Quadeca Is Cloaked in Magic

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Quadeca is a survivor. Born Benjamin Lasky, he started a YouTube channel in June 2012, uploading videos of him opening packs on FIFA and performing diss tracks in his Los Angeles bedroom. “It was a fun thing to do, recording videos and combining my personality with a more casual connection to art and hip-hop music and singer-songwriter music,” he says. “But then I would see these videos of child prodigies blowing up, and I’d be like, ‘Damn, fuck these kids. That should be me!’ I really wanted to be [Justin] Bieber.” By 2014, he was making freestyle rap content and even made waves at his school’s talent show—which turned into a viral online clip titled “Destroying Original Rap At School Talent Show” that currently sits at 2.1 million views. Then there was his “20 Styles of Rap” video and a beef with KSI that propelled him into an upper tier of music creators on the most-visited non-search-engine platform in the world.

But Quadeca, now 24, was never making YouTube content with a successful music career in mind, and he never thought it would be referenced as the “start of something great.” “It was more like, ‘Oh, I’m having fun with it and maybe I can have a platform,’” he elaborates. At the end of the 2010s, he’d already started taking the vocation more seriously. It had become his devoted craft, because “being on the internet and existing publicly and always trying to remind people that you exist can detract a lot from the earnest nature of making art.” Quadeca argues that, in order to “connect with what’s inside you and do something that’s different that nobody expects,” you need to disassociate from how you’re being perceived by others.

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He calls it a “furnace of content that you shovel your shit into and hope keeps burning.” “I think my experience on YouTube, weirdly enough, prepared me to not be on YouTube, because it made leaving it valuable,” he says. “It gave me an appreciation for that version of myself, it helped me compartmentalize the idea of being focused on art versus the idea of being focused on being a spectacle.” Internet fame isn’t such a vacuum anymore, either. Apps come and go, and while YouTube has oft-remained the lone victor in the online age, there are more platforms breaking artists’ backs just to stay relevant—like TikTok, which especially enables this instant-gratification, short-attention-span era of consuming that we’re in. “It seems to be making artists a lot more depressed, the fact that it’s so encouraged and it’s so necessary—the music industry encourages artists to play this game of non-stop content.”

There’s also a stigma around internet rappers. Certainly you know somebody from your hometown who had aspirations of becoming the next SoundCloud star. Maybe some wannabes have gotten popular enough now that the medium is being ingested so frequently, but YouTube veterans like Quadeca are still haunted by their beginnings. “No matter what I release—no matter where it’s going, or who likes it, or who I’m collaborating with—I still have the scarlet letter A of YouTube,” he admits. “You can never escape that. I don’t know if that’s a positive or a negative. At least at that time, there was a big, baked-in, algorithmic ecosystem of people on YouTube. When you’re involved in that ecosystem, you get a disproportionate amount of success, sometimes.” As is the case with anything where fanbases are being built on content that is extracurricular to the art, there will always be some form of gatekeeping present—people leveraging authority over what is and what isn’t “real music.” “A lot of times, the music was fucking horrible,” Quadeca remembers. “Shit was bad. I feel for a lot of the artists; they had to be twice as good just to be respected a little bit. You could be 25% as good but, if you knew how to do the thumbnail the right way, you could be getting more views than some really great music.” Quadeca tells me that he still feels caught in an uphill battle, because his YouTube career is more publicly known than the albums he’s been releasing since 2019’s Voice Memos.

But he always wanted to make music and be a singer-songwriter. Hell, the guy with one of the highest-rated mixtapes on RYM had to start somewhere, right? I ask Quadeca if there was somebody from his childhood who is partially responsible for the version of him that we have now. “My childhood piano teacher,” he says. “She was this hippie teacher who didn’t teach me how to read music or do the technical things, but every week I would write a new song and she would come and listen to it and be so immersed in it.” He pauses, reflecting mid-thought. “She treated me like an artist, and she was encouraging of the creative side of music, rather than the chore or the academic side.” A lot of the work he’s doing now is a product of him tapping back into his “less-filtered, childish relationship with music” and “ finding the magic from within.” “When I started to reflect about the past, I had to have this reckoning moment of, ‘What is true to me? When I’m making music, where am I actually finding those glimpses of magic?’” he continues. “A lot of it was going back and thinking about my purest connection with music and trying to integrate that with everything I’ve learned as a producer.”

Like I said, Quadeca is a survivor—of, more than anything, a platform that is confoundingly obsolete and oversaturated yet more accessible than ever before—and his production catalog has featured the steady growth to prove it. In the last three years alone, he’s abandoned algorithm-serving thumbnails and put himself in sessions with Rozey, brakence, Kevin Abstract, Sky Ferreira, and Danny Brown. Collaboration has given him better habits in the studio. “When I’m producing for myself, I’m a fucking mess,” he admits. “I’m like a hoarder. When you’re producing for someone else, you’re thinking about what they need and what helps you get it done for them.” He learned about other people’s habits, too—like how Abstract opens the room up “for people to workshop poetic ideas,” or how some artists bring tarot cards into sessions and “get tapped into the magical side of themselves”—and has gotten more open-minded about how someone might enter the sensitive and delicate space in which the best music is written. “And that makes sense,” he affirms, “because that’s what I’m trying to do.”

He operates with a “best case scenario” mindset, always trying to understand an artist’s vision before proposing something outside of their comfort zone. “I always want the songs that I produce to be songs that stand out and feel like a progression for that artist,” Quadeca says. “I’m acting from that desire to hear this song made. I want to produce something that an artist thinks is their favorite song that they’ve made. I don’t want to just fill in the blanks.” He mentions an unreleased Danny Brown joint called “Book of Danny,” which the Atrocity Exhibition rapper recently revealed is his favorite song he’s ever made. “That was so exciting to me, because that’s the dream—producing some shit for this legendary artist that’s made so much amazing music,” he reveals. “It feels like that’s a version of them that they’ve been waiting to get to.”

What makes Quadeca’s progression as a producer so fascinating is how far back the curtains are drawn. He’s transparent about “using stock Logic sounds and plug-ins” on his debut, Voice Memos, because he had to make it work with what he thought he knew. “And I thought I knew so much. It’s that classic thing where, the more you dive into it, the more you realize that there’s an infinite amount of ways to approach creating music.” His third album, I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You, was totally self-produced and featured not just a lot of immersive experimentation with distorted guitar rock, folktronica, and glitch-rap, but a mess of trial and error. “It’s like the ‘10,000 hours’ shit: After producing all these albums, I have learned a lot about how to do things the right way and how to do them the wrong way,” he says. “The more you know about where you can go, the more decisions you can make and the more tools you can have at your disposal. Sometimes that can be very difficult, because having endless possibilities can be very paralyzing. But for me, it’s really fun.”

Now, on his new album Vanisher, Horizon Scraper, Quadeca is thinking about his ambit of sounds before hitting the record button, building on the genre fluidity of his 2024 mixtape, SCRAPYARD. Pulling from a folder of samples, sounds, and ideas he wanted to resample, he made the intro track, “NO QUESTIONS ASKED,” first. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is cool. It’s got a little bit of a Brazilian thing to it. I’m using Latin drums, but it’s got these ethereal synths. What if I take that same synth patch but approach it from a scarier way, or I take those drums and slam then and then they sound all fucked up?’” he remembers. In my words, Vanisher is one of the best projects an ex-YouTuber has ever made, second or third only to Quadeca’s last two releases. In his words, it’s “like a chef with a kitchen full of ingredients.” Take a song like “THE GREAT BAKUNAWA,” for example: It’s a distorted, fucked up rap epic packed with harsh textures and a reused bossa nova drum sample that’s been time-stretched and smattered with compression. And then, on “THUNDRRR,” the mandolin plucks from “MONDAY” resurface in a fresh, atonal way. It’s not surprising that, for Pitchfork‘s “Perfect 10” series, Quadeca recently picked Construção. “I was really drawn to combining a lot of different World Music ideas and putting them in pop melodies and hip-hop structures,” he remembers. “Once I figured out the feeling of the palette, then I could take each of the interpretations to its extreme.”

After finishing I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You’s story of a ghost trapped in purgatory after committing suicide on Earth, Vanisher, Horizon Scraper became as much an adventure as it did a cautionary tale. Quadeca wanted to capture not only the beautiful side of freedom, but “the scary, angry, and lost” sides of alienation. From the onset of “NO QUESTIONS ASKED,” he felt the metaphors within this existential, oceanic voyage full of separations of reality and delusion tugging at him. “Albums and songs are like puzzles. It’s a Big Bang thing, where, once the first explosion happens, you have to see all the planets that come out of it,” he says. But Quadeca wasn’t thinking about the concept while making every track, instead prioritizing feeling, contrasts, collage, and vagueness over continuity and sonic adhesion. “If it’s so directly about a sea voyage, it’s going to be really hard to connect with people,” he cedes. “I wanted to use the sea voyage more as a canvas for these personal songs to be applied to it. It just makes for a more honest process.” The result is a studio album bearing closer resemblance to a mixtape like SCRAPYARD than the ambient afterlife of I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You.

On the punchy “DANCING WITHOUT MOVING,” Quadeca puts his voice front and center, only for it to drift into the background on the loping “THAT’S WHY.” He recorded his vocal with two different microphones in the room, singing in-between them but faraway and later panning the vocals to each side—to mimic someone screaming on the deck of an idling boat. “A lot of it is making sure that, when I bring in a vocal, it’s enhancing the world,” he gestures. “If I were to do a song like ‘THAT’S WHY’ and the vocal is front and center and so clean, the whole idea of where it transports you to is just completely fucked. Or a song like ‘RUINED MY LIFE’: If that’s a clean vocal, you’re not locked in anymore. The mixing is all about preserving the feeling of the world so that, if the music clicks, you’re really in a world.”

Quadeca is a visual songwriter, which allows him to build his own cinematic accompaniments for the music he’s producing. One of my favorite things he’s done, the music video for Jane Remover’s “Census Designated,” was a forerunner for the “full album movie” released alongside Vanisher, Horizon Scraper. On top of directing, writing, and editing, Quadeca also learned how to sail before filming, lending another dimension of authenticity to the already beautiful 67-minute production. While he didn’t let the visuals influence the album—articulating an image of a sea dragon is no simple task, mind you—the sea-bound pastoral of Vanisher comes from Quadeca fusing color with tone and story. “If someone were to ask me, ‘Oh, what color is this song?,’ it wouldn’t even be a second of deliberation,” he says. “’CASPER’ is red and orange. ‘WAGING WAR’ is blue and purple. ‘GODSTAINED; is orange and yellow. [‘NO QUESTIONS ASKED’] is yellow and blue. I think color helps me in a subconscious way. It helps me figure out when an album is done.”

Vanisher, Horizon Scraper features Danny Brown and Oleka, but UK post-rock band Maruja’s presence on the closing track “CASPER” has remained with me. Quadeca says that, while he had made the outro, which concludes with a clip of water swallowing the boat’s master and spitting him out, and wrote a spoken-word segment for it, it didn’t feel believable enough to him. So he looked for an outsider’s perspective. “I sent the song [to Maruja] over DMs with a long paragraph that was like, ‘Hey, this is a concept album about a sailor and I wrote this spoken word and I was wondering if you’d try delivering it.’ They were super into it and they were like, ‘Yeah, and we’ll have the whole band play on it, too.’ And Harry [Wilkinson] wanted to write his own verse.” Maruja sent the stems back, and Quadeca combined their parts with the bones of his own, revealing this stunning finale gleaned from a purge of jazz-punk and Wilkinson’s dirge.

Continuing a tradition he began while making I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You, Quadeca didn’t listen to Vanisher, Horizon Scraper all the way through until it was totally finished—until “every song had its spot.” “Sometimes, once you listen to an unfinished album, you start to excuse yourself,” he clarifies. “Of course, when you listen to 11 songs in a row, all of the little details in the song start to smooth over. You start to go, ‘Yeah, I guess this is good enough.’ Haunt You taught me that I have to go song-by-song and make sure every song is final. I became a lot more sensitive with ‘Why am I making decisions on music, and is it coming from a place that is in the best interest of the song, or is it coming from fear, or is it coming from insecurity?’” Quadeca returns to his belief in magic and its presence and delicacy in the art we feel connected to. “When I was making Haunt You, that was the first time that I felt like I was tapping into that magic,” he says. “It felt like that music was coming from outside of me, and all those songs ended up being the best songs. I know it sounds fucking stupid, but I think a lot of artists will understand that idea of, ‘Oh, shit, they tapped into something.’”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

Quadeca Is Cloaked in Magic

The LA singer, songwriter, rapper, and producer spoke to Paste about reckoning with his YouTube career a decade later, tapping into his magical side, working with Danny Brown and Maruja, and the ambitions behind his brand new concept album, Vanisher, Horizon Scraper.