New York hip-hop experimentalist Elucid: 'I like the harmony of the city'

Elucid sat in the Dream House, the long-running Manhattan installation by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, letting incense and drifting tones wash over him. Fridge-sized speakers in the room’s corners played shifting drone parts beneath pink and purple light; he walked through the space, found a place to lie down and drifted off.

It was his first visit in at least a decade, and he said his habit of using floatation tanks had him primed for the installation’s meditative effect: “It takes a minute to get into another space, but I definitely got there.” Growing up in South Jamaica, Queens, near JFK airport and railroad tracks, Elucid absorbed the city’s noise as a familiar presence.

That living racket threads through his work—solo records such as Revelator and Valley of Grace use spiky, sandblasted loops, and his production on Paraffin, Armand Hammer’s 2018 breakout, is blunt and bulky. “I just like those sounds,” he said. “I like the harmony of the city.

United States, New York City

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