Artist Profile: Lee Ikari

Lee Ikari, through his combination of subdued, mellow bars and spacial instrumentals, lays down his variety of influences to the sacrificial altar of his artistic vision, drawing cohesive bodies from the dust of his genre-wanderings.

Growing up between Florida and New York, Lee was exposed to a plethora of musical greats. His father, who he described as a “New York old-head”, listened primarily to the monumental rappers of the East Coast from the ‘90s; Cam’ron, Nas, and Styles P laid heavily within his father’s rotation. 

Yet, he formed his own music taste very early on, exploring jazz and lo-fi music on Youtube as early as third grade. As he grew older, this blossomed into both an obsession with finding sounds that scratched his artistic itch and an interest in developing a careful, critical ear through which to experience them.

In middle school, he fell out of love with his other creative venture, drawing, and gravitated wholly toward music, even skipping class to record reference tracks in the bathroom.

“I've always had a love for music, and I started making it eventually because, when you love something enough, you're going to want to at least try it at least once. If you like movies, you want to try to make a short film. I've always had a love for the arts in general… and music is just one of those things that I loved enough to put that effort forth.”

Like many artists of the internet era, Lee’s creative formation took place almost entirely in isolation; he quickly learned to produce, mix, and master his own songs out of this necessity.

This aided his already picky ear, and, thus, he was eventually able to craft his instrumentals into the precise forms he envisioned.

While his first two projects, World Ending Teenage Equation and Depakote (Son of Lithium), were released just last year, Lee has spent almost a decade refining his sound. While fully releasing his music required him to overcome any doubts regarding his public artistic presence, he, in part, chalks up his years of unreleased work as evidence of the endless hours that he has poured into his craft.

“I get a lot of DMs now, especially recently when I really started posting my stuff, people really liking my music, which is always good. But I also get DMs from other people, saying ‘Man, I hope to be as good as one day’. There's nothing special about me; if you put in the hours, and if you work, you can close the gap between you and anybody. That's all [that] matters: how bad you want it or how much you care about it, and it'll show.”

While, in his future output, Lee plans to continue drawing from the wide variance of genres that have helped to form him as an artist, he also, partially, wants to become more focused and cohesive in his output. He has, thus far, cast a wide net with his work, believing that there is something in his discography that will appeal to everybody.

However, in the process of working on his new project, his first full-length album, he has been closely studying song structure as well as the pop overtones of Andre 3k’s half of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.

For fans of rap that not only plays in other genres, but embodies them, Lee Ikari’s growing discography should be well worth its discovery.