On Saturday, rap impresario Alexander Spit took over the backlot at local corner shop Virgil Normal (a former mo-ped shop located at 4157 Normal Ave., Los Angeles) set up his mobile studio and invited all of his local friends to knock out a new record with him. The album just dropped at alexanderspit.com. The scale and magnitude of such an ambitious endeavor within a music world struggling with fluctuating examples of authenticity is something that hasn’t been truly understood thus far. Enlisting local rappers and musicians from the likes of Hugh Augustine, Senay Kenfe, AmirSaysNothing, Theophilus Martins, Manu Li of Warm Brew, and KT The Terrible throughout the day to record what Spit is already calling “my realest work with mistakes, imperfections and flaws intentionally included. It’s my ode to the artistic process.”
A day spent in the midst of his peers, Spit had 100 custom-made cassettes to capture the only physical reference to the feelings in the air, all designed and hand-drawn by one of his closest homies, Manface. Sprinkled across the room was burning sage, hot dogs and carne asada on the grill, and Natural Born Killers on VHS playing in the corner. As Senay Kenfe says, “Feel like me and the homies took over the Basement from Rap City and just knocked out a record that captured this moment in time in the best way possible.”
Playing the role of producer, engineer and rapper throughout the day to make the 10 track album come to fruition, Alexander Spit was able to accurately capture much of the tension filling the creative space here in LA with the recent political protests against the results of the presidential election of Donald Trump as well as feelings of displacement and anger with the rise and fall of many of the artists we’ve come to idolize within the scene (“this that fuck that Kanye”). The album was released to much fanfare at 7 pm where a live session at the shop followed in accompaniment with the ongoing photo exhibit Lost in LA by Japanese artist Ryuta Hironaga. After taking a poll on his Instagram account, Alexander has pushed forward with streaming Alive at Virgil/Normal online. Listen above!
Check out photos from the monumental day and night over at Suspend Mag and below.
Photos: Suspend Mag