BEAT HOLLOW

Pandemic or not, Prabh Deep’s quest for perfection – in body, soul, sound and words – carries on uninterrupted. As the rapper and producer prepares his next album, he tells Nidhi Gupta about this phase of evolution in his life and career

- Nidhi Gupta

Prabh Deep wants to make a hip-hop album without drums. No boom bap, no hard-hitting trap, no rattling hi-hats. “I want to create a meditative sound – something you can walk into a jungle with and feel at peace. It’s not about what I’m saying, necessarily. I want people to pay attention to the frequencies of sound; to understand that you can have rhythm without drums.”“But how do you move people without drums?” he pre-empts, a smile on his face showing that he has thought long and hard about this. As radical as it sounds, this has been done before. Most famously, you have Nas “Nasty Nasdaq” raging against the world over Jay Electronica’s calm keyboard-led production on “Queens Got The Money”. That was 2013, a year when Jay Electronica himself had demonstrated that you could emblazon a rap track onto unwitting brains even if there’s only acoustic guitar and violins – and a lion’s roar – for company, as on “Eternal Sunshine”. RZA, Action Bronson, Tyler, The Creator have all tried it: But it’s evident that only the bravest have gone this deep, confident in everything else their song has to offer.