Welcome to The DEEPER Experience

Welcome, welcome, welcome... my name is Zyrus Campbell, also known within my small circle of artists as z1 thaESSENTIAL. I am an aspiring hip hop recording artist and producer, member of two DC/MD-based hip hop crews, Subwoofer Science and DPA. Born and raised in Silver Spring MD, what I consider to be the mid-point between Baltimore and Washington, DC, and what others (especially in the mid-90's burgeoning DC hip hop scene) have coined as the "Middle East" since the DC metropolitan area is situated smack-dab in the middle of New York and eveything south of Atlanta.

My passions are music (esp. underground hip hop/soul, instrumental projects and oldies), graphic and web design/development (something I've been doing professionally for over 10 years at this point), family, faith, technology, basketball (playing... not watching) and urban apparel. I intend to use this blog to post things in these areas and at times give my own opinion. I may sometimes delve into politics but as I'm not completely astute in law and governance, that won't be too often.

"The DEEPER Experience" is a term that I coined back in the mid-90's with my cousin in the group DPA. I named the Maxell 90 min tape that we created and passed around to friends and strangers, "Tha DPA ik'spir'e@ns presents I.V.C.". At the time, my cousin's stage name was I.V.C. (as in, Invincible Vincent Campbell) and I handled the majority of the production on the project (mostly him doing freestyles over my beats). Since then, he's changed his name to GreyMatter. You will learn more about him in the future. The thing I told myself was, that if I ever started a label, it would be called "The Deeper Experience" because that was what I felt was happening to me when I was really feeling a song, beit the melody, the harmonics, the lyrics, the presence of the artist on the song... it wasn't just a song or a piece of art, there was an intrinsic quality to it that I had yet to define and my goal was to spend my life pursuing and enhancing it. To this day, I judge a lot of my beats based on 'feeling' instead of how comparable it is to top selling music. There's something deeper in the music, it's been around for years and I'm on to it.

Eventually, we made ourselves known as simply DPA (we've yet to figure out if it's an acronym with meaning or just the pronunciation of "deeper"). So, in essence, this blog is an extension of this movement available via the Internet. Whether or not it actually becomes a real label, we shall see... all the motivation is there.

I will go into greater detail about the various projects that I've done as a lyricist and a producer as well as with DPA and Subwoofer Science. I just wanted to take some time to introduce myself and this new blog that I've created. I hope you enjoy.