Eventually, though, I got it.

Iowa City is a town that promotes artists with a passion mirrored only in major metropolises but with the kind of sincerity and selflessness you’d never find in a big city. This town is fertile soil for the creative mind (no black-Iowa-dirt pun intended), and while the show might not always be sold out, the audience is there to hear every word.

The Iowa City Song Project is a good example of this town’s capacity to nurture creativity into some tangible, remarkable work of art. Commissioned by the Englert Theatre in celebration of their hundredth operational year, the Iowa City Song Project is a collection of 31 songs recorded by (mostly) local artists in commemoration of the town that’s so often lent them an ear. Last Friday, the Englert hosted the record’s release party, featuring five of the artists featured on the Project.

The show started hyper-punctually – I got there a few minutes before the listed starting time and Iowa City act Chasing Shade had already started their set. The two man outfit played a short list of beachy, low-stakes but well-textured pop rock. They produced some better-than-good vocal harmonies and took a strong stand against the shallow punkiness that so often stigmatizes the guitar-drum duo setup. It was my first time seeing Chasing Shade, and I wouldn’t mind seeing them again.

Christopher the Conquered took the stage next. Damn, can that guy sing. He opened his set unaccompanied, matching his keys with a Tom Waits growl that challenged his youthful demeanor that often gave way into the kind of soulful highs that gave Jeff Buckley his hallowed name. His band joined for the rest of the set and played somewhere between Ben Folds and Billy Joel. The saxophonist sounded as if he might have been used to playing with a full section and the songs were punctuated with a degree of silly, showy artifice that I could have lived without, but the songs were able to find their way out from all that. If you haven’t heard of Christopher the Conquered, check him out.

Caroline Smith was next, sans the Good Night Sleeps. She played only with multi-instrumentalist Jesse Schuster, but I can’t imagine that she’d ever need much more. Smith’s songs border quaint but are too soulful to ever sound coffehouse; they’re sparse, soft, and often fun, but brim with sincerity and are driven with one of the best female voices I’ve heard in Iowa City. She took the opportunity to debut her song for the Project, “So it Goes,” a jazzy yet haunting ode to former Iowa Citian Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve yet to hear the full record, but I’d imagine this is one of the highlights.

Pieta Brown, the show’s headliner as decided by the audience’s exodus after her set, followed Smith. The Browns (Pieta and her father, Greg, who also has a song on the record) have always been an Iowa City favorite, and Pieta lived up to the legacy. Her songs were characteristically adult and passive, often blooming from chords strummed after tuning and ending as subtly. Brown had the audience in a trance – I’m not sure I heard a word spoken save the ones on stage the whole set.

Brooks Strause closed the show to an audience about a tenth of the size of what it was during Pieta’s set. He and his band were visibly bummed by the turn out, but to their credit, they didn’t let the crowd’s size affect their music. There was little chatter on stage, not even a goodnight or a thanks-for-coming after the music stopped. But what was left of the crowd couldn’t have been happier. They were on their feet for the majority of the horn-laden, groove based rock set and thanked Strause with a standing ovation at his departure. Iowa City’s not a big town, but you can’t help but feel at home with those who are there to greet you.

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Flying Lotus describes “Tiny Tortures,” one of the standouts from his recent (and excellent) Until the Quiet Comes, as his “mischevious song,” a song he made quietly around other people so no one else could hear him play. If there really is mischief here, though, it’s buried pretty deep.

What “Tiny Tortures” does show is a producer that considers his work so delicate that another person’s breath might knock the whole thing over. It’s a dreamy track, sparse enough to almost see through, but rich with foggy, internal dialogue. A muddy bass snakes its way through a pencil-thin drum program like smoke around a skeleton, getting thicker and thicker until it’s almost opaque, but the three-minute mark cuts it off to trail behind you as a muted memory. Word on the street is it’s getting a video sometime soon.

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Hip hop has, in recent years, evolved into a beast of over-accessibility. The fabled street corner has been replaced by a SoundCloud account and it often seems that anyone with a Logic torrent is busy tweeting about their upcoming mixtape. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – Odd Future, Main Attrakionz and A$AP Rocky all owe their fame to the Internet and it’s becoming increasingly easier to suss out the next big thing. It’s also getting harder to keep up – trends in sub-genres have the shelf life of about an hour and whether you’re a fan of the Based God or not, Lil B has too many songs to count and only a decimal-sized percentage have remain in hip-hop head’s collective memory for over a week.

Iowa City’s Ion seems to have recorded Coordinates with an implied knowledge of the fickle tendencies of the hip hop cloud. While never raising opposition to the current state of rap music (and it’s refreshing to hear an MC who doesn’t rap about rapping), Ion presents a six-song showcase of hunger for and devotion to music that strives to remain timeless in an atmosphere thick with volatility.

Coordinates is completely self-produced, with Ion himself behind every track’s instrumentation. It’s a trade-off that often ends in the MC’s favor: while the beats lack the tonal clarity of sampled music (audiophiles might find themselves a bit distracted), they boast the precision and control of a live band and the rare opportunity to meld intention with execution, leaving little room for accidents. Instances of budgeted mixing are shadowed by the near-flawless fills in “Last Call” and “No Regrets,” and the horns in the anthemic “You Want This Myst” beg for repeated listens. There’s a live jam feel not far from Nas and Damian Marley’s Distant Relatives and while the beats are far from perfect (and may prevent the speed of the rapper’s ascent), Ion’s dedication overcomes Coordinates’ fiscal limitations.

It’s hard to decide where Ion resides lyrically. With a flow often akin to Aesop Rock, Coordinates is evenly divided between conscious and introspective rhymes that do a good job avoiding the preachiness and pot-fueled paranoia that usually burdens similar content. With the exception of the call-to-arms finale “F.W.R.,” Ion never demands pity nor support from his audience and his rhymes are earnestly straightforward. At times, this aversion of clever metaphor common in big names like Curren$y and Kanye is to the album’s detriment, with seldom a repeatable lyric outside of the hooks, and Coordinates will never be accused of breaking new ground within the spectrum of conscious hip-hop. But Ion is able to deliver his opinions and musings with the kind of thoughtful confidence that would sooner foster a dialogue than an argument, and I can’t think of another budding MC with such intention.

“In the Ghetto” finds Rakim insisting that “it’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.” It’s a sentiment that’s increasingly true during hip hop’s online migration, a process that lets Harlem MCs sound fresh out of Houston and has nearly wiped the notion of street-cred from public concern. Ion’s Cooridnates is a rare instance in which a rapper trades concern for his position within the genre for concern of the sanity of his community, and it leaves him exactly where he should be. If you’re struggling to decide who to follow, Ion is one to watch.

You can catch Ion on tour with The Odd Couple’s Louis Logic this summer.

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2011’s deservedly acclaimed  Black Up was something of an anomaly among rap albums: one part hip-hop head heaven, two parts acid-dripped enlightenment, all laced with beats that bend, crunch, and bleed over a good mix of electronic and acoustic (and sometimes arrhythmic) percussion. These tracks treat conventions as an afterthought, trading verse-chorus structure for that of an inspired daydream and swerving around any chances of comparisons to contemporaries (save for MF Doom and Madlib, but even that’s a stretch). Shabazz Palaces has done a good job of letting the music speak for itself – even after landing album-of-the-year-list spots across the board, the group has a Wikipedia write-up of about fifty words and interviews are far and few between. Before Wednesday night, envisioning how this kind of thing might play out as a live show was tricky.

A Shabazz Palaces show is almost twice as engaging as their debut album and about half as abstract (though not a drop less exciting). Their set was built around favorites from Black Up punctuated with tracks from EP’s and a few that might not have yet surfaced. MC Ishmael Butler and musician Tendai Maraire had almost every move they made choreographed: hand claps at high hat hits, fist-bumps at bass drops, the kind of movements that might have made a cynic groan had everything else been any less organic. Instead, it came off as a bit of reverence, both for the opportunity to make music and for the crowd that came to hear it.

With no DJ present, both members of the group take an active part in creating the music live. Butler’s been quoted as describing Shabazz Palaces’ recorded songs as a kind of launching point for their live shows, and the description is dead-on. Butler and Maraire were able to take tracks exactly where they wanted them to be, whether that meant hanging around the epiphanic chants of “Free Press and Curl” and “…(Felt)” for a few more bars or seeing if “Youlogy” could get any woozier. But juxtaposed with the kind of control and precision demonstrated in the choreography, these jams never got stale and stayed truer to an art show than a Phish show.

Shabazz Palaces packed Gabe’s to about a quarter capacity, though neither side of the stage seemed to notice. It was intimate without artifice, Palaces going as hard as they might to a crowd triple the size, audience as engaged as if they were lucky enough to get so close to the stage. At their last song, Butler and Maraire left the stage to wade through about ten rows of people and were called back for an encore before they could even clear the crowd.

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So, coming into The OF Tape Volume 2, some skepticism is a warranted. It’s been almost impossible to avoid at least overhearing the antics of Tyler, The Creator or speculation on the whereabouts of Earl Sweatshirt (who makes his knockout comeback at the end of the Tape), but that’s where the dialogue about Odd Future typically ends – unless you run in circles with some pretty diehard OF fans, it’s unlikely that you’ve ever found yourself discussing Mike G or Syd Tha Kid.

The OF Tape Volume 2, though, is one of the rare instances in which even the sleepers of a hip-hop crew (a term that seems increasingly pejorative to describe Odd Future) get to shine. Though it was released a year ago, Mike G’s “Forest Green” is a show-stealer, lending the impression that he’d do fine over just about any Left Brain beat. Even The Internet, whose Purple Naked Ladies flew deservedly under the radar, comes through with “Ya Know,” a successful rendering of the jazz-fusion attempts of N.E.R.D.

Those who have already established a name for themselves within Odd Future don’t fall short of expectation – Domo Genesis and Hodgy Beats, whose verses dominate the majority of the album, sound like they’ve been doing this forever, passing bars back and forth on tracks like “B*tches” as if they wrote each other’s rhymes. Frank Ocean finds a home more natural here than he ever has before with the group. His work on the gorgeous “Analog 2” and his solo contribution, “White,” ensures an involved and illustrious future for the OF crooner. Tyler also shows some considerable growth. Both his rhymes and production on The OF Tape Volume 2 are tighter and more accessible than on Goblin, hinting at a return to and evolution from the better parts of his breakthrough mixtape Bastard and flexing the kind of wit and non sequiturs that made Lil Wayne so interesting during is 07-08 mixtape reign.

The OF Tape Volume 2 finds its end at “Oldie”, possibly OF’s strongest track to date. It’s a ten minute opus with contributions from almost every member, even the seldom rapping Left Brain and joker Jasper Dolphin. Earl Sweatshirt returns here, reinforcing his pre-Samoan promises for grandeur. It’s a showcase of why Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All holds the power they do, and why they’re one of the few groups that can actually pull a project like this off.

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The crowd leaving Tim Hecker’s Thursday night contribution to the Mission Creek Festival at First United Methodist Church was a quiet one. Some of them sat on the church’s stoop, some smoked, but no one seemed ready to discuss what just happened in the sanctuary.

The show started promptly at 8 with local musician Ex-Action Model. He switched between some fairly dry soundscapes and dancey loops as aggressively hip attendees filled the pews and ignored what was happening onstage.

Perhaps it was the fault of the venue – his music felt better suited for a weeknight at the Yacht Club – but neither audience nor performer seemed satisfied.

Colorado Native Nathan Wheeler took the stage next and set the show in a more appropriate direction. Dressed in a robe that put him somewhere between a monk and a Star Wars enthusiast, Wheeler constructed his set-up alone, a MacBook, pedals and processors, and an electric, light-up rose. He softly explained that his first piece details the Hungry Ghost Realm (one of six realms described in the Buddhist faith in a period between death and rebirth). He was spot on – it was a wandering drone ripe with sinister desire, loops and glitches begging to be appeased to a crowd with no answers. It was one of two tracks that comprised a set of over thirty minutes that sounded like something close to the soundtrack of a Gaspar Noé film.

Hecker came on a little after nine. He didn’t have a mic, gave a little wave to the crowd and hid behind the pulpit with his equipment and the keys to the church’s organ. Before he started, the church went dark – every light, with the exception of two candles on stage, was turned off, leaving Hecker and around one hundred people with the least amount of visual stimuli I’ve encountered at a live show.

Tim Hecker’s music is that of dialogues. During his set (one song, well under an hour) it felt as if the organ and Hecker were in conversation, the organ offering a sound, Hecker considering it, processing it, twisting the tones and responding. They would beam at each other, find common grounds, disagree and clash. The audience played the part of a bystander, as if they were a group of people lucky enough to overhear two savants strike gold.

To call Tim Hecker’s set, or recorded music, for that matter, atmospheric would undercut the weight of what’s really going on. There’s a force here that just isn’t present among his musical peers – it’s hard to find another creator of droning, shoegazey loops that can produce sounds as psychologically loaded as his. His show on Thursday and the album it played off (Ravedeath, 1972) read less like music and more like pieces of literature. It’s intensely lyrical noise that is seldom easy to process. The crowd outside the church had experienced something bigger than any one person (Hecker and organ included) present, and words don’t always come quickly after something like that happens.

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