PRISM

San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles · b. 2001 · FARA Records

PRISM (Micah Reyes, b. 23 December 2001) grew up in the working-class San Fernando Valley — flat heat, long boulevards, stucco and strip-malls under an enormous sky, the dream-factories of Hollywood just over the hill and the people who actually do the labour living down in the flats. His was a mixed household of two lineages, both built on hands and music: his Mexican-American grandfather laid bricks for pennies, and the quiet dignity of built things — the craft, the load-bearing work nobody credits — got passed down to him. He watched people build with their hands for almost nothing, then went and built an image out of almost nothing too; the guilt and inheritance of that gap is the thing he writes about.

He found music with a corner, a notebook and a name — telling himself the hunger was the only thing to claim. Conscious West Coast hip-hop became the honest register for someone determined to interrogate himself in public; the soul samples came from home. He built the city bar by bar, then started asking, out loud, what it cost and who really built it. His influences run conscious West Coast hip-hop and its soul lineage — the introspection and structural twists of Kendrick Lamar, the confessional register of J. Cole, the Valley/LA specificity of Vince Staples, the storytelling of Nas, the jazz-rap and soul-sample tradition — with the West Coast textured production lineage of Sounwave and Mustard underneath.

On stage he's the crowned-but-cracking king — magnetic and cinematic, grand on the surface with a deliberate vulnerability underneath. He performs the empire and then shows you the fracture; the honesty is the point, not a weakness. The name is the glass — the many-angled, always-lit public self — and the whole of “Glass City” is about reaching past it to the person underneath. As he puts it: PRISM is the tower, Micah is the foundation. Introspective, driven, honest.