:3LON

Instagram / Twitter / Soundcloud

:3LON is quite literally the sound of the future. When they fell
to Earth just over two decades ago, they graciously found their
feet in one of the planet’s most alien spaces—Baltimore. With
the sound of the city’s breakbeats, 808s and ratchet-tech club
music influencing their young ears, they set to creating their
own cyberspace oasis from early on.

They found their voice through their mother, who introduced them
to some of Earth’s best—Anita Baker and Sade—the control, soul
and cadence of whom can be heard in :3LON’s voice today. They
found their friends in Anime, The internet and RPGs, the
celestial music of which still seeps into their art. Most
importantly, they found their future in music. With an unprecedented mix of post-internet afrofuturism, :3LON’s
music isn’t merely composed of songs, but of worlds and
alternative cyberpunk realities to escape into. Now that they’ve
played the legendary Club Quarantine, had their track placed on
the catwalk for Coach’s SS21 Line, dropped the huge Flex with Scratchclart for Hyperdub
, shot with Juergen Teller, picked up fans in Dance System, Skream, LSDXOXO and J-Lo their visions for the future could well be taking hold.

Growing up on the internet a Myspace-crazed music nerd, during
the rapid gentrification of Baltimore—which made a future seem
unstable and unknowable for someone like :3LON—their reimagining
of afrofuturism for the digital age not only makes sense, it
heals. “.I’m trying to create a sense of belonging with my
music. I want to provide representation for Black people. I want
to provide the future,” they say. Through their projections of
the [future], in which the greatest love stories take place in
circuit boards, and access keys are needed to fall in love,
:3LON tries to make us think beyond the tenuous concepts of time
and space. They take technology to a mystical level. With the sound of
holy-sounding synths, and their voice, half angel, half alien,
:3LON’s music makes you feel as though you are blissfully
falling through cyberspace.

In that way, they’re the ideal follow-up to the Soundcloud age;
a time when rappers with similar inspirations to :3LON—gothic
Hot Topic-ness, Anime, post-internet art—were spotlit. “I wanna
be the singer version of that,” they say. Even more than their
Soundcloud predecessors, :3LON’s worlds are painstakingly
imagined, as are the characters who inhabit them. In one song
you might hear the tale of a lost samurai, in another, a
character trapped in a medieval fantasy realm.

For their latest project, :3LON created a “dystopian I, Robot
type world” where everything is “sleek, sanitized, sterile” and
perfectly uniform. “But there are rebels who inhabit it too,”
they say. “I’m writing from the perspective of someone who’s
just landed in that world and is observing it from a distance.”
Is that how they feel living on Earth? Cosmically displaced?
They sigh a long, despairing sigh. “I feel like I kind of thrive
off that energy. As an artist, you’re kind of a nomad.

Displacement comes with the job; you have to figure out how to
find your center amongst it all.” Having their fair share of
tests and traumas on Earth, :3LON’s music serves a
dual-purpose—to purge the bad things from their past, while
creating a future for those less able to imagine one for
themselves. “I feel like most people can only really deal with
what’s right in front of them, because that’s what life wants
you to do and allows you to do, to just deal with whatever’s on
your plate,” they say. “But when you step back, and see the
whole organism for what it is, it becomes really strange.”