An Interview With Nomen

I’ve been involved in the underground discord rap circuit for a while. Not too involved, mind you, but enough to where I’ve had my finger on the pulse of several different collectives, each with their own rollouts and artistic ecosystems. Nomen has been honing his musical talent for a minute now, and he finally began the rollout of his debut EP “Homebrew” a couple of weeks ago. 

Nomen is a Norwegian rapper who takes inspiration from the MF DOOMs and the Aesop Rocks of the world. He’s an intellectual lyricist with a penchant for the wordy and a distinct voice. One can only hope his obvious potential materializes into quality on the upcoming EP, if the following interview I conducted with him is any indication of such. 

Here is the transcript (mostly) verbatim. 

G: What themes are you going to tackle on the Homebrew EP?

N: Obviously I don’t wanna spoil too much, ‘cause it’s yet to release. I like to be vague about things before they release because it gives people some room to figure things out on their own… The one thing I’ll say is that it’s not like super conceptual, but it has some core themes about creation. The whole thing is a sort of love-letter to creation. All the tracks are gonna cover different aspects of creation in a way, and show different aspects of life tying into creation. 

G: What was your biggest inspiration for this EP?

N: I’m gonna be a little bitch when I answer that and say that it was most likely primarily my friends. Shoutout to Greenfield (editor’s note: fuck you) and Waylon Mercy, who have both released shit with zero budget, and minimal skills (laughs) that turned out quite nice. So I guess, especially after Nobody Now released, I was like yo, it’s actually possible to make something with a lot of artistic content and depth even though you’re at this really fucking pathetic, low stage of creation where no one really listens to your shit, and you don’t have any resources or anything. But you’re still able to make something actually impressive. I was working on Homebrew before that dropped too, but I think when it dropped it really just solidified to me what the EP should be.

G: Why did you decide to make an EP as your first project instead of a mixtape or an album?

N: The reason I chose to make an EP was primarily because I wanted the scope to be realistic. I feel like when you’re starting out with creating things, it’s very easy to kind of aim too high, and as a result of that, you end up ditching a project before it’s even really begun. Or that you aim so high that you’re not able to really carry out your vision with the skills that you have. So when I was planning out what Homebrew was gonna be, I just decided like “okay, four tracks, that’s gonna be it. That’s all I have for this.” While I was making it, I did kind of consider at some point to add more tracks and expand it into an album or something like that. But I felt like it was best if I kept it to the original vision of having it be short and concise. You also ask why I didn’t make it a mixtape, which would probably also have been a fairly reasonable scope, I guess. Honestly I’ve never really understood mixtapes. Like, I get it for the pre-digital era when it was nice to distribute these things and gain some traction and I don’t know…

G: Underground notoriety?

N: Yeah, underground notoriety. And with the digital age, I don’t feel like that’s such a big deal anymore. Because I can just hit up one my friends and get a beat, and sit on my PC and write something and arrange everything all on my own. I’m not as constrained resource-wise as people were back then. I think creators nowadays have more resources to make something creatively impressive on their own, than like – a mixtape, which is less formal than an album. It’s not meant to be as polished. But we’re able to make something with more polish than that.

G: If you had unlimited resources, what would you make? What’s your TPAB (To Pimp A Butterfly)?

N: At this stage, I’m not afraid to admit that I often don’t really know where I’m going. Like, I’ll have an idea and just kinda carry that out. I don’t have any long-term plans musically. That goes into a lot of different aspects of it, I guess. I don’t think resources are really the limiting factor here. The only thing I’ve been considering that could really improve my music right now… that’s probably gonna be professional mixing and mastering. I feel like if I had money to put into music, that’s where I’d wanna go. I don’t feel like paying for beats, because I’m really down for leeching off your friends, heh. That’s also kind of the reason why I decided to only use people I know as producers on this EP. Cause I feel like it makes it a lot more personal and gives it a lot more identity than if I just found some fucking type beat and bought it. So I don’t feel like it’s resources that are limiting me creatively right now, I feel like it’s mostly just my skill. Though there are of course aspects in which having money would definitely would up the quality of my shit in some ways.

G: You’re saying your own skill is the biggest limiting factor, what aspect of your skills do you most wanna hone?

N: I’m a rapper, first and foremost. I’ve been dabbling a lot more in production recently, but I still feel like rapping is where it’s at for me. Maybe that’s gonna change, I don’t know. So that’s probably where I wanna focus, skill-wise. Production, I guess that’s important too. My goal, creatively, is sort of to achieve self-reliance. So not necessarily that I will do everything on my own, but that I’m able to. So I’m able to write everything myself, produce everything myself, mix and master everything myself. So I don’t need to involve anyone else if I don’t want to. I’m kind of a control freak, so, to me, I feel like if I’m not at least familiar with each step of everything to ensure that everything is going according to my vision, then I feel like it’s not really my project anymore…I admire the idea of everything coming out of the vision of a single person.

G: Does this relate to the title of Homebrew?

N: One thing that I think is pretty important to realize about everything in that project is that I’m trying to be self-aware about the stage I’m at, and the level at which I’m making shit. This isn’t some kind of huge studio production like a Kanye album, with fucking 7 million people helping him out with everything and working together to create this. I’m kinda just labelling it as it is, which is one dude just sitting there and putting his mind into a piece of art. 

G: So it’s sort of meta, in a way?

N: Yeah, that’s definitely something I was going for. I enjoy the angle of having a piece of art sort of be about itself. And I feel like that’s a kind of niche that’s not really filled in music today, at least at this level. I listen to a good bit of music from other amateur musicians, and none of them really cover what they’re doing. They talk about their lives, they talk about things that concern them. It could be politics, it could be what they ate for breakfast, I don’t know. But I feel like none of them really cover the process of creation. And I think that’s kind of sad, ‘cause when you look at a lot of rappers over the years, a lot of them have been rapping about rapping… at least to some extent (and people still obviously do that, also at our level). But I feel like people aren’t thinking enough about why they rap about rapping. Because the way I see it, they still rap about their lives, but since rap is such a big part of their lives, they obviously wanna comment on that aspect of that. If you feel me. 

Yeah, I feel you, pal. But that’s where the interview ends. Make sure to check out “Homebrew” when it drops on SoundCloud on September 15th. It will be available here: https://soundcloud.com/whoisnomen

Keep up with the rest of the BrainThoughts collective here: https://www.instagram.com/brainthoughts_bc/