Smyth conceived Spore Attic in an attic in Eugene, OR two years ago. He’s since moved to Portland, but a million revisions and excursions to the record store later, Spore Attic survives as both a place in his mind and a metaphor for the brains that bless the best art into being—a place where lunch is served gross, the record bins are bottomless, and the best of Oregon’s rap and jazz players bury themselves under dust bunnies and grody wall fungus. They’re eating trail mix with no M&Ms, playing hot-potato with the mic during a 40-minute game of Madlibs.

The Portland producer-rapper, also known as DJ Spinitch, has already released a handful of beat tapes and an EP with fellow MC Este. He’s an integral member of the Breakfast Boys Leisure League collective and was formerly associated with the Illaquips hip-hop ensemble at University of Oregon. His tentacles reach deep into the young Oregon jazz and rap scenes, and here he rubs elbows with some of the best players in the state—rappers Brax, Speno, Este, Raf and Slick Devious; jazz musicians like trumpeter Tony Glausi, saxophonist Chris Casaceli, bassist Ian Michael Lindsay, and guitarists Luke Broadbent and Keenan Dorn.

Smyth is the wild-eyed Bugs Bunny at the front of it all. His flow is locked-in, precise, easygoing, and confident. He raps with a palpable smile on his face, and he sounds like he has nowhere to be and nothing to prove. He’s stoned off the cryptic soul food of Stones Throw and the epic shit-talk of the Golden Age, and though he aspires to the local stature of Ramblin’ Rod Anders (if you’re not from Portland…) rather than godhood, he has the same mix of outsized confidence and keen curatorial spark that made Kanye the hottest artist in the world. “Shrink Rap” warns young rappers against following label-ordained trends, but Smyth isn’t some oldhead grousing about lil’ somethings. He just knows some of the best rap happens when smart kids get together and shoot the shit, trying to find the flyest way to talk about their own awesomeness and prove it in the process.

“Portland’s crazy for records,” a voice deep in the mix on "Sweet Nothings" advises us. Smyth refuses to tell us the source of that sample or the dozens of others he uses on this no-budget affair, but the air throughout the album is thick with low-slung, stoned jazz and gossamer R&B, intercut with an aggressive scratching style and sharp drums that kick up dust when they hit. That the only sample he’ll reveal (on “Shrink Rap”) comes from featured artist Tony Glausi and his Nine-Piece Band speaks to both the mischief and tight camaraderie we hear on this album. For all the voices we hear on Spore Attic, the impression is ultimately of a hive mind working in unison—an aggregate organism, a colony, a clump of fungi growing in a musty corner of some Oregon attic waiting to seed your mind with weird-ass ideas.
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