From Here, Out There

Written by u/Army-of-One-

Artist: cropscropscrops & Vaygrnt

Album: From Here, Out There

Release Date: 25 January 2024 (Deluxe 7 March 2024)

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Background

cropscropscrops is an Ohio-born, Montreal-based rapper and producer, currently making himself known in the abstract & underground scenes through collaborations with names such as Pink Navel (Ruby Yacht) and steel tipped dove (fused arrow records, known for his production and engineering work for Armand Hammer, Fatboi Sharif, Alaska of Atoms Family, & ShrapKnel, among many other names); putting together and releasing three full-lengths albums in the 2024 calendar, he has proven to be as prolific as is he hard to pin down. Enter Vaygrnt, a New York-based producer with an equally abstract and undefined production style, releasing his own instrumental project Sailsongs to cap off an excellent creative year following his collaboration with crops – the short, yet mighty project released this past January, known simply as From Here, Out There.

Review

From Here, Out There is an album by two artists I’d never heard of, which I stumbled across the day it released by pure chance, scrolling deep into the stygian depths of a thread on r/makinghiphop. Intrigued by the description, I clicked the bandcamp link; and to say that I was not expecting to find not only my album of the year, but in my opinion, one of the defining projects of abstract hip-hop released in the first half of this decade, would be a massive understatement. I had to spend my first few weeks with the album really trying to confirm that I was sure about what I was hearing; and safe to say, my friends, I’m definitely sure. Despite being incredibly brief at only 18 minutes and change, I found myself continuously enthralled in the world built around me by the vivid lyrics and placid tone of one cropscropscrops; spoken almost entirely in metaphor, the way these songs conjure imagery in the mind is almost as potent of that of classic 80’s text-based adventure games, or perhaps a particularly good novel. Take the opener “arancini from a street vendor”, a two-verse slow burner that ends as cryptically as it does poetically: “my future son’s enigmatic pulls out milk from the fridge / you gonna wake up or keep sleeping it really is what is it is / but if i plot my path there’s some bones i gotta dig / this fragile dinner plate i bought for a couple of bones from a kid”. There’s usually no profundity in the banality of something like taking milk out of the fridge, but the way that lyrics like these are expressed across the album makes them hypnotic to me. It’s deadpan, quiet, defeated in timbre; but over the crashing snares, glitching electronics and mournful keyboard provided by one Vaygrnt, it leaves you reeling as the track falls off a cliff into the outro just as quickly as it began.

Speaking of, I’ll talk about the production on this album before I get into more specific tracks, because it’s uniformly incredible. When I usually listen to rapper / producer collaborative projects (even my favourite ones, such as Piñata, PRhyme, Below The Heavens), I’m left with the feeling that while, yes, they may share double-billing on the album and both put in roughly 50% of the work, it’s usually up to the rapper to bring the emotional weight to a record, to steer it in a particular direction once the producer has laid the groundwork, and pull the beats together into songs that form a cohesive tracklist. I don’t feel that way about From Here, Out There, and part of me wonders if that’s half the appeal. When I hear the soundscapes of tracks like “towards the sun” or “my phones recommended photos”, I can equally imagine Vaygrnt pouring sweat and soul into his productions as I can any rapper poring over their notepad, desperate to articulate an internal feeling that manifests itself as anything but words in the mind. Even a relatively simple beat like “coffee stain” after the opener is eye-widening in how starkly dour it is. When I listen to this track, short as it is at 74 seconds, I can almost see the blue colour fading off the album artwork; the sky instantly shifting to grey, each rubbery synth hit landing like a raindrop on the concrete. The lyrics are equally aimless; “where you goin after this, can I follow? / where you goin after this, can I follow?’ feels almost like a plea not to be left alone in the downpour. And with a thumping 808 machine-gunning away in the background, there’s still a head-nodding grove to it that keeps me coming back.

But I have to dedicate a paragraph to just the third track, “towards the sun”, solely on the merit of how phenomenal it is. Considering it follows “coffee stain”, the most despondent rap song that I’ve heard this side of Some Rap Songs, it almost gives me whiplash with how fast this beat swirls into a triumphant upwards spiral. I can perfectly envision the synth line cracking the clouds open and bursting the sunlight back through, the rays of light shimmering and sparkling just like the beautiful keyboard embellishments here do. “towards the sun, that’s consoling / I got sunk costs from cause and effect / cause all these days end up rolling down that same path. I stay blasé with it” are the first words vocalized above monotone on this album, crops upping his vigour and liveliness to finalize the blinding effect this song has on the senses. It’s really a moment I’m struggling to describe, but know it’s one of my favourite musical moments of this decade so far, and that’s with the excellent glitched-out rest of the verse notwithstanding. We get one more repeat of this serotonin overload at the outro of the song, and just like that it’s gone before the 2:30 mark – if you want to hear it again, you gotta run it back.

If it wasn’t enough to hit us with a perfect song this early in the tracklist (remember, track 3 starts not even four minutes after you’ve pressed play on FHOT), we get another perfect one directly after it. “my phones recommended photos” begins with a beautiful vocal loop before the peppiest drums on the album so far start to pepper the track like bullets. I think this song is actually the best example of something I’ve noticed about Vaygrnt’s production, and that’s how one-of-a-kind his drums usually sound – I don’t know if they’re sampled, spliced, warped, ran through tape machines or what, but there’s always an extremely specific and wholly unique tambre to his percussion I’ve never heard anywhere else. And speaking of unique; “a foxhole, my big ticket item” is just one of the many distinctive phrases that stick with me from this song. I mean, I totally agree, but I doubt I’d ever put that exact thought together, with those exact words, in that exact order. It’s extremely R.A.P. Ferreira coded, but missing completely the tongue-in-cheek wit or mild-superiority complex flavour usually found across Rory’s own work. I couldn’t even begin to tell you what “the email chain / astigmatism rain” is supposed to mean, but it’s a turn of phrase I’ve had stuck in my head since January, so I’m sure it has to be something. And I haven’t even mentioned the best part yet; when we reach the end of the verse, the first beat slowly fades away (mimicking the final words crops says on the track) to make room for an instrumental outro that is simply to die for. This minute-long beat switch right at the end is easily Vaygrnt’s strongest showing so far; an incredible and frankly intimidating muscle-flex behind the boards that truly shows what this young producer is capable of, and why your favourite abstract rap producer should be nervously glancing over Vaygrnt’s shoulder right now, trying to copy his homework. Serving double duty as a centrepiece to the album (we’re already halfway towards the end) I consistently find myself involuntarily turning the volume up to dangerous levels at this part, as the drums continue to rain down like hail, the colossal sound circling and enveloping you completely. There’s no point even trying to follow this moment up – the following track “taking a line for a walk” is a much quieter number, entirely drumless for the first minute, the croaky raps from crops barely registering over the static haze and and bare atmosphere. There’s some tasteful autotone drenching the final lines of this song, which really bring to life the dejected wailing it closes on; “and I see land ahead… and I’ll circle around again”.

The album contines to be a tonal rollercoaster, whilst still staying impressively sonically cohesive. “-2.5 / +2.5” uses an effective repeating mantra to hypnotize the listener – “under water, under construction, under surveillance, under the microscope, under review”, while “takeout” performs similar duty to “towards the sun”. Lifting the energy with much brighter production, a nice In Rainbows reference, and more strangely captivating mild frustrations: “the water bottle stuck in the vending machine, I shake it / but I can never get the god damn thing to fall”. I’ve never rooted more for a main protagonist dealing with this level of first-world problems; but given that the vending machine, like almost every other line on this album, is likely a metaphor, your interpretive imagination really is the limit with From Here, Out There. Our despondent hero exits this depressive world with the much more traditional-sounding “2 truths & a lie”; a plodding, but no less exciting beat leaves room for crop’s most verbose and lyrical song on the album, full of dense rhymes that leave much less space between the lines (at least compared to the very cautious and withheld delivery we’ve grown accustomed to across the length of this record up to this point). It’s harder to tell if the story on this track is more literal or figurative; “once in the west of France I was slipping out of some guy’s van door / slept on the mattress in place of his back seat” could be an entirely real, or just another imaginative twist on the unremarkable. Either way, it leaves us looking at the future as we leave this realm, as opposed to stuck beneath the cold water we see on this album’s beautiful cover photo. “my philosophy is that back fence gon’ get knocked down in the next storm, so you might as well go over” – well say less, mate. I’ll see you on the other side.

5 weeks after the release of this album crops & Vaygrnt saw fit to release a deluxe version of FHOT, bolstering the runtime from 18 to 27 minutes in the form of four more bonus tracks. While FHOT is a bulletproof release in it’s own right, and I don’t always feel obliged to listen to material tacked unceremoniously onto the end of albums, these cuts are just as great as the main album and I undoubtedly recommend them. My favourite might be “hands”, a joyous, buoyant cut composed of a beautiful looped choir vocal and wonderfully lyrical imagery; “I feed the mustang with my palm flat / a bit more grass has it moving spectacular.” Or it might be “blubird” the solitary instrumental cut, or the fantastic guitar-backed “out of the woods” with a verse from longtime friend & collaborator Static Res, the album’s lone guest feature.

Now extended to album-length, it became even easier for me to crown From Here, Out There as my favourite release of 2024. I’ve returned to it more than any other project in a year full of serious heavy hitters, diving into it headfirst like how I’d try to get lost in an ambient album; always knowing that when I come back, that climax on “towards the sun” is always going to scratch my brain just as well as it has all year, the outro on “my phones recommended photos” going to swallow me in a whirlwind of ecstatic noise, all of the abstract quotables I’ve barely scratched the meaning of going to sit unsettlingly with me for even longer. Vaygrnt has seriously outdone some of the biggest producers in the underground this year, on both this and his solo project, while crops has kept the momentum going with not one, but two more projects this June and September, produced in full by stale brick and backwoodz mainstay steel tipped dove respectively. Both of those albums are as short, sweet, and worthy of your time and attention as this, but I think the first one – January’s From Here, Out There – came out of the gate swinging the hardest, with the best production, the most captivating performances, and the tightest flow across a tracklist of all three. These two are names to be watching next year, and with plans for a second collaboration for 2025 well in the works, there is no better time to tap in to the new biggest talents in the underground than right now, and no reason to believe it will be of any less quality. Thank you so much for reading.

Favourite Lyrics

“a field recording of a conversation you once had / while your childhood friend painted stars on your face” – 9. hands “the water bottle stuck in the vending machine, I shake it / but I can never get the god damn thing to fall” – 7. takeout “an article in the New Yorker pay-walled / but I can see it’s 5 ways to break in the safe” – 10. out of the woods feat. Static Res “somehow we all end up gridlocked, my x, y axis a fight” – 1. arancini from a street vendor “towards the sun, that’s consoling” – 3. towards the sun “at the end of the road, sits the bend” – 12. boulangerie POM

Talking Points

Abstract independent rap music has metamorphosised in various ways over the last 20 years, from Def Jux, to Rhymesayers, to Hellfyre Club, and most recently we find backwoodz studios waving the flag for the subgenre. With it clearly inspiring music as good as this, do you think we will see more artists emerging in this vein than we have before, or will it continue to be a relatively closed-off club? have you ever found a decent album through reddit? Do you usually keep your ear to ground for smaller artists, or is there simply too much noise to cut through? Why the hell do almost half of these songs still have less than 1,000 Spotify streams? ):< Vaygrnt, if you’re reading this, I’m sure I got all the descriptions of your instruments wrong – it’s only because I couldn’t produce my way out of a wet paper bag. Sorry mate.

Thanks again for reading.