Q:

Who is Zach Taylor?

A:

Hmm, Zach Taylor. Im a twenty one year old, alternative trap recording artist (The short is Alt trap) Born and raised in Calgary, the Northeast side. I been here my whole life, making music with my best friend and my “brotha-from-anotha-motha”, Alex Slade, that’s my main guy.

We’ve been working together for like two years, so this project is the accumulation of just the two years of our friendship and the two years of our business together.

Q:

Describe your sound and what influences it. What type of music were you brought up on?

A:

Well I didn’t really grow up on hip hop, I first listened to hip hop when I was twelve years old there as a lot of blues, rock and roll, and alt rock. Honestly I cant really remember a lot of the bands or the guys names that my dad listened to a lot. A lot of inspiration from like people nowadays like John Legend, or 6lack who is really good in the RnB scene and tries to incorporate that in there. A lot of Stevie Wonder man, those kind of vibes are like so unique and something that we really wanted to tap into.

Within the technical term, of calling it Alt trap, to get down to the definition of it, we are combining sub genres with trap elements and rap lyrics. So it’s not technically hip hop music, its rap music, but its on a completely different scale. Like we are using EDM, jazz, all these different types of musical genres, and even taking the sub genres within those and breaking them down.

An example is that we are taking soul trap and mixing it with lounge music instead of using 808s. Its an experiment, its not called a project because that’s not what it is. I wanna call them trials. Instead of an album I like to think of it as like fifteen trials of an experiment.

Q:

How did Underdog start?

A:

Yeah man so we are currently in the den right now. We are in a studio session with one of our artists, Niyi. Underdog was founded in 2016 by me and another artist named Sell Cisco and we went off with another artist who lives in southern Alberta, actually lives in Taber (For those who aren’t from Calgary this is where we get a lot of our corn during the summer) so he used to come up to the city and outsource projects through us and about a year in we both went our own ways and we were just trying to figure out what we were gonna do with the company.

Around then we were about ready to let it go and go do some solo work, but I started to meet member from this group called SAVI Gang and I met VARS last August. I started talking to him and two other artists that we were trying to sign, we were working on extreme legal level and just wanted to make sure that payouts were proper and that everything that everybody was doing was on a contract basis, and then they all got denied.

That was a hard blow and we ended up kind of wondering what we were gonna do.

Around this time I started developing a personal relationship with VARS and I wanted to get him on a contract. He couldn’t do it at the time sadly, so I reached out to another member of SAVI gang name Yung Cazzy and asked him if he would wanna do a feature since I thought he was a really good artist and I loved his music.

Then my girl brought me out to a movie one night and I met the third member of SAVI gang, who was Niyi, and that he was part of this group. I thought it was kinda crazy that I was meeting the members of this group individually, on their own personal accounts. So I think around that time I hit up VARS for another feature which was the experiment that just came out, I asked him to come to the studio.

So they all just came in, let me see what they were working on and it turns out that they had all of this written material that they had no way of putting out.

SAVI gang and I really just clicked, it was a natural thing where there was just natural chemistry. It just happened where we started working without communicating it like it was a contract.

So within like a month we formed together and so now we are all working on artist development and everyone currently has a project in their hands, and we are trying to get a tangible product into peoples hands now. My one that just released is the first of 4 that will be dropping between now and January.

Q:

Any last words?

A:

Go follow Nefarious Supply! They the mad plug, mad love out to them man. First real outlet that’s been serious with us in getting our shit out. On god bro, I aint ever seen a promoting company that operates the way that you guys do, constantly showing love, being super cooperative and everything. By far the best company I have worked with so far into my career.