I ask Onoe Caponoe, an artist with an unusually large number of intriguing “unreviewed ” bios scattered across the World Wide Web, most of which mention cat piss in some way.
Onoe laughs a little at his own eccentricity, but quickly returns to himself, clearly still very serious, “I need to get back on that.” I ask him about an unverified bio I stumbled across on Genius written 10 years ago with 720 upvotes. It begins: “A Funkadelic sperm from the sexual organs of the 169world Onoe Caponoe uses alien technology to record vocal crystals telepathically transmitted by his thoughts.” I read it aloud, blushing a little at “Funkadelic sperm,” and say that I assume it was written by an excitable, if a little overzealous, fan.
“Oh no, I wrote that,” Onoe responds matter-of-factly, “You should be able to tell, I give it a little flair.” On reflection, he’s absolutely right. The “Lord Cat Pissdelic myth” of Onoe Caponoe’s poetic verses leaves little room for misinterpretation. If there’s one thing Onoe Caponoe has in abundance, it’s a vivid imagination. It’s an almost rampant imagination, to be honest, exposing previously unexplored realms of quasi-reality, actualising themselves in elaborate music videos, illustrious animation and artistic characterisation. “I’m in my own world all the time,” Onoe says, and I really don’t doubt it. “There’s a lot going on,” he says sagely.
Forget your own world, Onoe Caponoe seems to be orbiting a vastly different sonic cosmos to what we’re familiar with, and for good reason. “I just can’t help but copy some shit, especially if it’s good.” I like and admire his candour. We’re all copycats at heart. “I got my style through not listening to any rap music,” he says, a pensive reflection on how the absence of influence can birth something beyond the limits of our humanoid imagination. Clever.
It’s what all the artists love to say these days, professing their discography as valiantly “cross-genre,” or perhaps bypassing the categorisation of music genre altogether. I ask Onoe about where he lies, foolishly suspecting the typical complacent answer that often lands at the other end of the call. Instead, he describes his catalogue as loosely being closest to “dark psychedelic rap music,” but that it still doesn’t do it proper justice. “It’s my own vibe,” he says. I can’t help but agree.
Onoe Caponoe came up in the inner-city graff scene as a yute, spraying walls with cans of colour (not cat piss), to make his mark on the city he grew up in. 2026 sees much the same in a different medium, a sonic notch in the bedpost of undefinable rap, and a fervent gesture towards a future of the otherworldly.
Read the full feature in RWD Magazine Issue
133
Read the full feature in RWD Magazine Issue
133
