Edan brings old-school hip-hop to NMF Main Stage for the first time

Edan with Dagha
5 P.M., Sunday, Main Stage

Rapper/producer Edan, aka Edan Portnoy, constructs colorful, mind-bending tracks inspired by rappers of the late '80s and early '90s, from Slick Rick and Boogie Down Productions to Big Daddy Kane. One can particularly hear the influence of Prince Paul and De La Soul in his often-humorous raps, and dense samples.

After discovering rap, he began home recording in his teens, and graduated from Berklee College of Music. In the decade since, he's released a pair of albums, an EP and several mixtapes, the latest of which, "Echo Party," is really much more. Given access to the entire Traffic Entertainment Group (Kool Keith, BDP, Madlib) catalog, Edan forged a single, flowing 30-minute track.

"I knew that making a traditional mix would be boring for me first of all, so I added a lot of instrumentation to the mix " synth, guitar, kazoo, glockenspiel " and got very experimental patching in different sounds," Edan said. "Chris Parker

  • or