behind the mask of ik.tomii; capital region hip-hop; transness in zines | capital ART

hello and welcome back to capital ART, a newsletter highlighting artists, events, and so on from the capital region. after this issue, we’re gonna switch the format just a lil bit but first…

ik.tomii on splitting

ik.tomii released mitosis on super bowl sunday 2025 and the album made immediate rounds among the community. my third best friend and second greatest enemy, tomii had been sitting on the album for months. with high-concept plans for a film and dreams of swimming in bigger ponds, the mind of tomii is stripped from his music entirely.

“when people listen to the music,” he says, “i want them to feel like they’re dying.”

death is an eternal nothingness, which we are lead to most often by pain. dying is something entirely different. while mitosis has painful, grieving lows and bright, unintelligible highs, tomii’s perception of the desired feeling - of dying - is not a value judgement. dying is a state of becoming, from something to nothing, and the album captures that perfectly.

i interviewed tomii in his bed, itself inside of his home studio (fitting.) the apartment is full of spiders, a nod to tomii’s nastier habits and to his namesake, a Lakota spirit Iktómi, who spins a web, connecting lovers. the duality of the man is immediately present; a figure i have a rapport with, bouncing constantly between serious craftsman, emotional introspecter, and funny dude.

tomii is many things - including “half disco ball on [his] mom’s side” - but above all, he is a fantastic artist.

stream mitosis (side A) now. stream side B later. watch our full conversation below.

fuck city.

in the last issue of this newsletter, dj mercy and i discussed a love of zine culture. while i am more than an advertisement for the stock of paper moon, i felt that conversation was incomplete without mentioning fuck city. i intend to dive further into the zine later, but for now know this: fuck city bangs.

in the face of fascist uprising and liberal quivering, fuck city chooses to continue producing art which pushes back. a small zine published seemingly by whimsy, it harnesses the punk underground to create a chaotic, provocative, and deeply necessary work.

the january 2025 issue, Deny. Defend. Depose., focuses on expressly political art across multiple mediums. poems repeating “there is no liberation in a label,” while collage art splatters “i am an american” amidst images of the many things that make that statement difficult.

error sparrow caps it off with an essay about what it means to be trans and creating art in a time where both of those things are decreasingly legal. given i can’t say it any better, i’ll block quote error’s conclusion:

if you haven’t already, dig deeper into fuck city. the zine is available at paper moon, probably some other places, and for free on error sparrow’s website.

download fuck city. follow error sparrow.

coming up soon.

not a lot is announced quite yet but some events that are coming up:

cap region rap

this week, i’m headed to a class at ualbany to moderate a panel of local rappers (aila chiar, wavy cunningham, and mic lanny.)

ahead of that, i decided to put together a playlist of a batch of my favorite local hip hop/rap tracks.

i’m going to take a quick second to shit all over the label i just used, despite my lack of ability to find a better one. many of the artists on this playlist would not necessarily identify with one or both of the “hip hop” or “rap” labels. although i’ve chosen these songs expressly for discussion of rap as a poetic form, many of them don’t include rapping in it’s traditional form. hip hop, conversely, has never been about form or technique but is, instead, meant to be about culture. what specifically that culture is no one really can tell you, you just know it when you see it.

for me, these artists have made their way on to the playlist by way of immediate connection; i.e. tw3ak is here because i think of tw3ak as performing on shows with artists who more cleanly fit the label.

however, i don’t think there is any method of taxonomy here which can be entirely intercepted from the urban music charts of the mid-20th century. before segregation ended and well after it was meant to, billboard and other music institutions would label all music made by people of color as “urban,” leading to chart fights between artists like chuck berry and billie holiday. hip hop and r&b have, in many ways, come to serve as a stand in for this — an artist of color is one of these two things, whereas the same music made by a white person might be labelled as pop.

i’m not interested in turning this into a think piece but this feels integral to the story of local hip hop. i’ve been around in the scene for a long time now and as a result have seen some biases, intended and unintended, create an undeserved stigma around local hip hop. further, i’ve seen artists judged for characteristics outside of the one that truly matters: if they’re dope or not.

these artists are all dope; give it a listen.

some local hip hop.

hell yeah lit stuff

april will be fun for hell yeah. we’re still sorting some stuff like:

• who exactly our next features will be

• how to keep up the pace of media work i’m doing right now

• how to handle national poetry month

• where to land brushes & pens for the future

in the meantime, mark these dates and go read some vanity published poems by amber jackson about yours truly on the hell yeah substack.

see y’all soon with our new format which will be, i promise, 1 artist feature, 1 business feature, an update on our work, a solid event calendar, and anything else that looks cool. hoping for 1 a week from here!