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Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/853426
58 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 8.17 19th birthday. A storage closet is now a re- cording booth with exposed insulation in the ceiling, walls of sound-proofing foam that looks like egg cartons, headphones hanging from a hook and a microphone stand. Har- low is six-foot-three and has to duck under the ductwork when entering. 2fo is always in a trance tweaking beats at the computer, the top of the headphones hiding in his afro. Shloob operates a sewing ma- chine with a foot pedal, tailoring a thrift-store pair of black-and-white floral women's pants for Garvey. Craighead gets home late from work at Cricket Wireless and tells a story about how he was looking at his phone and ran a red light and almost died. "Damn," Harlow says, "you're a real menace to society." O'Bannon says, "I just got a job." Doing what? "I think it's like insurance?" Harlow mentions how he opened a box of Little Debbie Donut Sticks at Kroger, took one out and hid the evidence. "You can grab a chocolate milk, finish it, throw it away, and walk out," he says. Garvey: "You could do that with any food in Kroger and not get caught." Shloob: "You could eat a whole dinner." Harlow: "And that shit's on the record!" e guys execute a complex handshake that includes finger snaps. "Y'all look like a damn NBA team," Nemo Achida, a Lexing- ton rapper in his late 20s, says. When Achida goes on a back-in-my-day tangent, Harlow says, "So what you're saying is, the youth is taking over." (Achida is featured on the song "Obsessed," off 18. "One thing that I thought was dope — that nobody had done to me before — is Jack made me re-write my verse," he says.) Harlow has been trying to suppress his debilitating perfectionism by creating down here "in the moment" — if those words can mean a session that stretches from 8 p.m. until the slap-happy stage of fatigue at 4 in the morning. e beat loops for so long that it somehow becomes white noise. Harlow has turned off the "damn cafeteria" fluores- cent lights. e lamp bulbs cycle through colors — blue, red, purple, green. Phone in hand, Harlow writes while leaning against the basement support pole, sitting on the the beat is loud enough to shake walls. "Just hitting me in the face," Harlow says. "It has to be loud enough to cover my voice." He likes to rap out loud, to mesh with the beat, but doesn't want anybody else to hear what he's saying until he's ready to record. "When it's not coming it feels like work, like: Do I even love this anymore?" he says. "But when I'm in the zone, I'll start rocking back and forth like I'm going crazy or something. It's a euphoric feeling I can't step away from. I'm not even necessarily a third-eye kind of person, but there's something spiritual about it." When I ask him to show me some of his notes, he says, "is is a very personal space." He scrolls so fast it's as if he doesn't want me to see. e only words I catch are: "at junk food give me love handles for the summer." He says he'll send me some examples later, but when I remind him, he texts: "I don't think I can. I didn't even really like showing you at the house or when you wrote down that one example. A big part of the art for me is choosing what I release to the world." I ask him if he can tell me how many individual notes there are. Six hundred and one. e basement studio is also called the Private Garden, where one of the books on his mom's old cow-print coffee table is Private Gardens of Paris. e whole concept for the name came to Harlow during a film-studies class his senior year, while learning about the Japanese director/ animator Hayao Miyazaki. One of the settings in Howl's Moving Castle is a secret garden. "I was kind of half-watching and that scene came on," Harlow says. "I've al- ways liked garden-ass shit: gazebos, benches, things that people built that are overlooked daily and might not get used." e basement carpet is the same color and thickness as the fringe of a golf green. Wood paneling encases the walls and even some of the window wells. e beanbag is Shloob's. e guys use an Akai MPK49 performance keyboard — "Aka professional," Harlow says — to concoct beats. Speakers flank a desk, on which stands a tiny resin garden fountain Harlow's mom used as a cake-topper for his carpeted stairs, sprawling on a love seat. His hair dangles like Spanish moss as he hunches over, the screen's rectangular glow reflecting in his glasses. He mouths the word puzzle connecting in his brain. When he makes eye contact, it's clear his mind is somewhere far away. en: "All right, let's go." He heads toward the booth. "I'm still me when I'm in there," Harlow says. "I'm just homing in on different zones of my personality." Tonight he's doing a 45-second verse that begins with him rapping, "is the shit I ride around to when nobody text back. I call this shit my jam like it's strawberry extract." "One more time," Harlow tells 2fo, who's at the computer recording. Take two. "Damn, ran out of breath on that one." Take three. "Run it back." "I got it this time." "OK, start it from the top." 2fo says, "Sometimes only Jack can hear what Jack hears." "I've been more scatterbrained than ever lately," Harlow says one spring after- noon in his house. "It's like I have late-onset ADD or something." He blames phones. "ey've become part of our bodies," he says. His mom told him to try meditating. Harlow says he likes driving without using GPS. "My dad talks about the fact that his generation knows where the hell they're going in Louisville much better than mine because they weren't looking down at a screen their whole childhood," he says. "Sometimes I'll look in the car and I'll have three guys with me and they'll all be on their phones. at feels normal at this point. But there's some- thing to be said for looking out the window. "I'm not on some hippie shit," he says, "but I really crave having conversations with people." Harlow can improvise a 10-minute solilo- quy on anything. Furniture: "I'm not exactly into interior designing, but I'm definitely into how con- venient you can make a room. My dad and I make fun of my mom's side of the family because, yeah, they might have a lot of seating but they don't understand airflow." Cleaning: "Something about everything being in order is so therapeutic. I love wiping shit down with Clorox wipes. Taking out the trash gives me such satisfaction." Movies: Life Is Beautiful: "at shit is fire." e Prestige. "Dope. Fire." Moonrise King- "IT'S A EUPHORIC FEELING I CAN'T STEP AWAY FROM. I'M NOT EVEN NECESSARILY A THIRD-EYE KIND OF PERSON, BUT THERE'S SOMETHING SPIRITUAL ABOUT IT."