a sit down with Nino Brown
We met through Pete from For The Homies at his CBD studio, creative to creative and no forcing it, if someone’s down for shit then so be it. I’ve always found it to be the best way to get things like this done and to have people in their most natural sense. I had always wanted to talk to someone like Nino, one of my biggest curiosities of people in hip-hop has been about their origins and how it enveloped their lives, as it has mine.
Nino doesn’t talk about hip-hop like something he found later, it feels closer than that, he’s played the long game ever since he was a kid and had the flat top like Terminator X. I think there’s a difference between being into something and actually seeing yourself in it, and with him it leans toward the second, not in an obvious or performative way, but Nino strikes me as a grown man, doing what it takes to balance his personal life and his existence in creativity (music).
Being a DJ goes beyond just playing songs, it’s judgement and taste that separates the good from the bad, because anyone can learn the tools but not everyone understands a room or earns that level of trust. There’s also the weight that comes with representing something bigger than yourself, hip-hop carries history and expectation whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, and with Nino there’s a quiet awareness of that, it shows in how considered everything feels without him needing to overstate it.
We spoke about influence without it becoming a list, more about feeling, what sticks, what you keep returning to without fully knowing why, and that constant tension between doing it for the love and doing it because it pays, something most people in creative work sit with whether they admit it or not. What stood out is that he hasn’t lost the curiosity, which is usually the first thing to disappear when something becomes a job, but with him it still feels active, still searching, still refining.
Pete connecting us made sense after the fact, there’s a shared language there, different outputs but the same need for wanting to tell stories, making things that actually mean something to the people they’re for. Nothing about it felt staged, it was just a conversation that confirmed what was already obvious, some people don’t just exist within a culture, they are the culture.
I’d like to say a massive thanks to DJ Nino Brown & Pete from For The Homies.
An interview with DJ Nino Brown
(Below) some stills taken before and after at the For The Homies CBD studio
