Step Into Little Stone Crow's World

Blink and you’ll miss Sunset Valley, a small community located in New Brunswick’s Westfield Parish, about a half-hour drive inland from Saint John. But on Dives Underwater, Mi'kmaw rapper and producer Little Stone Crow (aka Jan Martin) transforms it into a gleaming metropolitan city, complete with its own NBA team. By reimagining the area, Martin makes it a late-capitalist speculative stand-in for all places they love and question, holding tenderness and critique often in the same rhyme. The result is a rich lore that feels cyberpunk in texture across its fast-food neon and magical big-box stores, yet remains stubbornly human in its small, everyday desires. It’s a kind of critique through world-building, which is familiar territory for an artist who is also a tabletop role-playing game designer when they’re not making music. 

Martin’s route into hip hop runs through years of musicianship that started in their youth before making a left turn inspired by livestream culture. “I started out playing guitar, playing blues music and jazz and stuff like that,” they recall. A formative and accidental Columbia House order of LL Cool J’s Mama Said Knock You Out inspired them to write their own rhymes, though initially only sharing those words within a close circle of friends. 

Their full musical pivot came while watching a Twitch producer at work. “I started hanging out in an online Twitch stream by an artist called dot_dev. They were just making beats on the stream live,” they explain. “I became really interested in the sampling aspect of it.” From there, Martin broadened their workflow from dot_dev’s Roland SP-404 sampler, to building tracks directly in Ableton from their DIY bedroom studio with samples sourced from old silent films. Encouragement from the stream community led to an opening slot supporting Acadian rapper Jono in Moncton, and with that their growing local presence quickly turned private experiments into public practice.

Dives Underwater crystallizes that practice with intention. The blues still haunts their work, permeating Martin’s vocal performances, often uttered with a quiet growl. Songs like “Lake Monster” are imbued with a kind of haziness by way of the cavernous, slow-as-molasses samples. The skits don’t feel tacked on or skippable, they add vital colour and depth to the already rich world Martin has developed. Lyrically the album tracks a reckoning with motivation and inertia, the tug between feeling out of place, and self-acceptance. 

The album version of Sunset Valley may be fictional, but it’s tied to real feelings of scrutiny and displacement in arts spaces and everyday life. Martin’s shift from bedroom rapper to live performer has brought with it a quiet surveillance that turns curiosity into suspicion. “I went to one event once and they probably wouldn’t have let me in that building if I wasn’t being paid to play there,” they laugh. “They would’ve had a security guard follow me around ’cause my clothes aren’t right.”

That experience isn’t a one-off, but part of a reality for Indigenous people that shifts with context and geography. Martin notes they’ve moved often and sometimes pass as racially ambiguous, which alters the kind of hostility they encounter. The effect is a persistent out-of-placeness, a sense that their access is conditional and always being tested even as their work insists on carving a home for themselves and others inside (and against) those boundaries. 

On the record, that scrutiny also points inward. “I do spend a lot of time moping around. I do spend a lot of time sad, but I don’t want to change that. That’s part of me. That is who I am. I am a moper,” they explain. “As my therapist says, I have to learn how to love myself.” It’s a frequent theme across the record, but album centrepiece “Nothing But What I Am” reframes the self-critique as permission to keep going. In Dives Underwater, Martin maps a future by owning and embellishing who they are, inviting listeners to do the same.