Carl Kavorkian roams the halogen soaked streets at night as a homeless lion, prowling the twisted landscape as both a war drenched vagabond and an anti-genre wordsmith clinging to Philadelphia hip hop’s crowded, dystopian underbelly. Having survived the codeine-and-lean-fueled apocalypse that left many of his early 2000’s counterparts crushed, ground up and isolated, Kavorkian, in an act of self-preservation, reinvents himself; he is, after all, under that unkempt mane, behind that voice like a distorted rasp calling from a Cybertronian jail, a cyborg, able to download new programs and override the glitches– shifty AnR’s; wishy-washy youth born trap/southern rap pathogens; uninspired and directionless record labels– that sent many of his contemporaries to the scrap heap. It’s on this pile of discarded rapper parts that Kavorkian has erected Manikineter, a project as much an emotional take on minimalism as it is a meditation on encroaching paranoia and a distrust of the meme-led generation.