"Is This the Playboy Mansion, or a Studio?" Creating Hip Hop's Fantasy Camp
Last year, as SXSW'ers swarmed downtown Austin, Texas, Alexander "DJ RTC" Fruchter rented a palatial mansion in the nearby hills for four days and set about creating a "hip-hop fantasy camp." Rappers like Freddie Gibbs, Fashawn, Rhymefest, and Kanye West associate GLC passed through, hung out, and wrote music together. Along with compiling the best of those sessions for an album project, video footage of the bonds the artists forged was recorded for an accompanying documentary. As Fruchter puts it, the aim was to "not just document the culture and the art that came out of those four days but to tell the story of the artists and what makes them unique." With Closed Sessions: ATX released on March 15th, we asked Gibbs, Fashawn, GLC, RTC and Dilated Peoples' Rakaa to look back on their time inside hip-hop's most grandiose recording spot.![]()
























