marks of his experiences within the context of his collaborations within the collective, unpacking dense emotional dynamics within the tightly-bound rhythms and grandiose instrumentation of his soundscapes.

In that time, he also learned to conceptualize and direct his own music videos, pairing stunning visuals with the driven manifestations of his own tracks.

Now, as Kudo returns to NYC after almost a decade, he plans to continue work with his collective but, at the same time, take his homecoming as an opportunity to start fresh in a scene, diving back into New York wielding the immense talent he has expressed over the past decade.

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