At this point in time, I can’t tell you very much about the artist named Scottie Spitten, because he and his label haven’t made much information available. In the way they have done so, it is also indeterminate whether this has been on purpose. All this really means in practical terms is that all we can do is judge his new album, S.C.O.T.T.I.E., on its merits. What I can tell you is that this is his debut album, it was produced entirely by Radio Galaxy, and it was recorded in Space City, Texas.

Few producers have been as busy in recent years as the DC duo known as The Other Guys, who have produced for the likes of Tanya Morgan, J-Live, Substantial, and more, along with releasing their solo album, The Working Class, in 2017. For their most recent project, they’ve teamed up with one of the four million members of Lessondary, Brooklyn emcee Rob Cave, to drop an EP simply titled Word.

Rhys Langston is an emcee/producer from Los Angeles. His most recent project was the 2017 EP, Aggressively Ethnically Ambiguous. During SXSW, he sat down to talk with us about that release, coming up in L.A., and some upcoming projects. Scratched Vinyl: Let’s start with the basics. How did you first get into music? Because you produce and rhyme, did one come before the other? Rhys Langston: I think I kind of had always been writerly, had a writer’s approach to things.

Equipto is a Bay Area emcee who has been working for years as a member of Bored Stiff, as a solo artist, and collaborating with artists such as Opio, Otayo Dubb, and Andre Nickatina, to name a few. Just last year, he teamed up with producer Brycon to release the excellent The Watershed. Now he comes back with a solo album, Few and Far Between. For the album, Equipto assembles beats from Sinestro Enigma, Monk HTS, Evaclear, Bean One, Shayne Hill, Tahaj the First, Professor X, Laird, Otayo Dubb, and G-Pek, with some additional live instrumentation on bass and horns.

MC Frontalot is one of the key figures at the forefront of the subgenre known as nerdcore. Recently, he released his seventh full-length album, Net Split, or the Fathomless Heartbreak of Online Itself. We caught up with him during SXSW to talk about the album, the concept behind it, working with a new generation of nerdcore artists, and more. Scratched Vinyl: You just release the new album. MC Frontalot: Yeah!

Olmeca and BeOnd make up two-thirds of the group Acid Reign, along with Gajah. They recently sat down with us during SXSW to talk about Olmeca’s new single, Acid Reign’s new single, the history of the group, balancing projects, and more. Scratched Vinyl: Let’s start with your most recent stuff. You just dropped the single, “Define.” This came together over the course of two years? Olmeca: Yes. SV: So what was the original idea, and how did you find yourself taking this musical journey, just in the course of one song?

Roy Christopher is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at The University of Illinois – Chicago and a member of the Adjunct Faculty at Loyola University Chicago. Amongst other things, he has contributed to The St. James Encyclopedia of Hip-Hop Culture and served as assistant editor for DJ Spooky’s Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. His latest book is Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future. In Dead Precedents, Christopher examines hip hop’s relationship to the future, and how it’s served as a forward-thinking culture from its inception.

Chris Conde is an emcee/producer from San Antonio who has been performing for over a decade. Despite all of this experience, he just now released his first full-length album, Growing Up Gay. He sat down with us during SXSW to talk about the journey to that album, the album itself, and what it means to be a queer artist in independent hip hop. Scratched Vinyl: Let’s just start with the basics.

Monday, March 11th Monday is something of a soft opening for the Music portion of SXSW, so the schedule wasn’t jam packed with choices, but that doesn’t mean that wasn’t anything to see. At the Empire Control Room, the Keep It Local showcase was going down. I got there in time to first see NickNack spin some records. NickNack has been an Austin-based DJ and producer for years. If you’re familiar with some of his albums, you might think of him as an artist who makes chilled out, jazzy downtempo records.

Tornup is an emcee, producer, and bassist from Fort Worth who has quietly been making progessive hip hop in Cowtown for years. In February of 2019, he released his most ambitious album to date, a concept album about the prison-industrial complex called You Will Never Understand (The State of Soul), done in collaboration with the producer Arkatype. Before SXSW, there was a pitstop in Arlington, Texas where Tornup took the time to talk to us about the album, his origins with music and hip hop, and how the prison-industrial complex has affected him and his family.