Resonator Festival Celebrates Innovative Hip-Hop Fusion Music [NYC – Aug. 12]

Resonator Festival
August 12, 2017 at National Sawdust, 80 N 6th St., Brooklyn

As Grandmaster Caz famously stated in the documentary The Art of Rap, “Hip-hop didn’t invent everything. But it reinvented everything.”

Musically, hip-hop has long been about mixing, melding and morphing musical styles from its past, a form of sonic alchemy which has propelled the music and its associated culture across the planet to near ubiquity.

Still, hip-hop music has suffered from time to time as a victim of its own ambition, when musical experimentation crosses the line from innovative to irritating — even insulting. Yet, while there are genre purists who scowl at the notion of excessive cross-pollination, hip-hop possesses a supremely unique ability to creatively mesh multiple genres into an eclectic, enjoyable smorgasbord.

At no time in history is this more possible — or prevalent — than today. With the advancement of music-making technology, and a new generation that isn’t afraid to break molds, young artists are escaping the corporate-peddled morass of pop-influenced rap to create genre-bending, genre-breaking and genre-ripping-inside-out forms of musical expression, rooted in hip-hop, but swallowing up anything it damn well feels like along the way, often to great acclaim.

While this phenomenon is obvious to those who scour the internet and stumble upon those pioneering the next evolution of hip-hop fusion, the general listening public is often left unaware. Newer artists of note, such as Chance The Rapper, SZA and Kendrick Lamar have been successfully following in the footsteps of creative risk-takers in the past like Kanye West, yet just slightly hidden from mainstream view, a groundswell of similarly ambitious and talented artists across the planet are primed and poised to amplify this trend.

Enter Resonator Arts, a New York City-based arts collective which seeks to promote this phenomenon, in part, though its yearly Resonator Festival, a brilliantly curated lineup of artists, groups and bands that personify this explosive and eclectic musical evolution.

Among the performers scheduled for the all day affair is OSHUN, the buzzing, soul-stirring, singing/rapping duo from Brooklyn; acclaimed trumpeter and bandleader Theo Croker; Chris Rivers, son of the late rap icon Big Pun, who has been steadily making a powerful name for himself in the rap game; the multi-talented DJ/rapper/bandleader LiKWUiD; rapper Oswin Benjamin, who many saw during the 2016 BET Cyphers; jazzy hip-hop fusion band, QNA and West Coast spittress Ill Camille, coming straight out of Compton.

Going down August 12, 2017 from 1pm through midnight, Resonator Festival 2017 is a perfect opportunity to explore creative musical artists who are delivering an impressive mix of style and substance, as well as support the organization which aims to help highlight those deserving artists for the world to see.

Tickets for the Resonator Festival are currently available on the National Sawdust website, with a limited-time early-bird discount (use code ARTIST5)