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Today we’d like to introduce you to Chovie.

Chovie, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
So I’ve been making music since I was in like 7th or 8th grade at Wigwam Creek Middle School, and now I’m in like 20th grade (forever a student of the game) … but yeah, it all started with a creative writing class project about how to revise an essay. Me and my homie Jacob (Cula Akda) decided to rap about the things that one should do to revise a paper, trading off between beat-boxing and rapping our respective verses. Needless to say, it was a smash hit, we got an A on the project, and we still spit it to this day whenever we see each other. Once I had that awesome feeling of rapping for an audience, I knew that I wanted to get into hip-hop a bit more.

When high school came around, I started making the beats and rapping sometimes as part of a little rap group with a few friends, including Cula Akda and my homie Mikey- but we mostly made songs just to be funny. This was when I started to realize how sick it is when you can make the beat match the song you wanted to write. I made some cool-ass beats those years… Anyway, flash forward a few years and I’m in Portland, OR for college, living in the dorms. Freshman year, my room was on the same floor as this super dope dude named Rico, and he was a musically-driven guy as well. While at PSU, we became great friends. We jammed out a lot (I was playing bass and ukulele at the time), we smoked a lot of amazing weed, and he always had some really sick and influential music to show me. Those early years of college are a real hazy memory, but looking back, I know that those days planted the seeds for a lot of what I would end up making music about.

I did a study abroad program in Sevilla, Spain from 2012-2013, and when I came back to Portland, I lived with Rico, Mikey, and Cord in a spot we called The Mole Mound. It was at The Mole Mound that I finally began to take making music a bit more seriously, forming the group BCGS with Rico and Mikey, and setting up my first home studio. I was going by A-Beats then because I mostly did beats, but when the group fizzled out after Mikey moved back to Arizona, I was still trying to make music. I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but I decided to change my rap persona to CHOViE, and release a mixtape dedicated to spliffs, which I had become very fond of in Spain.

In the time creating and organizing the beat selection for SPLiFF LyFE – The Mixtape, I released my debut EP with a friend and producer named fresh2fresh out in Eugene, OR. It was called ~rotini crutches~, clocking in at just 2 tracks, but this was my first time recording in the booth as CHOViE. Once I had the full mixtape ready to go, I recorded it with Drae Slapz (Rare Vibe Records) and he really made it a professional product- I also learned a lot from being in the studio with him. My next project was a follow-up to ~rotini crutches~ with fresh2fresh, called ~PAPERZ~ (the 2nd part of the trilogy), and this was my last project on another person’s beats. Following up ~PAPERZ~, I released BUMP!N MY OWN $H!T, which was the first project I made all the beats for, and mixed and mastered myself (although at the time I didn’t really know how to mix or master).

As I honed my craft more, I did live shows in a few different Portland venues, including Kelly’s Olympian for The Thesis, a local hip-hop showcase that happens every month. It was after The Thesis that I was asked to come back to that venue to do a headlining show for the release of WEIRD WILD WESTCOAST & WAVY, which has been my most comprehensive project to date- released August of 2017. I still have many projects in the works, but a lot was put on hold while I moved back to Arizona for work.

Now that I’m back in the Arizona sunshine, I feel supercharged to release these projects that I’ve been sitting on. In the next few months, look out for my new projects: Deep End (6 tracks, self-produced), REBOOTED + ZOOTED (the remastered re-release of BUMP!N MY OWN $H!T), Trees (the final installment of the fresh2fresh trilogy of tapes), SPLiFFGOD – WELCOME TO THE SPLiFF (an instrumentals tape), and a few other surprises. But yeah, that’s pretty much the story… Stay up to date with all the new stuff I’m doing on my self-designed website: chovieraps.com.

We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I make alternative hip-hop music- written, produced, and mixed/mastered all by me. My message is whatever you take from it- I think it would be silly to pigeonhole my entire music into having one message, but I hope that people feel love when they listen to it.

I’m inspired by a lot of things: my life experiences, my weed habits, my family, my friends, the weather, my mood, The Based God. I’ve also been inspired by a lot of artists- probably too many to name but off the top of my head I think my biggest rap influences might be Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Outcast, Isaiah Rashad, Vince Staples, Joey Bada$$, KOOL AD, Saba, Smino, Open Mike Eagle, MF Doom, Why? and Earthgang, in no certain order.

You should know that I put everything into my art, and I do it because it makes me feel good to see other people vibing out to something I created.

Artists face many challenges, but what do you feel is the most pressing among them?
I don’t know if I can speak on a challenge for all artists, but my personal challenge is having to work a job that isn’t my music career… My lack of money is detrimental to my musical plans happening when I’d like them to most of the time. I need them BIG RACK$.

Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
Find everything you need at chovieraps.com. I’m pretty much on every platform though- Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, Google Play, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Datpiff, Audiomack, and a few tracks on YouTube too. Just search for CHOViE, or CHOViEraps and you’ll find me. Obviously, I’m on the social media sites too, so you can find me @chovieraps on pretty much all of em!

Contact Info:

Image Credit:
Rico Macias-Zepeda, Deb Lee, Kyle Ingram, Alexander J Whitney Wright.

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