Portland artist Lucas Dix has released a lot of music under the names of a lot of different projects, including Jellyfish Brigade, BCxLD, Hives Inquiry Squad, Shut-ins and the Colony, and R4PC4MP, just to name a few. For his latest project, he goes by the name of Claud Six, and takes a lot of new steps with the release of Vignettish.

Vignettish is interesting for a lot of different reasons, but one of the main ones is the way in which Dix has managed to push himself in new and different directions, but also remain true to himself in such a way that the minute you press play, everything feels familiar. There’s his gruff voice and smooth delivery, and his penchant for vivid imagery and story telling on the mic. However, when you listen just a little bit closer, there’s a lot going on here that is much different than his other projects. For one, Dix is handling all of the production himself for the first time. It’s not too different from past collaborators such as Brass Clouds (Dix has clearly been paying attention and learning all these years), but there are subtle differences in melodic choices and rhythmic patterns that affect his vocal delivery in certain ways that seem to have inspired him to take more chances on the mic. Secondly, Dix gave himself a set of parameters to forces himself to approach the music differently. One was that each song was to be no more than a minute long (give or take five seconds). The other was that each title was going to be taken from the dictionary.com word of the day from the day each beat was made. These restrictions help push Dix to approach his songwriting from different angles, making him work more economically, and to maybe take some different perspectives or take on different themes that he had in the past. And while so much of this release is all Dix, he still finds room to bring in guests like Kellen Asebroek, Blake Ambrose, Koda B, Dig Mode, Dug, David Lincoln Mann, Kurn’t Cobain, and Mohs to help give the release more of a family affair type of feeling. The real testament for how well this project worked is that for a collection of 24 one-minute songs, you feel like you’ve been taken on a real journey when you listen to Vignettish. I’m always surprised more time hasn’t passed, since I’ve been on such an intense listening experience while it’s playing, and I never feel short-changed by any of the songs.

The artist now known as Claud Six has given us yet another interesting hip hop project with Vignettish. It’s both easy and familiar to listen to, while also existing as a challenging and unusual release. That is no easy feat to pull off, but it sounds effortless here.