Duckwrth

Growing up in L.A., Duckwrth recalls always wanting to be an individual, feeling like that kid who didn't quite fit in anywhere completely. As he said, "South Central was a bubble. Everyone was either trying to make it to Hollywood or on some gangster shit." But for Duckwrth, growing up in a strict Pentecostal house, he always wanted to see the world beyond that bubble, and he got his first taste of that world with his ear pressed to the wall of his sister's room, listening to her play Erykah Badu. Soon he was in love with Badu too (he jokingly calls her his first girlfriend), which lead to other soul artists, which slowly but surely turned him onto rock like Led Zeppelin, which lead to punk like the Bad Brains, which mixed with battle rapping in the cafeteria and made Duckwrth an eccletic mixture that didn't resemble much around him. And so after graduating high school he moved to the Bay Area, America's home for those who don't fit in anywhere else, to attend art and design school. It's there that his music career began in earnest, there where he suddenly found himself at the cool kid's table because every table was a table of outsiders. First with his early group Tokyo 24 and then more recently with a collective of musicians and artists known as Them Hellas, Duckwrth channeled all of his energy into multidimensional music that was always as much visual as it was sonic.