When they founded Ill Skillz in 2005, Uno July and Lukhona Sitole couldn’t have anticipated that, just one year shy of a decade later, they would’ve experienced the departure of three crew members. Their deejay, Nick Knucklez, relocated to a different country and their fourth member Macho left some time later. DJ ID (short for Intelligent Dezign), joined the group for a stint, but then he too migrated to a different city. With time, Uno (July) and Jimmy Flexx (Sitole) solidified the working partnership they’d struck with Pumlani Mtiti and Sibusiso Dlamini, known collectively as the jazz outfit Ological Studies. They performed their free-form blend of jazz and hip-hop in front of moderately-sized audiences around Cape Town. That they’d one day showcase their music at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival was, if anything, a mere pipe dream at that point.

Akio Kawahito (DJ ID) is an International Relations graduate who left his job at the Hague to get involved with Conscious Connectionz, a grassroots community development program which used hip-hop to rehabilitate at-risk youth in Cape Town. When the recession hit in 2008, ID decided to pursue the craft of deejaying full-time.

He started doing the odd club gig with Ill Skillz in Cape Town, becoming an official member in 2009. As a trio, their profile rose somewhat: they (Uno and Flexx, specifically) were the original brand ambassadors for the urban clothing label Head Honcho. they produced outstanding videos on minimal budget and they extended their footprint beyond Cape Town to cities such as Johannesburg and London. Having ID on board proved to have multiple benefits, partly because of his affiliation to Kool Out Live, the independent events company he’d helped found in 2008 and now runs, along with partners, in Johannesburg.

While still situated in Cape Town, Kool Out regularly promoted events which featured reputable non-mainstream hip-hop artists, mostly from Europe and America. Inevitably, Ill Skillz would be on the bill, an opportunity which afforded them the ability to build a larger, more varied following. Cross-continental satellite television stations such as MTV Base and Channel 0 took notice, the group’s profile rising to the point where even the fashion publication Elle did a double-page spread on them, while Rolling Stone South Africa Magazine gave them a multiple-page feature.

However, without ID’s constant presence to help fortify the unit and collectively negotiate their moves through the maze that is independent musicianship, Ill Skillz’s momentum slowed down considerably. Life also happened; Uno moved back to the hood in Gugulethu, the place that gave him life, music, and taught him the value of resilience.

“Notes From The Native Yards” (or NFTNY), Ill Skillz’s most recent album, is their musical joy-ride through the good, the bad, and the nostalgic. It’s also their most focused effort to date. The album is their fifth release in a discography which includes an LP (“Off The Radar” in 2009) and three EPs – “Another Day Another Rhyme” (2005), “Skillz That Pay Da Billz” (2010) and “Skillz That Pay Da Billz II” (2012).

NFTNY draws liberally from an impressive range of influences: 90s rap and RnB arm-wrestle with early-to-mid-2000s production sensibilities while first-person-perspective hood narratives provide dark hues and warm shades, adding murky hues to their thick-textured music. Traces of jazz music are not far from reach.

The album is a rap nerd’s wet dream! Anyone can literally play spot-the-influence on every song; traces of Common (‘To the beat y’all’), KRS-One (‘Back to the streets’), and Heltah Skeltah (‘Yesterday’) are peppered throughout with the decadent splendour of now-ness. It’s revisionist, but it’s also modern; behind, but ahead at the same time.

But why “Native Yards,” an inherently apartheid construct which initiatives like Name Your Hood have done little to address? Ill Skillz would know: they’ve just played me songs off the album – unreleased at the time – at a roadside restaurant. We’re in Rondebosch, very near to where they come from, yet miles apart in terms of people’s living conditions.

“Now there’s that name-change thing,” begins Flexx, often the most vocal of the two, while Uno listens intently, chiming in whenever he sees fit. “They changed NY1 to Steven Biko drive, but people still call it NY1 regardless,” he states, then goes on to wax philosophical about the significance of not only the album title, but the location where the album was recorded – SAE Studios which was, until recently, located at Church Square.

“There’s a spot, which is still there, where they used to trade slaves. They’d put them on this pedestal and sell them like goods; like an auction. Just with that backdrop, the content of the album that we speak on stretches from very far; it goes very deep. It’s not just immediate; whatever social ills, whatever stuff you talk about, whatever the condition in the environment is – it’s actually a culmination of many decades.”

With Ill Skillz, the personal is political.

A conversation about them should have at its core a full appreciation of their make-up. They are two Xhosa men born and bred in Gugulethu, 80s babies who came of age in the 1990s, imbibing all the attendant features of that era, RnB and rap music notwithstanding. They went through the Gugs school of musical knowledge, and are as fond of a McCoy Mrubata or Ringo Madlingozi as they are of, say, Gugs reggae legend Zoro. Or Crosby. Or Korianda, co-founder of the Gugulethu Sports Complex Park Jams at which Ill Skillz have performed many a times.

The conversation should acknowledge their rap music headspace – more Def Jux/Rawkus than Bad Boy/Def Jam. They’re spawns of a loose collective of similar-minded emcees known collectively as Groundworkx, mostly active during the 90s and early 2000s.