We make vibey hip hop tunes out of a red brick apartment in North Portland in one of the city’s few remaining affordable housing projects, Ainsworth Court. We make music but have regular jobs just like you. The rent is too damn high and the wages are too damn low, but I digress. For now we’ll open up our own can of worms. Neka, who hails from southern California, was schooled in music from an early age singing and playing piano in the local churches. She fell in love with R&B despite living in a home where secular music wasn’t allowed, save for Luther Vandross. As she reached adulthood, the desire for a life outside of the fundamentalist Christian reality-map led her north with a lone Casio keyboard. Kahlo, a native of Portland, comes from a family of eastern european emigrants. She fell in love with music at young age as well. Her first stage performance was at age four, tap dancing in a pink two-two as part of her grandmother’s dance school. Perhaps she was even younger when her father's uncle, a renowned accordionist, played folk songs from the ‘Old Country’ at family functions. As she reached her formative years though, she fell in love with the local hip hop culture that, at that time, blossomed in her Northeast Portland neighborhood. Suffice it to say, it took the Fates colluding in serendipitous ways for the pair to have a chance meeting in 2009. Their first musical collaboration was, in many ways, an effort on both their part to transgress the confines of their early upbringing. Neka took to the music of legends like Freddie Mercury, Michael Jackson and Chaka Khan, as well as new stars Frank Ocean, Miguel and Janelle Monae. As a youngster Kahlo took oaths of fealty to Nas, while still indulging in the braggadocio of Jay Z. Now you can find an eclectic playlist in her headphones, from 60’s acid rock to Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap. Rather than latching on to some trendy sub-genre that critics can easily package as “something new”, we like to think of ourselves as a vector for the convergence of many genres, many sounds, expressed through the lense of our unique experience as women who refused to any conform any one identity alone. We pray to the Goddess of many faces. Amen.