We are Nate and Hila
a duo of emcees / writers / performers, who create ecological, sociological and philosophical songs, videos and live shows.

 

— We combine elements of Hip-Hop, comedy and performance art to stir the heart and stimulate the mind about the state of things on the planet Earth in the 21st Century. 

 

We’re both independent artists in our own rights (see below), and we met as such in 2016 in a basement at a Brooklyn house show we’d both been booked to play. We were enchanted with one another’s bizarre performances — Hila did comedic raps about sex to the beat of a cajon; Nate did unapologetically metaphysical raps to his sampler. We were like: ‘we should jam’. So we started busking together on NYC subways with two microphones an SP-404 and a portable speaker. 

 

Little did we know, within a year this would lead to an explosion of new creative directions. We began regular collaborations with House of Yes, Little Cinema and Caveat NYC; and soon we found ourselves on a regional tour and then a world tour, starting at the Berlin Music Video Awards. Not only had our careers taken a new turn — so had the nature of our content. Little by little, our thematic focus oscillated to environmental education and ecological philosophy.

 

In 2017 we created ‘I Am Plastic, Man’ — a music video about plastic pollution with sets and costumes made from discarded NYC plastic. Following this we developed Eco Trippin, an ongoing live show combining musical theater, comedy and environmental science, which debuted at House of Yes and continues intermittently at Caveat NYC and other venues. 

 

Our recent and current projects include a collaboration with Meow Wolf, and our latest original show Naughty for Nature — an epic musical exploration of sexuality among animal species on the planet Earth, debuting January 23, 2020. 

 

Our goal: to engage with audiences on topics of the greatest importance — our relationships with Nature, and with ourselves — with depth, humor, nuance and musicality, free of censure and full of hope; and to collaborate with others who can bring their much-needed and as yet unheard perspectives to that shared endeavor. 

 

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Nate

(Nathan Dufour Oglesby, aka Sir Kn8) is an emcee and academic hailing from Washington State. For most of the past decade he’s lived in New York City, where he’s built a distinctively didactic approach to Hip-Hop, using the form to explore concepts drawn from philosophy, history and the physical sciences. 

 

He received his PhD in Classics in 2018 from the Graduate Center, CUNY, with a dissertation on organicism in the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Plato. By day he teaches Latin language and Greek Civilization at City College of New York; by night he versifies vociferously and wields microphones on stages. 

 

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Hila

(Hila Perry, aka Hila the Killa) is an emcee, comedian and performance artist hailing from Soho, NYC and Tel Aviv, Israel. Her work synthesizes standup, music and monologue to make a simultaneously lighthearted and deep-minded treatment of sexual politics, body positivity and environmental crisis.

 

She began her artistic career as a filmmaker, graduating from NYU with a degree in Film and Television in 2014. She’s carried this background into her current undertakings, producing and directing an array of cinematic shorts, sketches and music videos. In recent years she’s educated herself in permaculture and urban agriculture, and endeavors to transmit these skillsets and ways of thinking into her artistic output.