Producer/MC Jneiro Jarel prefers not to call any one city his own. Not wanting to fall into hip-hop’s territorial obsession, Jarel is more concerned with pushing his various leftfield projects forward than claiming certain area codes. “The thing about me, I always brought my vibe anywhere that I go,” he explains. “That’s why you can’t really put a finger on where I’m from. I call it a Viberian vibe—this is my own world.”?

While mentally chilling in the sonic utopia of Viberia, Jneiro now physically lives in L.A. The recent move out west from his longtime residence in Philly was made partially to be in closer proximity to his friends and collaborators Flying Lotus, Daedelus, and others from L.A.’s bubbling beat community. With Jarel, though, no move is permanent. “I’m in Cali for a minute, but I’m still Philly, though. You know how it is—I’m everywhere.”

After growing up across the country, Jarel began sharpening his MC skills in Houston and then moved on to Atlanta, back to his hometown of NYC, and then to Philly in 2004. And it was there that he ultimately began to make noise as a MC and producer. Thanks to a push from Philly selector Rich Medina, Jneiro opted not to let his financial troubles on the East Coast get the best of him. “I was gonna go to Texas and then eventually come back to New York, but I went to Philly, met King Britt, met Bahamadia, and hung out with all these Philly legends.”

Living in PA amongst established greats, though, Jarel didn’t follow in anyone’s footsteps. Instead, he began letting loose in the studio, and recording projects under different aliases like Dr. Who Dat? But in 2007 he pushed his creativity a step further with his debut as Shape of Broad Minds, a group made up of four of his aliases and one actual rhymer, Jawwaad. Approaching this project from so many angles allowed for a raw assortment of cosmic boom-bap, jazzy broken beats, and a little Brazilian funk.

Jarel made no less of an impression on his collaboration with Goodie Mob MC Kuhjo, called Willie Isz. The duo’s 2009 debut, Georgiavania, evoked listeners to re-think their impressions of Jarel and Khujo with this self-dubbed “digestible but still different” LP.

Staying in tune with his rapidly shifting sonic vision, his recent collaborations include remixes for DOOM, a song with Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio, and tracks with fellow shape-shifting act Blu. No matter the locale, Jarel strives to not repeat himself. “I’m all about reinventing for my own personal stimulation [and] for my audience,” he says. “I feel like a lot of my audience gets that now.”

Phillin’ It: For years, Philadelphia has been shrugged off as New York’s little brother—a place where displaced Brooklynites went in search of cheaper rents, bigger spaces, and a touch less ‘tude. But what’s emerged over the years is far more than simply a sixth borough. So for this year’s special City Issue, we dug around the Fishtown, Northern Liberties, Chinatown, and every other little enclave we could find to bring you the best that Brotherly Love has to offer. Check back every few days for a new feature from the east coast’s newest hotbed.

There’s a level of deep listening where “being influenced by” doesn’t ?quite come into play. It’s very near the surface of the music that Philadelphian Wes Eisold has been releasing for just over a year, with the occasional help of friends, under the moniker Cold Cave. A near-delirious jumble of pop gestures embedded in dusty-circuit synths and mids-heavy drum machines, Cold Cave’s first proper full-length, Love Comes Close (released on Eisold’s own Heartworm Press imprint), might recall EBM or dark wave at moments, but its prerogative is less about a particular sound than a whole structure of feeling. As Eisold puts it, “What I wanted to make was an ode or memorial to the music I’ve spent years dancing to alone in a bedroom.” It figures, then, that former Xiu Xiu member Caralee McElroy—a singer and musician well versed in bringing out the dancefloor potential of bedrooms—contributes to many of the tracks here.

More often than not, the soundtrack for Eisold’s bedroom dancing was Brian Eno’s “Here Come the Warm Jets,” and he singles out Eno’s debut album of the same name as a bridge between the structured world of hardcore and experimentation with audio processing and recording itself. As the vocalist of now-defunct post-hardcore units Some Girls and Give Up the Ghost, Eisold sees Cold Cave as a departure from his previous projects in that his writing and recording process are one and the same, involving more improvisation and more responsibility for the final product: “I record everything and end up using a lot of the mistakes I become fond of,” Eisold says, echoing Eno’s Oblique Strategies dictum to “honor thy mistake as a hidden intention.” While Love Comes Close is undeniably more of a pop album than the noisier singles collection Cremations (Hospital Productions, 2009), the tracks behind Eisold’s and McElroy’s singing writhe and threaten to devolve into the protean tone exploration of early electronic music.

Comparing Cold Cave to the musicians they fleetingly resemble—OMD, Front 242, Chris & Cosey—is something like taking dream symbols literally. Each of the bands mentioned had their own subcultural corona in the pre-internet era, a net of references that orbited around them and described a whole way of being in the world. If there’s a dreamy quality to Cold Cave’s music, it’s in the way it creates spaces we seem to recognize. Eisold has recalled in previous interviews how, as a child, a family friend described to him that the black-clad kids at the mall were Smiths fans. Peering into such portals is what guides Cold Cave, a project that Eisold describes as an attempt to “give back in the present to what has given so much to me in the past.” In doing so, Cold Cave manages to come up with something more vital than irony or earnestness alone could muster.