About Xeno
I started rapping at the close of the ’80s when I lived in Kent. Born and raised in Folkestone, but now a Londoner for nearly 30 years.
By 1996 I’d acquired enough skills to create demos of myself with the help of a community project in New Cross (The Midi Music Company, now in Deptford), where I learned how to use a studio for myself and find confidence as a performer as well as a recording artist.
My first authentic recording was around ’96/’97 and was called Carnival Carnage, featuring Mission X on cuts, with Bite It on the B-side featuring Mr Thing. It was a synth fest and nothing like anything popular at the time. I’d also been working with a producer called Mista Serve, and then I met Defisis in ’97, and soon he and I were recording demos with Serve as well as my own music which by then was synth and sample-based, calling ourselves DFXO. Serve introduced us to SFDB and it wasn’t long before a 6 track version of Kill Ya Wiv A Demo was released on the label. Prior to the SFDB release, but after our first outing on Disorda’s Mind The Gap mixtape Vol.2 with ‘DFXO-Reprised’ – all produced and recorded at Blades’ – KYWAD was a CD of 10+ Xeno produced tracks (I forget how many tracks it was exactly) that we’d had in circulation, reaching out as near and as far as Belgium and New Mexico. Chuck D played it on Rapstation in ’99/2000, around the same time I recorded with Bill Tha Pharmacist the track We Don’t Need You, featuring Kyle Jason, Prof. Griff, and Chuck D. A track that would later be remixed with additional artists and thus a new group formed with the help of Chuck called The Impossebulls.
I quit performing in 2006, and then recording in 2007. My last performance was at the Brixton Jamm in 2006, but by then I’d performed at festivals in Italy and Belgium, as well as with Blade on stage and on a radio tour for his The Unknown album. Some of the most memorable performances, though, were as DFXO – Hope and Anchor, Imperial Garden – and even though the first time we performed was at a college in Lewisham one afternoon, my venturing into a life of music felt real for the first time being introduced by Manage at the Amersham Arms in New Cross in ’98. In 2004 I teamed up with Secondson of SFDB, calling ourselves Plague.
Many other tracks were recorded between 1995 and 2007, including a brief visit into beat-making again where I turned out some instrumentals that I collated later on as Lunch Break Beats. Most of the works were never officially released, except for a Plague album, but not until a decade after its recording. Everything else I slowly leaked onto Soundcloud during what turned out to be a 10 year hiatus. In 2017 I recorded a second Plague album with Secondson called, Where’s The World Gone?, and in 2019 I bought myself some equipment and began composing again, resulting in the recording of XOLO in 2020, which was released in 2022, followed by the albums Priceless and Iconoclast in 2023. A Series of 3 instrumental albums called Alien Archetypes are scheduled for release in 2023 as well (part 1 was released at the beginning of June).