By Gary Suarez in Interviews — Feb 25, 2025

Henry Canyons: The 'Radio Free Cabbages' Interview [Video]

Watch the full video interview. +reviews of Child Actor & August Fanon and Q No Rap Name

Henry Canyons. Photo via Bandcamp.

"Anyone considering moving to L.A., spend as much time as you can before you move there," Henry Canyons says. "Very little is on face value [or] on the surface. It takes time to uncover it." The native Brooklynite, who left New York at the age of 18 and didn't return permanently until five years ago, spent enough time out west to know intimately just how different it was from the place where he grew up. "You know whether you like it or not," he says, conversely, of his hometown."Everything is direct."

Dropped earlier this month on Valentine's Day, Canyons' new album Educated Guesses (via URBNET) captures the rapper's distinct sense of place across its verses, his travels and travails playing out over its Fresh Kils instrumentals. As the guest on February's edition of Radio Free Cabbages, our program on Bushwick's own Newtown Radio, he discusses the road to its release, nearly seven years since his last solo album Cool Side Of The Pillow for Backwoodz Studioz. Watch the full interview video below or on the CABBAGES YouTube page.

(Please note this interview was recorded live in-studio on Monday, February 10, 2025, prior to the album release.)

Child Actor & August Fanon, Here And Here

(buy it / stream it)

Two of indie hip-hop's busiest beatmakers, Child Actor and August Fanon have respectively worked with several of your favorite rappers, including a few you probably haven't even caught onto yet. Most recently, the former dropped CINE with the ascendant Cavalier, while the latter seeded his upcoming album with Sleep Sinatra by dropping a joint EP teaser called Hero's Journey. For Here And Here, however, they've come through with a fully instrumental, albeit non-collaborative, set. Child Actor's "side," if you will, feels closest to the understood concept of a beat tape, with relatively few of his over two dozen tracks reaching the one minute mark. In his hands, the samples, though mangled and obscured, retain their inherent charms or are otherwise imbued with new ones. Take the jazz drummer bravado of "Gone Days," the warbling muzak of "Filo," or the dubwise manipulations of "Hibiscus" as examples of his craftsmanship. Speech snippets central to "Hematoma," reprised on "Gelatin" and the woozy "Rhododendron," among others, address the improvisational aspect of this work, asserting thematic cohesion rather than some random assemblage of tracks. With Fanon's turn comes a similar artistic purposefulness, beginning with the words that lead "Enter The Ignorance" into its mantra of choral soul. An adventurous emcee could assuredly navigate the noises and triggers, but without one in place songs like "Blade Runner Boogie" and "Eraserhead" compel listeners to pay closer attention to the cinematic details and recurrent elements. Driven by lengthy monologues, "Invasion" and "Ridah Ambitionz" put global politics on harsh display, while moments like "When It Rains..." take a lighter, more playful tack.

Q No Rap Name, LIVING ROOM

(buy it / stream it)

Q No Rap Name largely avoids sharing his music to the leading streaming platforms, instead posting projects to Bandcamp for more direct support. With Raymond Pettibon-inspired artwork by Chop The Head, LIVING ROOM marks a rare record by the Philadelphia-based artist to reach Spotify and YouTube, though its contents are more than worth opening your wallet over. His refusal to formally delineate between tracks, choosing instead to divide the whole thing into equal-ish halves and list the guest vocal features in order of appearance, gives this hourlong effort the loose, liberating feel of a mixtape in the classical sense. It takes more than four minutes for the first rapper, New Jersey's Freddy Stone, to show up with his bold attitude and 420-friendly verse, followed promptly by Vic Spencer and an even greater focus on smoking trees. Though CABBAGES favorites like Fatboi Sharif and Lungs make notable appearances, as do some of Q's prior collaborators such as Nán Fiero, the point of this release is to demonstrate the beatmaker's capabilities. Indeed, some of its highlights come when the bars are absent, with the plundered horns and upright bass solos of jazz's past slipping into the murky head-nod ether. Consider me loathe to log this under lo-fi, even as he borrows from boom bap and builds new structures with a nostalgic blur and low-pass filtration. That categorization doesn't do justice to the skill on display. This isn't background music; it's meant for the foreground from end-to-end.