A Journey Into Self: The Bay Area Filipino Artist Blending Abstract Painting with Rap

One of my favorite varieties of hip-hop is the deeply subterranean kind. The sort you stumble upon by accident: a barely discernible but promising little secret stubbing against your toe. And then you dig. Sometimes, you’ll discover an artist with only a couple dozen monthly listeners. Often, no one you know has actually heard of them. But it’s always fulfilling as fuck when you realize you’ve unearthed something of value.

That’s what it feels like listening to THEALLSEEINGEYE: an underappreciated rapper, producer, and abstract painter from San Jose who will surprise and reward you with his cerebral, East Coast-influenced lyricism dipped in lazy, West Coast-stoner vibes. Despite being raised in a post-Y2K world of internet ubiquity, the Gen Z-er has a vinyl-etched soul, and he’s ready to be heard.

At his best, THEALLSEEINGEYE is an amalgam of Toro y Moi meets Wu-Tang Clan. He’s got hints of Oakland’s Hieroglyphics with dashes of Buffalo, New York’s Griselda. The rapper-producer is unafraid to experiment (a fair amount of his releases are wordless instrumentals) and he utilizes canvases that he paints in his spare time as his album covers, too.

His brand is an imperfect, small-budget variety of SoundCloud basement music, but that’s part of what makes listening to him appealing: a stream-of-consciousness flow without pretension.

“The more that I saw myself across different mediums, the more I was able to consider the cohesion between my creativity and self,” EYE says about his multifaceted artistry. “It was like this spiritual awakening.”

In 2024, EYE unexpectedly popped up on my radar with Selected Works, a seven-track LP co-released with AdamBeen, an equally overlooked Samoan rapper from the East Bay. The duo’s energy is fluid as they exchange verses on songs that are more likely to evoke callbacks to the GZA’s Liquid Swords than any current radio slop (I won’t name names). It’s simple, minimalist, and concise. The weed-laced deep thinkers are certainly fun to listen to for their clever wordplay (see: “You would probably [Instagram] Live this, but I live this”), but the album’s muscle is largely generated off EYE’s production style, at times brooding and calculated, at others feathery and soulful.

In contrast to the endless range of generic Type Beats you’re likely to encounter on Spotify’s RapCaviar playlist, EYE’s instrumentals seem meticulously tailored and true-to-size, as if handcrafted with an array of lo-fi touches, samples, and drums that were stitched together at a slow, uninterrupted pace for each song’s unique dimensions.

Maybe what I most enjoy is the unexpected nature of his sound. It’s often far too easy for Bay Area rappers to fall into a variation of “mobb music” on repeat. EYE is an exception. Born in San Jose, he split his upbringing between the city’s north and south sides, and constantly traveled to visit relatives in South San Francisco, Daly City, Fremont, and Fairfield, before eventually ending up in Milpitas. He credits his roving childhood as helping him develop a wide range of rap and graffiti interests beyond a singular neighborhood.

“Whipping back and forth made it easier to cling to any song I downloaded off the internet onto my iPod Shuffle and bootleg MP3 player I had at the time,” he says. “[I had] a lot of time to listen to different rappers and look at graffiti out the window, which would also become a cornerstone of the art I do.”

The 28-year-old lists Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor as a seminally influential album for him in 2006. Shortly after that discovery, he began writing his earliest raps around age 13. By his eighteenth birthday, he picked up his first MPC (a production instrument made famous by hip-hop legends like J Dilla and DJ Premier, among others). He hasn’t looked back since.

The album On Growing & Falling is EYE’s most recent work, released earlier this spring. Like all of his discography — which only spans back to 2023 on Spotify and includes a combined seven EPs and LPs — the project is brief, ideal for a drive across the Bay Bridge on a rambling late night. From the opening track, “When The Weed Hits…,” the artist riffs over stripped down soundscapes with an associative outpour of references familiar to Bay Area listeners and beyond — ocean breezes, the Splash Brothers, and Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix. EYE explores both the seen and unseen, communicating with ghosts and God, and leaning into the preternatural spirit of his moniker.

A standout track is “MADtv” featuring the aforementioned AdamBeen. Titled after the mid-90s sketch comedy show, MADtv, it plays on the notion of riling up imaginary haters. The song invokes the aura of a young Joey Bada$$ rapping without concern over a Lord Finesse-esque gem. As always, THEALLSEEINGEYE’s production is the star, but he backs it up with his own dose of sincerity on the mic: “That’s why we’re different, my love [is] from the ground up, you’re in for the digits/ when your time’s up you can’t play victim.”

Throughout the album, the vibe is art for art’s sake. The guy is a painter, after all, and he’s in search of his masterpiece.

“I would categorize myself as an outsider. Maybe even a little rebellious in nature,” he says. “I kind of thrive off the fact that I don’t sound like anything you expect. I grew up in the Bay Area and my taste is largely defined by that, but I more so grew up during a pivotal time on the internet. This journey into artistry is really just a journey into self.”