Hidden sniper Nomar Slevik fires his Paper Bullets BY SAM PFEIFLE

For my first meeting with the elusive Nomar Slevik, I travel to an unassuming location, down bumpy cobblestone streets, deep in the heart of the Old Port. Riding a sleek elevator to the fourth floor, digital numbers tick off a lilting cadence. Doors open on a deserted lobby. I circumnavigate brick hallways, past shady figures populating glassed-in offices, to find his dark hideaway. Under the dimmest of lights, a chair sits nestled amongst a tight space stacked to the rafters with computers, video-editing equipment, and television screens.

Slevik is nowhere to be found. Has Portland’s most secretive underground MC and producer given me the slip once again?

Nope. He just walked away from his day job as a video editor for a local TV-production company long enough to have a smoke in the parking lot.

Really, there’s not much mystery here, simply a local hip-hop fanatic who has made himself incredibly productive (two full-lengths in two years; everybody else on the local scene has produced a similar amount of material collectively) by spending long hours at his mixer and networking extensively with other MCs and producers both right here in Portland and as far away as Hawaii and Vancouver.

But let’s just say that Slevik’s not in the business for the fame. He likes to keep to himself.

That’s going to get ever more difficult for him if he continues to release albums that push the boundaries of what hip hop can be, aligning himself with some of the brightest lesser-known talents on the scene. Last year, his Purple Lights and April Foolishness featured turns by Beth Lahr and the Ponys’ Jon Balzano-Brooks, on what was, by Slevik’s own admission, something of an eclectic album. I called it "atmospheric."

On Paper Bullets, which will be released with a party at SPACE next week, Slevik has taken the guest-spot idea to heart, teaming up with 17 different MCs — and DJ Jon — to put out an albums of duets, "Sinatra style." In fact, at least four of the songs are actually triads (or whatever you call a duet plus one). And here we see Slevik crafting a series of hip-hop songs that fit more easily into standard ideas of what singles sound like (though there’s nothing "standard" about anything here). Yet his production is so consistent, his mission so clear, that the album holds together well enough that you’d never know that Slevik may have put some of these songs together without ever knowing what his fellow MC looks like.

"I wanted to make an album with MCs that I liked," Slevik explains simply, "and I love them all . . . I made a list of everyone I wanted to work with — a lot of them were contacted online."

For "First in Space," the track with former Portlander Brzowski, Slevik took a sample from Brzowski’s own "Mandatory Braggadocio" and reworked it into a new track. The refrain of "dirty sagging pants, a heathen beard on my chin" rings aggressively through the chorus over a hard beat and some scratches. It’s contrasted by Slevik’s verse, dropped nearly a capella, with just a repeating bass in the deep background.

As each MC takes Slevik’s production to heart, crafting accompanying lines, Slevik seems to alter his delivery to match, so that there is no identifiable Slevik style, rather only a Slevik sentimentality, generally characterized as dourly playful, the laughter in his voice betraying the heartache in his rhymes.

On "The Treestump," Slevik features the precise and scientific Lifelike (who may be familiar locally from jdwalker’s most recent EP). Lifelike’s is a detached anger, considering the possibility that you "denounce your father’s name, that was passed down from generation to generation." Slevik answers with a low-voiced roller recalling a childhood accident where he fell on a treestump: "I called out for you, but I guess you weren’t alive."

Or there’s the political rant with mole and Demume, "Shocking Blue Day." This features some of the best interspersal of spliced-in back and forth on the album, from all three rappers. This may be the result of more frequent collaboration between Slevik and mole, who resides in Hawaii, but has also supplied production for Sontiago, locally.

The collaboration with Bluebird hints, too, at what a labor of love this is for Slevik. He clearly admires Bluebird especially, and says that he’s one of the few rappers here for whom Slevik created a beat with expressed intention. It’s a winner, with melody from something like a xylophone, bouncy and fun, and Bluebird stepping up with alternately ultra-quick and slowly relaxed rhymes: "Isn’t it a wonder to think ahead/ But isn’t great to drink instead."

Nomar goes in for the ultra-quick, too, the results blurred at the edges like you’re listening to it with a pretty hard buzz on. And how did Slevik get into this in the first place? "I got over it," he raps, "started listening to Bluebird and Brzowski."

Though I’d argue that he showcases fellow artists as a producer in ways new and different, it’s clear that Slevik as MC has studied at the knee of anticon artists and other intellectual underground rappers like alias, Slug, ADeeM, and Sage Francis, in addition to the ones found on this disc. Nothing wrong with that.

Some of the songs he’s crafted here are nothing short of outstanding. "Metallic Smoke Screens," with Brad Hamers of Phlegm, features a twinkling piano perfectly mirroring the title of the song, and Hamers busting out this gem of a line: "I kill my television three times a day and hope for a reincarnation of something more human." Then it finishes with a rock number like Big Country.

I can’t even write about Geneva B’s "Is That Your Final Cancer." There’s too much to digest.

And Slevik brings out some real animosity in the often demure Sontiago, who’s paired with fellow Portlander Rent on "Some Kind of Redemption," singing along with her in the opening before she busts out: "If that were the ammunition of choice, I would be the source of a lot of dead trees/ I’d have piles of papyrus piled up for all my enemies." She knows "exactly which bitch on my list would be the first to go." She wants to "put you shoeless over broken glass/ be in the world’s biggest game of dodge ball and have you picked last." Whew. Pairing that with an industrial backdrop of clanging pipes and minor keys, Slevik has brought out a side of Portland’s favorite female MC not often seen.

That takes talent, underground or otherwise.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com

Nomar Slevik plays a CD-release show, with Sontiago, Moshe, Bread, Rent, DJ Fuckface, and jdwalker, at SPACE, in Portland, Feb. 7. Call (207) 828-5600.