One of the fun things about being alive for a while is that you get to see your friends proven correct. Curta has been making dystopian noise rap since the early 2010s, through the era of Facebook pokes, Harlem Shakes, Ice Bucket and Tide Pod Challenges, and they always seemingly asked the question: what if this shit’s bad for us? 

 

Released in 2015, Curta’s second album  Replica may not be their finest pound-for-pound (I think it’s CLICK BAIT), or their most personal (that’s [sic]), or their most musically adventurous (tie: End of Future Park, Second Sun). It’s certainly not their strangest (that would be the impossible-to-obtain Universe, a collaboration with Serengeti and J.A. Grimms). But it is their most important album. It’s the one where, as Alyssa Larsen’s cover art of two heads bio-mechanically fusing together depicts, the minds of MC Jake Danna and producer 4Digit combined as one. The hardest part of making music is finding the right accomplices. They found each other while working at a Whole Foods.

Lyrically, Curta is two bands in one. The first Curta is inspired by the Rhymesayers collective and the Strange Famous roster – ahem, #rappingwhites. It boasts and self-loathes equally, hates mainstream rap, and laments the difficulty of making art and a living at the same time. 

 

This Curta is funny, relatable, and, sometimes, psychedelically weird (is “Bouncy House” about creativity or sex?) As Danna sings on “Suicide Artifacts,” he’s “the rap game’s Jesse Pinkman.” That’s patently untrue. The Breaking Bad meth dealer wouldn’t shout out David Foster Wallace and Phillip Roth. However, I’m certain that when Danna says he’s the “hottest girl in his little rap world,” he’s spitting the truth. 

 

The second Curta is more interesting and prophetic. This is the rapper as a philosopher poet, one who makes the observation that “history was written with no rubbers,” how each of us is the miraculous result of a million creampies. 

 

This Curta makes Black Mirror into rap. (In fact Danna hipped me to the dystopian show years before it blew up on Netflix.) It casts a suspicious eye at technology, how it has altered our consciousness, how it relentlessly drives consumerism, and how it has infantilized us. “My people don’t hunt,” Danna raps on “Replica.” None of us do anymore, homie. 

 

Like my favorite hip hop, Curta is about the beats and noise as much as the rap and lyrics. A friend of Heck Reckoners, the singer Jeanne Marie, said, “The only people who don’t care about lyrics are musicians.” Uh, guilty. Curta is inspired as much by the maximalist vertical production of Trent Reznor – one of Replica’s densest songs is called “Maximize”, another is “Titan” – and the unnerving bleep-bloop beats of early rap and industrial. “Inflatable Toys” even starts as one and then becomes the other. 

 

This is music created by people with big ears. While most of Replica’s tracks amble along at midtempo, they incorporate a galaxy of sounds – drum machines, synthesizers, piano, samples, electric bass and guitar. This band isn’t beholden to the boom-bap strictures of “indie rap,” or whatever its equivalent is in 2024. 

 

If there’s a sticking point for new listeners, it’s Danna’s flow, which is by turns mechanical and glitchy, prone to run-ons, odd pauses, and offbeat accents. He’s not silky like Snoop Dogg or rat-tat-tat like Chuck D. This is the flow of, to borrow the name of their debut, a “broken machine.” It’s by design. Danna once told me that all white rappers are inherently corny, so he leaned into it, seeking to become the “world’s best bad rapper.” I don’t know how we can determine who that actually is, but as far as I’m concerned, if he wants that crown, he can have it. 

 

As of the end of 2024, Curta has released six albums of increasingly technophobic rap – all while, ironically, embracing the newest technology music has to offer. Currently the members of Curta are making music as Pinkorat (https://pinkorat.bandcamp.com/album/mspaint) and multimedia as part of Church Fire (https://churchfire.bandcamp.com/).