REBEL SPIRIT
Released December 31, 2022
I had been in my birth country of Honduras at the time of my 2 previous solo rap releases, in 2017 for Musical Alchemy and in 2019 for Expanding our Horizons, and during the time I was there I got the chance to work on some music that didn’t really fit the feel of either one of those two tapes. The beats were more intense than chill, the lyrics more controversial. These odd tracks became the base for what would become the album “Rebel Spirit.” Some of the first tracks I made for this album were “Mass Mental Manipulation” and the first track “Rebel from the Start”, which I produced the beat for, along with the remix of the track “Rebel Spirit” from the Musical Alchemy mixtape. Since I couldn’t acquire the rights for the initial “Rebel Spirit” beat and I really liked my lyrics and flow on there I decided to make my own beat for it so I could fully release it on my first album on streaming platforms. Being in another country really inspired me to make music, both lyrics and beats. It provided me with a different perspective on life, which travelling always does. I had a simpler life in a way, with more time to dedicate to music, and more privacy to record music uninterrupted as well. I had taken my mic and laptop to Honduras, along with the mic stand. In those days it was easier to move my setup anywhere in the world, since I was still recording on a USB mic and laptop, and had no notion of what an audio interface even was. I was also making beats using only a mouse and keyboard on FL Studio. Regardless of all that, I returned to Canada 5 years later, at the start of 2022, with a good amount of work done for the album, then finished up the rest of the tracks and all the editing, mixing, etc. I also re-recorded some of the tracks with my new XLR mic and audio interface. I had been learning a lot about setting up a studio, something which has always been a dream for me but I just never took seriously, and when I got back to Canada I knew it was time to level up, including the way I made my music. Maybe I never took the studio idea too seriously because I never thought I had the money for it, but now I know that setting up a decent home studio is a lot more affordable than I had originally imagined. You always see studios full of equipment, but you don’t realize that one doesn’t need all of that to make music, only some basic things. I also picked up a great 61-key MIDI keyboard which I use both on FL and on my MPC to get melodies down in a much quicker way, which is also a lot more fun and hands-on than clicking on a mouse. In a way, although this is a kind of debut album for me, being the first I’ve released on streaming platforms, it also marks the end of some things. For one thing, this album only has three tracks that I produced, but on future records I plan to focus on all or most of the production myself. I’ve been making beats for a decade, but only recently do I feel more comfortable using my own productions to rap my lyrics over. These past few years have been instrumental, hah, in me getting into the craft of making beats, both sampled and from scratch. I had been making beats only on FL Studio since the beginning, but when I got into the MPC workflow I started to really see the beauty in crafting a beat, like a piece of art much like a full song, and now with a newfound appreciation for music production I can enjoy making beats on any platform, and I’m excited to see how I can craft the sound of my music more deliberately. As previously mentioned, this album is recorded only semi-professionally, with the other half recorded on my old setup, my USB mic which I had been using since I made my first song ever more than a decade ago. Moving forward everything will be recorded the proper way, and I’ve been learning lots about mixing, mastering, production, and just audio in general. None of this is to say that this album is lacking in quality. As I mentioned, some of these tracks were in the works for years, since 2017 when I first got to Honduras, and they’ve undergone many changes to get them to their current state, ready for release. I really put a lot of time and effort into the songs on this album, as well as a lot of thought into the lyrics, so I appreciate any and all of you who are willing to give it a listen, as well as to all of you reading this. This album, true to its name, focuses on various aspects of life from a rebel perspective, from a perspective that I feel is not always noticed, or is actually actively ignored due to a widespread, sometimes unconscious, fear of facing reality, of accepting positive change.
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THE COME UP 10 (with Kalvonix)
Released August 12, 2022
Kalvonix and I have been making music together since way back when I started rapping. Back in high school when I was first starting out I was just making my own music by myself, but when I heard of a school group about rapping I was interested to see what it was about. To be honest, as a young kid with a wild imagination I imagined a full recording studio with a recording booth and all the equipment needed, but that wasn’t the case. I’m not complaining, I just mention that because it’s funny how kids’ imaginations are. The group was Access Denied, and it was made up of a few different people, mainly Calvin, aka Kalvonix, and his cousins Ohwell and Nizzl. In those days he was called “the rapper of the school” since he loved showing everyone his passion for rapping. I guess at some point he and Mr. Begg, the school English teacher, had come to an agreement to work on a school rap group, and so Access Denied was born. I joined later, but we quickly made a few mixtapes together. We usually recorded right in the classroom, after school hours so no one would be there, and our music was educational and touched on lots of different subjects, without getting too serious about them, but just getting the main message across. Those were fun times for sure, and we even did a show for the Olympics here in Vancouver, and also ended up on the newspaper front cover. “Rapping for a reason” was the title of the newspaper story. They also did an interview with us which was on TV. Of course, all of this wasn’t because we were incredible rappers, it was mostly because it was a school project and we were rapping about positive things. I didn’t mind it at all because I was writing and rapping, which is what I loved doing, but outside of Access Denied I was always working on my own music as well, which wasn’t always the most positive, but it was real to me, since I wasn’t living through the most positive times in my life either. Kalvonix was also doing music on his own, of course, and after he graduated from high school a year before me, we kept meeting up at his house to record song remixes here and there. We eventually had an idea, to release a mixtape together, since we were starting to make more and more songs together. We titled this mixtape “The Come Up.” Back then we weren’t the most professional, we were young and we were really making music kind of in a rush, to be honest. We were having fun though, so we just wanted to move on to the next track and complete it. I spent a lot of nights at Calvin’s house, rapping all through the night up in his room. The good thing is his house was pretty big so I think his parents couldn’t really hear us rapping the night away. Since we were making so much music, we eventually made the Come Up 2, and at some point we decided to turn in into a recurring thing. By the time we recorded The Come Up 3, we had decided that we were getting better and we had to get our music out to more people. That’s when we decided to go around his neighborhood knocking door to door selling CDs of The Come Up 3. I definitely don’t regret it, but the music isn’t really as good as we thought it was in the moment. Over the years we recorded the Come Up 4, 5 and 6, before lots of things in my life changed and I ended up moving away to Honduras, my home country, and eventually meeting my wife Maria, then waiting three years for her residence papers to be approved, and eventually returning here to Canada in February 2020, right before the whole COVID pandemic really started getting crazy. During all of those years we didn’t really make more music together, and maybe we didn’t even think about it. Calvin had success with his own music, always being super active with it and showcasing it to the world, and in my case, I was way into living a spiritual life, to the point that I had decided not to pursue music anymore because I didn’t want fame, because of the possibility of it corrupting me and the beautiful family I had formed with Maria. I remember actually telling Calvin I was quitting music, and he was questioning whether I was sure of my decision. In that moment I was one hundred percent sure. I never wanted fame, but I have always wanted to share my music with people, and to share inspirational messages through it. Fast forward some more time, spirituality-wise my thoughts changed in a way, and I basically decided to start pursuing music as a career again as I grew increasingly frustrated with 9-to-5 life, which I believe is corrupt, soulless and exploitative. I told Calvin I was back into music, so we put together The Come Up 8 and 9, mostly from a few of the last songs we had recorded together, as well as some songs from his albums that I was featured on. As I started getting serious with music again, and Calvin was getting more professional than ever and constantly releasing music on streaming platforms, we decided to make The Come Up 10 an album, with no remixes, just original tracks we could post for streaming. Since life is a lot busier now for both of us, it took us about to years to finally complete this album, but I’m really proud of it, and it’s really symbolic in a way. We’ve come a long way from our early days recording the first Come Up. Our flows have improved a lot, our writing is more impactful and our sound is overall more professional. It’s also been maybe a little over ten years since we started, so the number 10 is kind of symbolic in a way as well. We released The Come Up 10 this year on August 12th, a few days before his Calvin’s birthday. Kalvonix has always been a big inspiration for me, not only because we share the same passion for music and rhyming, but also because he was born with cerebral palsy and faced a lot of struggles growing up, yet he never let that get in the way of his passion and his dream, and nowadays he’s found a decent amount of success, and I’m super happy for him. I’ve always been all over the place, lacking the dedication to make my music thing happen in the way he has, but life is a learning experience, and I can say that now I’m more focused than I’ve ever been, so I’m excited about what the future holds. I’m constantly working on new beats and songs, and Kalvonix and I don’t plan on stopping our work together either, so The Come Up 11 is already in the works. For now though, give The Come Up 10 a listen, I’ve embedded the Spotify link below so you can listen right on here if interested. I appreciate anyone who takes the time to listen, since we put a lot of effort into this album.
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EXPANDING OUR HORIZONS
Released January 31, 2019
EXPANDING OUR HORIZONS is the second mixtape I released under the name of Rebel Spirit. It was recorded and released while I was in my home country of Honduras for a couple of years. I returned to Canada one year after recording this album, on February 2020. Continuing with the positivity and conscious style of rap, this mixtape opens with one of my favorite tracks of mine “Free the Brain”, a track about freeing our minds from the chains that have us shackled, whether it be any kind of addiction or toxic pattern of thinking. The tape stays true, for the most part, to the old school style I love so much, and it has a chill vibe to it. I also finally write about a lot of topics I also wanted to go deeper into, like philosophy and spirituality, and I think the lyrics in this tape reflect where my mind was at in those days very accurately, and the spiritual situation I was going through. Life is truly a learning experience, and this album represents a turning point in my life, a point of true growth into a new me, expanding my horizons. The cover is me at Altia in Honduras, where I worked for a couple years before coming back to Canada in February of 2020, two months after releasing this tape, as previously mentioned.
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MUSICAL ALCHEMY
Released December 30, 2017
It’s crazy how fast life changes. Since 2012/13 when DG and I recorded the Rebel Gang tapes, I recorded only a couple of tracks, which is why a lot of my 2014 Crooks In Castles release included many of the Rebel Gang album songs in it. After 2014 things changed and I started making even less music. The truth is I travelled back to my home country of Honduras, for various reasons, and various things happened that shaped my life forever. Life happened, and music was put to the side for a bit, unfortunately. I still wrote lyrics and made a few beats from time to time, but I didn’t release any projects until my I finally decided to record some music again and my 2017 mixtape Musical Alchemy was released. On this tape my focus was on creating music that would inspire people, far from wanting to rap about drugs and guns, about girls and partying, I chose to start trying to use my gift to inspire people. After all, that’s what I had started making music for in the first place. That’s the point of the mixtape name, alchemy, transmutation, turning the old into new, into gold, constantly improving. This tape has a lot of dope tracks on it which I personally really like, focusing on everything from philosophy to spirituality, music itself, reminiscing on old times on “Trip to the Back of My Mind”, just a bit of everything. I released this tape while still in Honduras, now married to my beautiful wife Maria. I had also changed my moniker to Rebel Spirit by this point, trying to reflect the spiritual nature of the change in my music. It didn’t stick, but it was good for that moment.
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MOVING MENTAL MOUNTAINS
Released November 19, 2012
This album is a mix of all the different sounds I’d experimented with up until that point. It has the old-school sound of the RUNNING REBEL album, the deep and painfully personal lyricism of RHYTHM AND POETRY, the crisp, new-school drums I’d rapped over on the E mixtape, some of the gritty, hard rhymes of WICKED WORLD, and some chill, psychedelic singing to bring in the spacey, stoned state of mind I presented on REALMS OF REALITY. The title sums up what my attitude was at the time, feeling like I had to move mountains to make the dream happen.
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REALMS OF REALITY
Released April 20, 2012
Continuing my creative streak in early 2012, following the old-school rap flow of RUNNING REBEL, and the hard-hitting heavy rhymes and beats of WICKED WORLD, I released this tape on 420 and titled it REALMS OF REALITY. The concept for this tape was to make it spacey, chilled-out to the max and perfect for a chill smoke sesh, as if it’s taking you through different planes of existence. There’s still good rhymes on here, along with some autotuned singing, as well as chiller, softer beats. Some highlights of this album are the “It Is What It Is” remix that I did with the super talent singer Mary Jane, and the intro track “Divine Dreams”, which is my first public release of the chill electronic music I’d been working on for a while, and which I’ve continued working on up to this day.
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WICKED WORLD
Released March 15, 2012
Early 2012 was a super creative period for me. I had just released the RUNNING REBEL mixtape in February and my song “It Is What It Is” from the same tape, had gotten about 60K views on YouTube. Around that same time I had gotten together with Lil’ DG and we formed RRG (Running Rebel Gang), so we had started working on the Rebel Gang tapes. With that in the works, and about a month after the RUNNING REBEL mixtape release, WICKED WORLD was born. The concept was very different, where RUNNING REBEL was written on a more personal note, this mixtape focuses more on the global situation, on issues with society, government, and the like. It’s got a heavier sound to it, as far as the instrumentation is concerned, and the flows are definitely harder and faster.
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RUNNING REBEL
Released February 14, 2012
This album marks a turning point in my music career, and it’s the one that I’d dare to consider a true classic, without a doubt, of all my releases. This is when I added the Rebel to my name, something that grew out of a lot of (admittedly stoned) philosophizing I was doing at the time. The beats on this tape are true to the old-school sound that I love so much, super chill and smooth with lots of samples, and my rhymes on here are sharp and to the point.
Most of the beats are produced by French beat-maker Dela, but I wrote and recorded these raps on my own, without his explicit authorization, upon falling in love with his style of beats and just getting to work. I wrote my raps to fit them perfectly, and I hope one day I get to purchase the rights to release this album on streaming platforms.
Most of the beats are produced by French beat-maker Dela, but I wrote and recorded these raps on my own, without his explicit authorization, upon falling in love with his style of beats and just getting to work. I wrote my raps to fit them perfectly, and I hope one day I get to purchase the rights to release this album on streaming platforms.
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R.A.P.” (RHYTHM AND POETRY)
Released November 20, 2011
R.A.P. (RHYTHM AND POETRY) was the first album I fully completed. It was released on November 20th, 2011, 5 days before my 17th birthday. Although I feel that my flow and writing skills have improved since then, I can’t help but admire the fire I had burning in me back in those days, the passion with which I can hear myself spit my rhymes over these beats. Back then I was only making music for the sake of it, because I loved it, and I had a huge collection of beats I’d accumulated, so I chose the ones which inspired me the most, which resonated with the lyrics and themes I explored in this tape, the chillest beats, the rawest or the jazziest beats. A lot of the ideas expressed in this tape marked the beginning of an amazing personal and spiritual journey for me, so while I was writing these rhymes I wasn’t concerned with making money, with how the tape would be released and all of that, but rather with sharing a concrete piece of art with the world, expressing my deepest thoughts and emotions through poetry and music. Honestly, I can say I succeeded in creating what I had in mind, but because the beats I used weren’t beats I’d purchased, I couldn’t post my music onto streaming services, so these deeply personal tracks couldn’t be released to a wider audience. Nevertheless, this album is very special to me since it marks the start of my discography, and so it remains available on YouTube and here on Bandcamp.
rebel eye 