But before the land can have any meaningful healing, the people have to heal. ![]() They’ll say, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if you focused on agriculture or afforestation?’ That’ll be a part of the curriculum, clearly. There are certain points I bring up that make the room fall silent. “I don’t want to name names, whatever, but I know people. “I deal with a lot of tech people,” Mach says. The investor and philanthropic classes do not necessarily share this vision. Hopefully it’ll inspire others-maybe not to give that to me, but to see a different way of affecting change.” I’m starting with this land: this is my intellectual property that I’m giving as a down payment. They take land and then give it in perpetuity to this place, that thing. “So at the end of the day-we’re talking about a trust fund-if I really want to do what I’m saying, then I have to give something substantial to the fund in perpetuity. “These people really do rely a great deal on the contributions of the diaspora,” he says. Haiti’s GDP, Mach points out, is more dependent on remittance than any other country in the Western hemisphere-and by a wide margin. It is not hard to see how this would galvanize a pride in one’s heritage. In person, he sounds much as he does on wax, speaking in a blend of cryptic wisdom and joking asides. His album from this May, Pray for Haiti, is his most acclaimed and widely-heard to date, an ecstatic burst of ancient wisdom and Vetements linen. He has a pliable voice that effectively communicates contempt (often) or longing (selectively) his writing seems like collage until it doesn’t, breaking from interpolated lyrics and allusion into richly rendered scenes from his own memory. This scarcity helped create an aura of mystery that stood in for traditional press hype, but the records themselves hold up to careful scrutiny. Until recently, only a modest percentage of it was widely available on streaming platforms: After selling his breakthrough LP, 2016’s Haitian Body Odor, through Instagram, he proceeded to list many of his albums for hundreds of dollars on Bandcamp and other websites. Over the past five years, Mach has made some of the strangest, most incisive, most tantalizingly intertextual rap music in the world. Toward the back-toward the ocean-in a white Martin Brodeur jersey is Mach-Hommy, his startlingly tall frame folded into an office chair, staring patiently at a mixing board. There’s a piano signed by those who have written or recorded here, everyone from Ariana Grande to Fran Drescher. This is surrounded by a moat for koi fish who have a Pavlovian attachment to a large gong the interior walls, an assistant shows us with Vanna White flair, move on tracks fixed to the ceiling. The only building on the expansive lot is a custom-built studio which belongs to a well-known film composer. We finally arrive at a secluded property that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. An hour into our drive-I eventually realize we’re going to, or maybe past, Malibu-he pulls off the highway to show me the buildings that house HRL Laboratories, the opaque aerospace research firm Hughes founded in the ‘40s. He says he blends his own alloy for his patients’ fillings and speaks like a Pynchon stoner (“Guys these days, they’re whacking off, looking at their iPhones… there’s no more Howard Hughes”). His theories about what many commonly-used materials do to the bloodstream and nervous system are distinctly Californian: at once outlandish and full of intuitive sense. Without going too far into detail, the dentist’s methods are unconventional. and cars.” We peel out of the arts district and careen toward I-10. “I only care about three things,” the man tells me as we buckle in: “God, dentistry. He tells me to follow him into a yellow Volkswagen Beetle with bold black stripes and, he says, a much more powerful engine than I’m expecting. Mach’s friend is there he’ll take you to where Mach is.” A slender man of about 70, wearing a surgical mask and grey hair down to his shoulders, appears above my table. The moment I find a patio chair, however, my phone rings. It’s about 8:30 in the morning, and I’ve been told to meet the Haitian-American rapper Mach-Hommy at a cafe east of downtown Los Angeles. ![]() The car is not unmarked-in fact, it’s very conspicuous.
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