5.1.2024
Mach-Hommy Czn Approaches…
Look Out For #RICHAXXHAITIAN, Dropping In Time For Haitian Flag Day
The Enigmatic Rapper Continues His Mission To Redefine The Image of His Homeland, Preparing a Rich Tapestry That Examines Its Past and Imagines a Better Future
Stay Tuned For Much More
Photo credit: Manfred Baumann
The Rundown:
Defying convention and transcending interpretation as he blazes his own path through the rap game, Mach-Hommy is a true hip-hop original. The prolific rapper can be hard to track, physically and metaphysically: his face and birth name remain a mystery, and his Machography spans more than 50 albums, some only available in limited-edition physical formats, some gone forever as limited-edition digital releases. When they’re out in the world, Mach exhibits them like high art, selling them at prices that reflect their true value, not the artificially deflated value imposed upon music by the streaming age.
A man like Mach has a brain that doesn’t stop working–it’s a creativity that results in tremendous productivity without sacrificing quality: his incisive lyrics probe the frailty of the human condition, arranged into alchemical verses that draw instant rap hands from even the most-seasoned hip-hop head (“…every bar is rap chemistry” – Rolling Stone; “Over the past five years, Mach has made some of the strangest, most incisive, most tantalizingly intertextual rap music in the world” – GQ). Usually, his restless creativity results in several works per year, plus a helping of designer merch drops and collabs with high fashion houses. But recently, the Newark-born and Port-au-Prince-raised artist has slowed down, narrowing his focus to shape and fine-tune an album that promises to be one of his best yet: #RICHAXXHAITIAN, coming very soon.
Arriving just in time for Haitian Flag Day, #RICHAXXHAITIAN is Mach’s first solo album since 2021, when he released his massively-acclaimed albums Balens Cho and Pray For Haiti, the latter a critics’ list mainstay of which a hefty portion of the proceeds benefited Mach’s fund to promote social, economic, and technological growth in the titular country. The upcoming album continues to examine the strife and turmoil that has historically engulfed the small Caribbean nation–including the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, shortly after the release of Pray For Haiti–while seeking a new way forward for the country and its diaspora.
Attempting to transform our modern dystopia into a utopia using only his rhymes and force of will, Mach-Hommy invites us all, from his most loyal investors to his freshest fans, to imagine a brand new world. With #RICHAXXHAITIAN, that seemingly impossible dream creeps ever closer.
“I’ve always wanted to rep for Haiti and the cultural and intellectual richness we’ve provided the world,” he says. “From our musical styles like kontradans that have influenced world music, our natural resources which provide so much raw material for so many important advancements in technology, our thinkers that pioneered philosophical movements and Black pride, and our spiritual leaders who kept the religious traditions of Guinea alive and in tact, the religious traditions of Ayiti….”
Stay tuned for much more about #RICHAXXHAITIAN in the coming days.
Purchase Mach-Hommy releases at his official site or his webstore Zotanica
Please contact Michelle or Kevin for more info.
Critical Praise:
Read Mach-Hommy’s 3-Part FADER Cover Story (written in part by Mach himself): 1 | 2 | 3
“Over the past five years, Mach has made some of the strangest, most incisive, most tantalizingly intertextual rap music in the world…He has a pliable voice that effectively communicates contempt (often) or longing (selectively); his writing seems like collage until it doesn’t, breaking from interpolated lyrics and allusion into richly rendered scenes from his own memory.” – GQ
“…every bar is rap chemistry” – Rolling Stone
“The charms of Hommy’s music are on full display as he moves slickly, with casually clever wordplay, through well-curated soul samples.” – The New Yorker
“…tightly constructed yet freely floating through hip-hop’s past and present like ghosts in Gore-Tex jackets.” – Pitchfork
“Mach is worldly the way you imagine a spy would be, or at least upper management in a global oil conglomerate: He knows how to order coffee in Damascus and a hit in Paris, knows which local toughs to muscle out and which to charm into his service.” – Pitchfork”
“Hip-hop heads love to talk about that feeling. It’s a nebulous concept, at times an old-head argument to dismiss new folks, and in other instances a passionate plea to try and articulate what can be so powerful and transformative about hip-hop. That feeling, while oftentimes trite, is the best way to convey to a latecomer what makes Mach-Hommy the most exciting MC today.” – Billboard
“His work is often crammed with diasporic twoness, but crammed with other doublenesses, too.” – NPR
“Mach-Hommy is special. He can rap absurdly well, and he could have a career on that alone, but he doesn’t seem to want it. Instead, he seems to want to exist in a lane that did not exist before him. He’s pulling it off.” – Stereogum
Links:
Mach-Hommy: official site | zotanica | youtube | spotify | apple