Dirty Dev
Pseudo-intellectual Alt Raps
Dirty Dev is a Canadian-Chilean musician, illustrator, writer, activist, and editor hailing from Edmonton, Alberta. He has been playing house shows and real venues since 2015, when he released his first project Dirty Since '97 as one half of the duo Dirty Dudes.
With a sound as inspired by Hip-Hop legends Earl Sweatshirt and Aesop Rock as it is by folk and punk music, his music is versatile, messy, and unique. You’re as likely to hear a bar about material dialectics as you are about parties. Recently he's started singing.
He has had work published by several Canadian outlets, journals, and organizations, ranging from articles to narrative essays, and his literary bent is reflected in all of his work, which is dense, often to the point of flirting with abstraction. In 2017, he received the Postcolonial Literature and Culture Prize from the University of Alberta.
Dirty Dev also works and volunteers as an organizer of events, in communications, as an illustrator and visual artist, and as an editor and copywriter.
Most if not all of his work centres around the extremely local - the manifestations of broad policies and concepts (imperialism, colonialism, etc.) in day-to-day life, how identity - specifically Canadian identities - are manifested, and how those manifestations are reflected in our river, in our communities, in the structures of our friend groups, and so on. More importantly, radical methods of approaching and effecting change through and on those manifestations. Failing that, at least an interesting way of rendering those things visible and thus malleable through the arts.
His most recent project, (Presumption of) Undue Influence, is out now on all platforms.
Instagram | Spotify | Apple Music | Youtube
Dirty Dev & Lefthandlee EPK
Dirty Dev and Lefthandlee are both alternative Hip-Hop artists that hail from Alberta. Both have been passionate members of Edmonton's music scene since they were young, with Dev playing consistently in Edmonton since 2015 - and setting up shows himself through the Absurd Collective, an Edmonton-based artist's collective - and Lee having recently made the jump into performing live in the wake of his debut project Until The Worm Farm. The two have been collaborating since ‘23 on a wide range of projects, from shows, to a cypher series, to a monthly playlist that highlights musician’s from Edmonton, to a collaborative EP that came out last September, “(Presumption of) Undue Influence”. Moving forward, Dev and Lee have begun the process of creating a full-length album together that will feature frequent collaborators and other local musicians.
