To Study: Hip Hop in Colwyn Bay
From the East Coast to the north Wales coast. M. Yesekaon has worked with Underground Artist Movement to open a studio in Colwyn Bay for young Hip Hop artists and rappers to hone their craft.
I’ve been making Hip Hop music from my mother’s basement for so long now it feels strange to have somewhere else I’m going to be calling ‘studio’. I mean, it ticked all the boxes. Wooden walls and a bunch of unused furniture that acted as acoustic treatment. The floor: beige and carpeted. The sound is kept generally dead (unless you flush the toilet upstairs). It allows me time and space to learn a craft which I thought was only produced by magicians and alchemists. Fitting then, that the word ‘studio’ comes from the Italian ‘to study’. The average bedroom producer/artist knows this fine balance well, making this ramshackle sort of setup work if a studio isn’t available. Buying equipment you think you need only to realise it was the other thing you needed. Countless plug-ins to help hide what is ultimately just a bad microphone. Trying to polish a shoe with wet mud. Hip Hop specific studios in Colwyn Bay did not exist… until I met Kene in December 2023. (‘Kene’ is pronounced ˈkeni’ before you continue reading it like keen. Saves you the embarrassment of butchering his name if you ever meet us; and I hope you do.)
Bitterly cold. The sun was setting at what felt like midday and the streets reflected that cold cobalt-blue of the sky, mixing with the orange street lamps. I’d walked past the beach which was still having considerable work done to it. The JCBs lined up looking derelict, aimed towards the Gwynt y Môr wind farm. I’d turned up into the town, underneath the A55, and found the monstrous orange Conwy County Council building, which has that jutting out roof that I still don’t understand. It loomed over the town, looking at the decaying high-street and the regular smokers outside of the Prince Madocs. A man fell out of the betting shop, slipped on the icy ground but he would’ve fallen on his own volition, I’m sure. Heading past Ivy Street Car Park and the fly-tipped remains of countless trips stacked against the graffitied wall, no flies because they’d all drowned in the rain, I cut through the Bayview Shopping Centre, which feels like a time capsule from the early 90s. Pale white walls and food court fading into a gaunt grey. I got a Costa coffee (which, nine months on, has closed) and swung back round to the road with the food bank on it, then kept walking up, past the park and into Old Colwyn.
I felt like I had to go as it was one of the very few networking events that goes on up here. You have to be in the room to hear the conversation, I kept telling myself. Kene was leaving as I was arriving. I think he was directed towards me, Hip Hop heads generally are, and he gave me the grand plan for the Underground Artist Movement (UAM). Forming a collective and offering a free under-18 studio for Colwyn Bay and the surrounding area. He was brought up in Colwyn Bay and left the area, much like me, before returning. I’d just got back from finishing my music production master’s in Manchester and was eager to pursue music, most likely elsewhere. Back to England, maybe back to Cardiff. So, when you hear exactly what you want to hear, you are naturally sceptical. I didn’t know Kene and I didn’t know if this was snake-oil or the answer to my prayers. But nine months down the line we have all the equipment and we’re only waiting on a desk before we can open officially.
I go by M. Yesekaon as an alias, and I produce and perform all my own work. I’m not against having other people be involved; there was a necessity to do it by myself because I couldn’t afford to pay for things. Still can’t to be honest. My interest in Hip Hop began when my uncle passed me his hard drive when I first became conscious as a boy. Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Wu-Tang, N.W.A. This is what I was digesting at twelve and shaping what would later become an integral part of my life. However, at the time, I did think that this music was an impossibility for someone to create from where I’m from, and quite frankly, cringe.
I’ve since had the realisation that this was because of the lack of structure and the lack of role models providing an avenue for me. Which is bizarre because everyone listens to Hip Hop and rap, but nobody is brave enough to pursue it. The pursuit of Hip Hop isn’t even about signing a record deal or hitting big numbers on Spotify. It’s striving to be better than you were yesterday and showcasing that. The four elements of Hip Hop (DJing, MCing, graffiti and breakdancing) are fundamentally about creatively showcasing skills confidently. The bigger, the better. The smarter, the better. The riskier, the better. The props achieved along the way by people also in the know. This mind frame pushes the genre forward because it can never be complete; it evolves with the people who practise it. It also shows how, without an infrastructure of Hip Hop culture, nobody local would ever get the props from doing the work, putting in the hours, and achieving something.
So, on this jagged coast with unique stories, where the rain peppers the sand much more than the sun shines upon it, why should our stories be unworthy of this form? Cringe doesn’t really cut it anymore.
Our closest major city is in England, which sucks away a lot of people. Growing up, a lot of my peers’ aims was just to leave; mine was too for a sustained period. Cardiff oftentimes feels so alien compared to Liverpool in this respect and although we’re Welsh, we are six hours away by train and being directed to Cardiff for music events isn’t feasible. This is especially the case when it comes to MOBO (music of black origin) and a gig is basically a networking event. So providing shows has become the bedrock of UAM because it gives people something to aim towards.
Our latest show, ‘Bars In The Bay’, was at the Colwyn Bay Community Hwb, a large old hall situated beside the council chambers and adjacent to St Paul's church in the middle of the town. The sunlight streamed in through the windows at the top and we clambered up ladders to put makeshift curtains of cardboard over the summer light. Martin Daws brought the PA system for the venue and the artists assembled with DJ B.Lou conducting the decks. The merchandise had been made for Bangor native A Gent Orange, as he was headlining with myself (M. Yesekaon), B-Mellow and Harvs Le Toad supporting. The crowd filtered in and listened intently to each of the artists before the cypher allowed others to collaborate with the evening. We then packed up and went to a local bar to host an afterparty where music was played acoustically, djembe and guitar, and rappers got up to preview their bars and join in with the event. At these moments, it feels like the audience gives as much as the artists and everyone is free to express themselves and be listened to. We always meet new faces that feel the energy that we want them to. It’s a movement, as the name suggests, a wave, the hop.
And it’s funny how a form originating thousands of miles away, among African Americans in the South Bronx, can make you feel Welsh. For me, I feel like I’m adding to the diaspora of Hip Hop, whilst also paying homage to the speck of soil my family finds themselves on and paying homage to the families that were here before. Oral traditional storytelling is well documented in Welsh histories and the role of the bardd was important to a Celtic society. So, relaying our own histories and lives verbally is something we’ve been doing for centuries. As Sioned Davies refers to in Storytelling in Medieval Wales:
Three things give a poet amplitude: knowledge of histories, and poetry, and heroic verse.
That sounds like Hip Hop to me. But is it a surprise that these elements are shared across cultures and centuries? From Homer to KRS-One to Kendrick Lamar to Dave Acton to The Mabinogion, we’re just telling stories as humans do, trying to find the truth in our lives and make our mates say, ‘that was sick, man’.
Beyond the heavy theory for why I make and why I want to encourage others to make, we’ve been building this community with workshops and gigs. Martin, one of the other founders of UAM, has been delivering workshops for many years and has been up the ladders in the studio like the rest of us. He told me when we first met that “it’s a dream I didn’t know I had but I’ve since come to realise it’s something I’ve always wanted. Setting roots somewhere and sharing ideas from words and music.” From the first brush stroke to the finishing touches, from the chance meetings in bars to sharing bars on stage, the collective has been delivering opportunities to artists that didn’t exist eight months ago, and we have our eyes on more. We’ve all got our links to Larynx Entertainment and we’re slowly making our way into schools and youth groups; you’ll see our stickers throughout the Bay and encroaching into Bangor and then switching back further east. There’s not only a crying need for expression in Colwyn Bay but a desperate need for tangible expression. You might think poetry is wack but you’ll get in your car and listen to Central Cee or Wu-Tang because you think it’s dope and you’ve got bars yourself, but you’ve never had the chance to try it. Rap isn’t the sort of thing you step up for at the sleepy, cozy open-mic in Betws-y-Coed. Well, we’re bringing the cyphers and the studio.
I wanted to give you the story leading up to the grand finale – “…and here is the studio finished!” – but we still don’t have the elusive desk. Mañana.
I went to the studio last week. Summer was over and we crept towards winter with rivers forming from clogged storm-drains, autumnal leaves and cigarette butts fallen in the slits. Inside the studio, the paint was dry. It looked clinical. The lights were up on the wall, that day they were crimson-red but with a thumb gyration they could be sage-green, whatever the mood suited. The vocal booth stands in the corner, dead sound within. The plan is to have a graffiti artist come and use it as a canvas. I sat on the podcast couch with acoustic treatment in-built and put my laptop bag on the wooden custom coffee table. Kene was going through a new opportunity regarding schools. Martin popped his head in and wanted to go through the plan for a workshop on Monday, whether we could use BandLab to introduce some digital music making elements to the class. The conversation drifted to when we could feasibly start the free under-18 studio sessions and how we should promote it. Boxes of audio equipment, the temptress in the room, lay neatly piled by the wall. Waiting. Indigo’s guitar leant neatly upright against the Adam Audio studio monitors that were practically begging to be hooked up. I move the kalimba to one side on the table, push past the UAM stickers and take my laptop out. Shaneo wanted to record a verse for something I made so he would be here shortly. He’d just started his job with the scaffolding company and was writing like he never had before. My usual style is mellow and chill, but this beat was dark and heavy, something he resonated with when I played it to him. I mentioned to Kene an idea to host a beat-making competition: provide a sample, open it up to producers. I felt like we needed a prize other than “well done,” but it could be a good tactic for spreading the word on Instagram to rappers and producers alike. Kene’s phone vibrated.
He studied it for a while before showing us.
Shipped 12:34.
Calum Noakes (M. Yesekaon) is from Colwyn Bay, Conwy, and has been making Hip Hop since 2022. He is the in-house producer at UAM and a freelance creative practitioner/writer. He was selected as a Forte Artist in 2024 and continues to make music out of North Wales.
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