Photographs by Kristina Pedersen

Rory Ferreira stands in his closet facing the window.

He stands there a lot, every day in fact he tells me. He is not happy if he does not get to stand in there everyday. This is where he cooks the (vegan) meat that substantiates the stew of his one man revolution (just go with me here for a minute).

Many of you probably know Rory as the rapper Milo, just as many as you may know him as the artist Scallops Hotel or the green horse for rap, maybe more know him as owner and operator of RBYT (his tape label) and maybe less as RP McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest off Broadway in Kenosha, WI.

He is a prolific rapper, artist, poet, maker. He assures me that rapper and rap are not pejorative terms and, though his music is heady and viscous and only ever dramatic in subtle ways, he assures me (and I am assured) that he sits in a special place within his genre and not outside it on its edges. He exists in centre void.

I wanted to speak to him to learn more about this void he singularly occupies, Rory has really invented something (or maybe perfected something that already existed) and he is both the fan and the flame. So in a conversation we had last week he showed me the modest but literally brilliant closet he makes raps in every day.

Each morning after waking (obviously), he steps into his closet studio and let’s the morning sun punch him square in the head through the east-facing window sitting directly at eye level.

When we hung out it was evening and a softer orange made itself at home on his forehead as he rolled us a modest doobie. He wanted me to leave the doobie out of this article because rappers and hip hop culture are (not necessarily erroneously but) gratuitously associated with smoking imagery as if rappers are the only people in the world who do it.

So if we can all briefly suspend the fantasy that everyone, and not just midwestern frat dudes, doesn’t smoke pot - and for good measure the fantasy that all people participating in any given culture are all the same! - I’ll tell you about the happy magic Rory practices in his closet in Milwaukee.