KOCHI: Growing up, Down Trodden (DT) (@ down_trodden on Instagram) would listen to Eminem when his elder brother played it at home. “Hip hop infected me back then, and it continues to do so,” says the Kochi-based artist. As a photographer, Down Trodden quickly made a name for himself with the kind of frames he chose, where the subject is always more important than the backdrop, a sort of architectural calculation that was very new in fashion photography.
It was on returning to Kochi last year, after a tryst in Hyderabad, that DT seriously considered making videos. “I was a fan of the low-angle, wide frames in old school hip-hop videos. It is about the artist and their art. Not commercial movie making, but the music taking centre stage,” he says. It is no wonder then, that his latest project, Alt Echo, an audio-visual series that tells the story of south Indian hip-hop borrows from the old school style.
The first episode of Alt Echo featured rapper MC Couper with the track ‘No Choice’, and the second one featuring Imbachi from north-Kerala based act Street Academics released two days ago.
“The idea is to familiarise people with underrated artists from the south and their music. ‘No Choice’ was released an year ago as an audio track, and I always thought it deserved more attention. We live in the age of visual storytelling. I am attempting to pool these areas together to promote hip-hop as an art,” says DT.
However, he has more plans for Alt Echo. “Hip-hop is just taking off in Kerala. This is the right time to record and document this culture, and bring deserving artists to the forefront,” says DT, who is a part of city-based content creators Mixmo studio. The first season of the series will feature five more artists including Dabzee, Vaidyan, Vkdv and D’backer and Thiruvananthapuram-based act Bando Brother. Starting second season, it will document interviews as well as stories from underground hip-hop.
FLOW STATE | THE IMBACHI
“We’re empowered, a beast not a sinner, Like beef roast, porrota, I eat like a villain” — Flow State is right up his alley for Imbachi, the politically correct rapper part of Street Academics. The song is part of his collaborative album that is slated to release by the end of the year. “I think it is great that projects like Alt Echo are helping artists put themselves out there, free of cost, and purely based on merit,” he says. Imbachi’s another single ‘Chocolate’ is on the way and ‘Valayar’ with his band Street Academics also dropped this week.
NO CHOICE | MC COUPER
We caught MC Couper as he was travelling back from Bengaluru after recording an episode for Parimal Shais’s homegrown hip-hop video series Curry Chatti beats. “DT spoke to me about No Choice which released some time in early 2020. The importance of a good video in creating traction for a song cannot be understated. The song got great reach on IGTV and digital platforms with Alt Echo. Such platforms can have a huge impact in creating a platform for emerging artists,” he says.