Four semi-underground hip-hop groups will rendezvous at the Brewery, 233 E. Beaver Ave., at 10 tonight to spit a variety of rap styles.
Audio Imagery will headline the Cherry Darling Productions-sponsored show, along with Reading-based Factology, local hip-hop group Midnight Love Ensemble and Penn State student Matthew Tsoy (sophomore-arts and architecture), also known as The Sauce.
"Audio Imagery has three rappers and a full band; they have a very unique sound," Meredith Rebar, promoter for Cherry Darling Productions, said. "They go from rapping to singing, and they have a female backup singer."
State College-based Audio Imagery has been competing in the Bodog Battle of the Bands since last year, Rebar said, and has a chance to win a $1 million-dollar record contract.
"It's kind of like American Idol where people have to vote for them," Rebar said. "Right now, I think they're in the fourth or fifth round, so they're doing really well."
Though The Sauce, Factology and Midnight Love Ensemble have played together before at the Brewery, this will be the groups' first chance to play with Audio Imagery.
Local act Midnight Love Ensemble features two emcees: MC B. Rips and MC Droopy Drawz. The group likes to rap about parties and girls and draws influences from non-traditional sources for hip-hop.
"Our influences are not rap or hip-hop related; our influences are like Pantera or old-school Metallica, and we're into Johnny Cash and stuff, too," MC B. Rips said. "We like to rap about partying. We all love to party, what with the drinking and the women, and along those lines, we rap about sex a lot."
Though they'll rap over a tape during the live show, Midnight Love Ensemble uses a variety of local musicians to record its beats and backups, with the drums and bass as the only programmed aspects of its music. The featured emcees are in local band The Clover and consider the hip-hop group a growing side project.
"Droop and I have masterminded it, but there are a lot of other creative inputs," MC B. Rips said. "A lot of local musicians who are our friends lay down some tracks for us; it's cool to have [hip-hop] as an artistic avenue to be able to get the songs out to the people."
Rebar said Midnight Love Ensemble was more of a comical rap group based on their lyrical content.
"They rap about beer and booze and girls and sex," Rebar said. "They're fun."
Factology, a group of five artists featuring Keith DiDomenico as its emcee (a.k.a. DiDomeniflow), will be taking a different angle than Midnight Love Ensemble by incorporating some political orientation into the music.
"I'm a little more politically conscious; I get real frustrated with politics so a lot of times I vent from that aspect," DiDomenico said. "When we do a show, I like to mix it up and have party songs out there for people to have a good time, but I have to intertwine my own message into it."
