Candy’s Spike Nolan character — a minor-league baseball catcher caught up in the financial caper of Pryor’s title character — starts sporting a gold catcher’s mask on a chain at one point. J-Scienide (A.J. Davis) always liked Nolan, who is known for trash-talking a fictional New York Yankee, among other things.

Then the emcee realized something.

“Like, you know, hip-hop — everybody into gold chains and gaudy-ass jewelry and s**t. He had this gold catcher’s mask, and it just stuck,” he says. The result? “Spike Nolan,” a cavernous boom-bap track that will be featured on The Actual Heat, an EP that the MC expects to release in November. The follow-through from thought to song was instinctive, he says.

“I had a beat playing, I was messing around with some prog — like a Yes record. And I was like, ‘You know what? I got something for it.’ And we recorded it just like that,” he says.

Just don’t ask him to identify which Yes record — the exact provenance of the sample escapes him. The Spike Nolan reference still excites him, though.

“Even if you just look at the cover art [of “Spike Nolan”], and you look at that mask, it’s just like, biiiing! It’s shining, it’s just glossy. And it’s just real flashy,” he says. “And that’s how I approached the track when I was rhyming: ‘I’m just gonna talk real flashy.'”

Apollo Creed, Five Percenters and Telly Savalas are among the myriad cultural references that spill out in J-Scienide’s rush of gritty wordplay. He says the other songs on the EP will match the general vibe of “Spike Nolan.”

“Fall and the winter are my favorite times of the year. I was born in the summer, but I always liked the fall and the winter,” he says. “I want it to be an album, like, when you out on the train, on a bus, or on 95 North going to New York and it’s cold, I want you to play it. … There’s a lot of static, you can hear the pops in the records… I just really want you to feel the gristle of it. There’s nothing pretty about the album.”

“Spike Nolan” was mixed by DMV producer/rapper Kev Brown, who J-Scienide calls “big brother.” The EP will include Brown, as well as other artists with connections to the D.C. area, like Ken Starr, Grap Luva and yU, and a few that don’t, including North Carolina’s Supastition and Detroit’s Nolan the Ninja.

J-Scienide expects the record to have profile far beyond home. The single has gotten attention in the U.K. and Japan, he says. And the EP will be the first release by Official Crate Music, the label offshoot of a Baltimore record dealer. (Brown and J-Scienide are also planning a joint album for the fall; it’ll be released on Fat Beats, a label known for supporting classic boom-bap sounds.)

J-Scienide says his own songs hardly paint a full picture of his musical tastes, though. He and a friend, Ashton Wingate, co-host a show called Neverland on the new low-power, community-oriented Takoma Radio station. The description: “A mixed-element show combining audio dialogue from classic and cult films with new wave, post punk, shoegaze and soft grunge music.” It airs every other Thursday at 11 p.m. (The next one is Sept. 15.)

“Nobody at the station even knows I do hip-hop,” J-Scienide says. “They just think we’re like two black guys listening to punk. Like, they don’t even know!”

Oddisee – The Blooming
Studying – Because What Has Hardened Will Never Win
Zoe Ravenwood – The End of Something Beautiful
Jonathan Parker – CO86
Benjy Ferree – Leaving the Nest (It’s a Long Way Down)
Memphis Gold – Do You Still Want Me
Wes Swing – Blood Branches
Oooh Child Ensemble – Diko’s Groove
Sun Machines – Mare Island
Kev Brown – Always Instrumental
PLOY – XIX
igloo two – lokhu blues
Terracotta Blue – The Dust Settles
Luke Denton – Light & Happy
Girl Love Distortion – (You Don’t) Speak For Me
The Greatest Hoax – Opus no. 10
Derek Evry – Wake Me Up
Wild Flag – Racehorse
Zenon Slawinski – Sealed With a Kiss
Dan Deacon – Of the Mountains

Kev Brown – Threat
Sriram Gopal – Nadia
Marian McLaughlin – Fourth Son
My New Mixtape – Sunburn Suburb Someday
Luke Denton – Montana Sky
The Harry Bells – Matilda
So Spirited – WildLives
Reginald Cyntje – Atonement
The Seldom Scene – Working On a Building
Tereu Tereu – Crackle And Hiss
Sam Phillips – October
Miter – Yr Gold
STROMA – SC Jam
Zenon Slawinski – Ice On the Glass
Atoka Chase – Tick Tock
igloo two – first life
ZOMES – Se Genom Tiden
Anthony G. J. M. – Universe Collide
aerialist – Pegasus
Bobby Thompson – Again

Patuxent Partners – Washington County
ZOMES – Ruminants
Supper Club – Chambray
Fort Knox Five – Swinging On a Rhyme (Instrumental)
Tomás Pagán Motta – Love In Her Lies
Justin Jones – Miracles
Kev Brown – Always (Instrumental)
Be Still, Cody – Wrong Right
Buildings – Everything Is Possible
Lifted – Silver
Sun Machines – Mono Mind
Derek Evry – Wake Me Up
Iritis – Pedal
A Tale Of – Oh, We Owe This to Ourselves
Nitemoves – Ashe
The Petticoat Tearoom – Kundalini
Jonathan Parker – CO86
Girls Love Distortion – Sleepwalking
Dawit Eklund – Lies Are Chic
Masego – I Do Everything (More For Cruisin’)
Otis Infrastructure – Furniture
Oooh Child Ensemble – Diko’s Groove
Extra Golden – It’s Not Easy
Kev Brown – Party People Dedication (Instrumental)
Marian McLaughlin – Your Bower
The Greatest Hoax – Opus no. 28
Marvin Gaye – What’s Happening Brother
Aerialist – Naiad
Wanted Man – Interlude
Baby Bry Bry – Slumzzz
April + Vista – Theme In Adagio
Stranger In the Alps – Love/Afraid
Swings – New Year

Producer: SlimKat78
Stats: Age 36, Deanwood
Notable Collaborators: yU, Bilal Salaam, Eric Roberson

If you’ve attended a show at Bohemian Caverns/Liv lately, you’ve probably seen SlimKat78: The producer works the soundboard for the historic U Street venue. But the Deanwood resident is a formidable composer in his own right, having produced music for singers Maimouna Youssef, Bilal Salaam and Muhsinah, among many others.

Like many artists, SlimKat started young: As a student at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, he played music over the loudspeakers in between class periods, and later bought a sampler and began to create his own music. Still, the budding artist didn’t release anything until the mid-2000s. In 2010, SlimKat released a beat tape, Soundfreakers Vol. 1, which collected heavy drums and old vocal samples. Elsewhere, he’s produced singles for singer Nicholas Ryan Gant and California rapper Trek Life.

These days, SlimKat is working on several of his own instrumental projects: one with live instrumentation, a gospel-themed beat tape and another called D.R.U.M., which Slim says will be an expansive mix of percussive sounds. But his most anticipated project arrives later this year, when he and D.C.-area rapper yU—known collectively as the 1978ers—release a promising collaborative album. The forthcoming People of Today deals with the broad theme of people’s lives, from D.C.-based MC Grap Luva to philandering preachers. The project was conceived almost five years ago, SlimKat says.

“Mike [yU] and I are lifetime friends, and a lot of the album stems from agreements and disagreements we’ve had,” says the producer. “It’s like a discussion we’ve had amongst ourselves.”

Producer: Kev Brown
Stats: Age 38, Landover, Md.
Notable Collaborators: DJ Jazzy Jeff, Gods’illa, Phonte

Kev Brown once preferred rapping over making beats. But after a few performances in the local open-mic scene, Brown decided he wanted to rhyme with original music. In 1998, the Landover native—who cites Pete Rock as a major influence—heard a copy of Rock’s landmark project, Soul Survivor. “I thought, ‘Whoa, this is how you make beats,’” Brown says. His production style combines the music he grew up on—Dilla, A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang Clan—with his own low-key vibe.

In 2005, Brown released a solo album, I Do What I Do, on which he rapped alongside members of the local Low Budget crew (Kenn Starr, Quartermaine and Oddisee) with rapper Phonte (now a singer with The Foreign Exchange) and vocalist Raheem DeVaughn.

Yet over the years, Brown hasn’t rapped as much. He’s released a slew of instrumental projects and spit a few bars on other work, but he doesn’t enjoy it as much as making beats. “I’m not that technical,” Brown says. “It’s like school to me to write. I might as well be in math class or something.” With that said, Brown is finishing a new project that includes more of his own rapping, but it won’t be like I Do What I Do. He says it’s more like “I’m doing whatever I want.”

Kev Brown image by Daniel Love