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🧞🪔 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙂𝙚𝙣𝙞𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙇𝙖𝙢𝙥 🧞🪔
In deep thought, Pink Siifu leans back in his chair. The sun is beginning to set, beaming directly into the frames of his black Oakley shades, as he looks skyward from the back porch of his Culver City AirBnB. I’ve just asked him how he wants to be remembered and he’s currently searching for the right words. He faintly repeats the question aloud to himself while bringing a light to his spliff, as if to buy time before landing on the perfect answer.
It’s the rare question that stumps him. More often than not, Siifu’s words roll artfully off the tongue, usually in the form of long-winded streams of thought. Answers that swerve right, then left, but leave you hooked for what lies around the corner. But right now, as the sky is beginning to turn on an idyllic Saturday afternoon in west Los Angeles, Siifu briefly ponders mortality and legacy.
“I want to be remembered for studying above all else,” he finally answers, pausing momentarily to allow that thought to sit in the air. “I’m super technical with where my discography is going, because I ultimately know what I want to present.”
You see, Siifu, real name Livingston Matthews, is very conscious of time. Not necessarily its inevitability, but more what he can leave behind. The rapper and multidisciplinary artist considers his records as “timepieces” — relics that can enrich generations to come. “I feel like the babies I make, the children of my music, they going to go crazy,” he quips.
The result has been releasing a collection of work at a breakneck pace, with each project reflecting a unique creative turn, if not an entirely new artistic persona.
Choose your adventure: Siifu, as iiye, the elusive loop chopper and beatmaker. The passionate lo-fi rapping poet and storyteller on ensley. Siifu, as a woozy, narcotized vocalist under his South Texas rap outfit, Kryptonyte, alongside Dallas rapper Lord Byron and Jade Fox. The cooled-out record shop owner on FlySiifu’s. Or the riotous Black punk artist on NEGRO!, his sharpest left turn artistically – aptly channeling the repressed rage of Black America during the 2020 uprising.
Matthews’ music weaves a web between various pillars of neo-soul, afrofuturist jazz, and hip-hop — D’Angelo, Badu, Goodie Mob, Sun Ra, Ras G — making for a sound that is ostensibly some of the Blackest shyt you’ll ever hear.
“When I first named myself Pink Siifu, I thought of an artist you would see at a festival and be like, ‘Pink Siifu? The f*ck?’ Go there and it’s all these different genres,” he tells me like he’s painting a picture. “I’ll make a punk track tomorrow, a rap track, and a jazz track in the same week. But it’s intentional where it’s getting placed at.”
While he is prone to take detours, you can file his latest, IT’S TOO QUIET..’!!, as quintessentially Siifu: a sprawling 17 tracks, still fixed with neo-soul and lo-fi trappings but thoughtfully channeling genres and new sounds.
Turich Benjy is along for the ride and often takes command of the wheel. His rangy, often auto-tuned vocals offer a vibrant catalyst to Siifu’s soulful rasp. Where Siifu, the world-building architect of the project, sounds like he’s whisper rapping boasts while laid up on silk sheets, Benjy attacks with abandon. He harmonizes so instinctively that it registers as borderline spiritual.
“He always comes different,” Siifu says of Benjy. “I’m already knowing based on certain beats what he’s going to bring. He might come a little bit like how I came, but he always going to take it somewhere else.”
In person, that dynamic plays out a bit differently. When we meet, Siifu and Benjy are equal parts jet-lagged and sleep-deprived – less than 24 hours removed from a London-to-LA flight that was immediately followed by a 3 a.m. night in a studio somewhere near Highland Park. The deluxe album could be on the way soon, they say. Siifu has just wrapped up the third leg of the Leather Blvd. tour with B. Cool Aid. — his collaborative neo soul-revival project with close friend and producer Ahwlee. Benjy just linked with him at the final stop.
More here
Pink Siifu & Turich Benjy Are Making Tomorrow’s Music, Today
Myles Andrews-Duve links with Pink Siifu and Turich Benjy to talk about their travels informing IT’S TOO QUIET..’!!, Siifu carefully curating a genre-morphing discography, not being driven by algor…
