Next month our 2022 Artist To Watch Rhys Langston unveils his new album Pale Black Negative. So far the LA musician has released “Ate The Tuning Fork While I Taxied In The Crepuscular” with Open Mike Eagle, "When I’m Squared With Happiness," and "When The Orchestra Is Dreaming" with Mike Ladd, and now he's back with “It Jes Grew (Right Outta Me).”
"In the summer of 2021 I casually sat down at my Minilogue synth and found a chord patch, which brought me to a drum loop, then my acoustic guitar, electric bass, and finally a shaker," Langston told Flood about the new (and final) single. He continued:
A few months prior I had read Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, and so when I built the song’s initial loop, the sung phrase "it jes grew" and the melodic structure of the B part of the song came out fully formed. Over the following months, trying to massage the composition, build out the intro part, and then source some samples and foley, it became, frankly, a jumbled mess. However, around a year later in 2022, I decided to sit down with the song again. Over the course of a few weeks I fine-tuned the arrangement, wrote the intro rap, and gently annoyed my friends to send me some clips of them talking about their hair. Now, in 2025, the 6:21 runtime joint arrives, an ancestrally connected piece about hair, whirling through many sonic and historical references and spaces. Somehow I found room for my voice and drew my own throughline in the continuity of Black diasporic music.
Listen below.
Pale Black Negative is out 6/11 on his own Black Market Poetry label. Pre-order it here.
