We're sitting in PTP founder Geng's studio, where a handful of the label's records have been produced, and a loop of a sunnily dispositioned hip-hop beat wafts in from across the hall. "This shit sounds like early 2000s Roc-A-Fella," Geng told me, with an inquisitive look on his face that suggested, for a moment, he doubted himself. "Yeah, oh definitely, Roc-A-Fella," he said more authoritatively. "The sped-up vocals, chipmunk samples and shit. That's funny."

The outlet's acronym stands for Purple Tape Pedigree, a reference to Raekwon's solo album Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, famously dubbed the "The Purple Tape" due to its original purple cassette pressing in 1995. Over the past decade, the New York label has been a stronghold for some of the DIY scene's most ingenious talents, bringing on a coterie of producers, vocalists and rappers making emotive and confrontational noise, hip-hop, folk, industrial and experimental club music. Outside of PTP's excellent stream of releases, the platform is likely best known for its live performance series, Silent Weapons, which has also functioned as a fundraiser event for various prison abolition and immigrant rights non-profits in recent years. The label's anything-goes attitude to genre is as central to its ethos as its commitment to community-building. During my conversations with its varied members and affiliates, I gathered the sense that I'm not speaking to your average label but something more akin to a family.

Carrying about three decades of experience in DJing, producing and promoting under his belt, Geng is a hip-hop head in the most traditional sense. He grew up in uptown Manhattan during the promising rise of hip-hop, where the club-oriented jams of '80s freestyle artists like Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, The Cover Girls and Stevie B had just begun to drift through New York stereos.

When I spoke to him earlier that week, Geng named Salt-N-Pepa's "Push It," and Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock's "It Takes Two" as two tracks that made him restless for more hip-hop as an early listener. In those days, he'd aimlessly surf through radio channels on his WALKMAN or race home after school to catch Video Music Box, the first American music television series to primarily showcase hip-hop videos. When Friday and Saturday nights rolled around, he'd diligently listen to local radio stations Kiss FM and 107.5 WBLS, where New York DJs Marly Marl, Mr. Magic and Kool DJ Red Alert would regularly throw down the hottest hip-hop records. "The mix shows were crazy," he said. "A lot of my DJ roots come from just growing up with that in my ear."

Geng

Geng often cut school to pick up records from HMV and the now-shuttered chain The Wiz, typically on a Tuesday, when albums would come out. During the school day, Geng and his friends listened through the new records, often arriving with a mixtape of their favorite cuts. He described himself at that time to be somewhat of an introvert, but with enough convincing from his peers, by '95 he'd begun transferring his passion for music into DJing. Initially, he admitted, "I was worried. I was the only child that wasn't super, super, super social by that point." But after extensive consideration, he realized that the beauty of DJing as an introvert is that the music often speaks for you. Plus, crowds become far less intimidating once you're safely nestled within the anonymity that a DJ booth or an at-home set-up can offer. "I was just like, 'Ah, yeah, that sounds good. I'll talk with my hands,'" he continued with a hearty laugh.

Some years later, he was a member of the rap collective Atoms Family. The sound was lyrically nerdy rap, as the group had a special predilection for cartoons and anime. "By that point, people were rapping about Akira and things of that nature," Geng told me. "A lot of the heads in Atoms were comic book artists. So there was that element to it. They were able to take an idea from visual art to then make those visuals appear in writing and then in rap, you know what I mean?"

In the late '90s, Geng and his friends would trek downtown to view shows at spots like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Planet 28 and Wetlands—where anyone, "into any underground shit, whether it be hip-hop or hardcore punk or jungle or drum & bass," could find themselves during that period. It was a fertile and exciting time for hip-hop, and throughout our conversation, he casually mentions moments in which he brushed shoulders with the likes of ODB, Yasiin Bey and MF DOOM in their pre-fame days.

"There's never going to be another '90s," Geng told me, "but I would say that right now, we're in a renaissance in terms of hip-hop. We're definitely in a renaissance period of so-called underground or independent music, where creators are just kind of doing whatever they want and making it work."

When PTP was founded in 2009, conversations about beginning a label had yet to surface. The platform began as a blog, where Geng would discuss all manner of music happenings, from hip-hop releases to hardcore punk skating, alongside his partner Note, who at the time handled PTP's visuals. The early founding heads included members of Geng's uptown crew, The Kuzo's, and the sound primarily centered hip-hop. The Kuzo's involvement predated any official PTP releases, and much of their music found an audience on local radio stations like East Village Radio and BBOX Radio. PTP was, in every sense, a passion project. In its fledgling stages, Geng was juggling his time at a non-profit organization for a few days a week, producing beats and mixing on turntables until he fell asleep, and in his off-time, digging for blog content on YouTube. A first release on the label didn't arrive until 2012: Northwest rap duo Gorgeous Children's self-titled debut album. A month later, a Geng-produced chopped and screwed Black Sabbath record followed, which, when brought up in conversation, elicits a chuckle from the label founder. From there, the PTP releases widened their scope, with many of the early contributors doubling as a survey of the most exciting constituents of US underground and experimental scenes.

The second release on PTP, London producer Celestial Trax's 2015 EP Ride Or Die, is a solid timestamp of the inventive deconstructed club music that defined the mid-'10s, sitting at the interstices of plasticky grime, serrated industrial and club music. A year later, Copout's end-of-days EP, Forces, was released on the label, melding hyper-modern melodies with nimble rhythms that nod to gqom, reggaeton and dancehall. In 2016, the label's first cassette tape series, CELL, was launched, a project probing questions of surveillance. "The idea was to discuss the cell on all levels: as cellular matter, cellular device, and also a cell that you are trapped in," Geng explained. The tapes highlighted the work of an emerging artist on Side A, paired with an audiobook on Side B, and Baby Blue, Ssaliva and Flora Yin-Wong are among some of the musicians who've been tapped for the series.

YATTA's 2017 EP, Spirit Said Yes!, is a poster child for the label's commitment to genre fluidity. Distorted, robotic vocals morph into bebop jazz, trickling electronics splinter into rustic acoustics, and poetry is shouted out from great melodic hilltops. In 2019, one of PTP's other integral members, Dis Fig, released PURGE, an EP that represents one of the climaxes of PTP's discography. The record is mesmerizingly haunting, replete with dark alleyways of industrial rhythms and emotive lyrics delivered in something between a punk cadence and a devious whisper. The Berlin-based artist, who originally joined the collective as a DJ, told me that the album was made with the intent to resist the city's emotionally repressive hedonism. "It was my effort to lock myself in with my feelings and really confront them, and to break through the numbness that I had built up around me," she said. "Even though I knew that there was all of this pain, things inside that I hadn't been dealing with."

Some electronic music might be regarded as escapist by nature, but the emotional dialogue that courses through PTP's catalog speaks to an insistence on being escapism's antagonist. Nearly every record that touches the label is a conversation starter—take for example, New York-based producer and vocalist Dreamcrusher's 2020 release, Panopticon.

"If I were in an actual panopticon, I would want to dance. I would be that motherfucker in prison that's like singing Al Green at 3 AM," Dreamcrusher told me over a Zoom with a smirk. "I want to be that prisoner."

Dreamcrusher

The story of Panopticon began with a 29-story windowless building that mysteriously looms over Lower Manhattan. This enigmatic building is believed to be a National Security Agency surveillance site, which became a source of many questions, inspiring the album. "I'm thinking about what a panopticon is and does this qualify? Can I make it qualify?" They wondered. "Is it making itself qualified for me—autonomous of me—because that kind of power eats itself. It's toxic, it's vacuous, all that stuff." The mixtape, an extension of Dreamcrusher's self-proclaimed NIHILIST QUEER REVOLT MUSIK, is noise with a soul. Horror film strings open the record, kept vigil above wailing trumpets and ultimately, redlining static.

While maintaining its reputation as a reliable purveyor of experimental and confrontational projects from artists across the globe, PTP has also stayed true to its hip-hop roots over the years. The dark aesthetic of the 2020 LP An Unknown Infinite, a joint project between New York-based rapper Amani and Geng's alias King Vision Ultra, pays homage to East Coast hardcore rap, with Amani spitting heartfelt and deeply personal sermons over crestfallen instrumentals. That same year, the label was also responsible for releasing the cassette edition of H31R's debut album, Ve·Loc·i·Ty. The inaugural release from the promising East Coast rapper-producer duo of maassai and JWords joined the former's slick and self-possessed lyrics with JWords' lysergic production mining from footwork, lo-fi hip-hop and club music.

After more than a decade in operation, PTP is still a passion project. Geng described it as more than a label, but instead a broader community, a hub for like-minded artists, and a home base for emerging musicians seeking guidance and mentorship. New York-based musician Via App attested to this sentiment over email, explaining that Geng excels at "getting resources to where they're needed. There is a principle lacking in a lot of groups that call themselves collectives," they continued, "which function more like marketing conglomerates." This commitment to mentorship, I'd add, extends outside of Geng's work with PTP. Throughout the pandemic, he's remained busy running an online sampling class centering the history of the conversation on sampling and music ownership called "FOUND SOUND: Authorship And Appropriation," where BIPOC attendees are offered entry via sliding scale.

Via App and Yatta

Back at the studio, I talked shop with Geng and Dreamcrusher about the films that have inspired their practice. They both share a love for sci-fi scores—in the span of about an hour, they discuss a wide variety of late '70s and '80s films such as Bladerunner, Alien, Dune and Akira—and watching them converse felt like sitting in on two good friends continuing years-old banter. At one point, Geng stopped to look at me and said, "We're sci-fied fucking out!"

To that, Dreamcrusher responded with a knowing sigh, "Well, you know what it is? Now that I'm an adult, I'm able to make the connection that this combination of sci-fi, horror films and electronic music, is almost inseparable. The first electronic score was of A Clockwork Orange," they continued. "That movie is so intense. It's a thriller, it's an action movie, it's all this other shit. And all these things are happening with this immensely fucked up soundtrack."

The studio is holed up in the basement of an unassuming building that exists somewhere in the polished, gentrified dystopia that is Long Island City. On my way home, as I strolled past the glittering glass buildings that presumably house the offices of some of New York's most well-heeled, I couldn't help thinking how interesting it is that some of the rawest music coming out of the state would be made just next door.

The last time I saw the PTP crew was at Vancouver's New Forms Festival, where that year's organizers, CCL, Boo Lean and J.S. Aurelius, had made a concerted effort to present New York's diverse pool of underground talent. The PTP showcase took place at Fox Cabaret, a former adult film theater that, dressed with red velvet stage curtains, sensual mood lighting, '70s-era furniture and one leopard-patterned wall, had retained some of its cheesy glam. The collective infused the space with a feeling of immediate belonging. When I brought up this event with Geng, it became clear that this was completely intentional.

Prior to that show, PTP members Yatta and Geng sat down for tea to discuss the residual exhaustion that can follow revealing deeply personal subjects through their work and the burnout that can accompany it, especially after busy live shows.

"I don't want to keep performing or—not even performing—we were trying to change the language around it, so that it could be seen as ritualistic," Geng said of the conversation. "Because that was the thing too. We all deal with energy and we all know this, and are kind of tapped into the same kind of thinking about it."

"We wanted to address these experiences in terms of a collective gathering or collective sharing," he continued, "versus we, the performer, you, the audience."

The outcome of this discussion was monumental. In my 2019 review of the festival, I described the showcase as one of the events that would be burned in people's minds like a virulent flame long after the night's end. The energy was galvanizing and euphoric. Jubilant dancing treaded the waters of ferocious moshing, and dawdling audience members were forcibly pulled toward the stage. The show was a safer kind of space for many kinds of people, but it proudly shunned those who were indifferent and non-participatory.

In PTP's Label Of The Month mix, we're taken on a visceral tour of what a night with the outlet sounds like, leading with the comforting and long-missed babel of an audience in the preliminary stages of a show. The full oddball spectrum of the label is contained in its 60 minutes, including grueling noise, achingly smooth R&B, rousing post-hardcore and clear-eyed meditations by way of pointillist mallet works. The mood is brilliantly dark, but there are also glorious cascades of light that trickle in where they're needed most.

The mix calls to mind an earlier conversation I had with Geng in which he eloquently described the future of the label's sound. "The messaging is still going to be from the heart, and we're still going to move with love," he said. "So at the end of it all, some of it might still appear to be dark, but dark is a beautiful thing. Let's just get that straight."

Resident Advisor · Label Of The Month Mix: PTP

Tracklist /
01. Speaker Music rolls up with bookworms - aight
02. Model Home + Saint Abdullah - output 1-2
03. SOUR VISION - WAR MATERIALS_THREE FINGERED JACK
04. 9T Antiope - Dose I (Danse Macabre) (segment)
05. Dreamcrusher - Blameless
06. H31R - whatweleftwith
07. Contour - Distance
08. AMANI + KING VISION ULTRA - Hell Juice
09. Bonaventure - FEARLINGS (Feat. Hannah Black)
10. Copperhead - Sugar Daddy On Fire
11. Saint Abdullah - Eastoxication
12. Dis Fig - Alive
13. YATTA - Francis
14. A Space For Sound - Sound Bath Mixtape Vol.1, Side B (segment)
15. Dunn + Mimz - TRIP IN THE LAVA (ft SEMIRATRUTH)
16. AKAI SOLO & BSTFRND - TOP BOY
17. Celestial Trax - Together (Lost Highway Version)