If his internet-fueled ascension seems sudden, it’s only because of how old-world Chance’s grind had been at first. His story starts in Chicago and stays there for a few years. He honed his skills at YOUmedia, an after-school creative program for teens based out of the public library. He organized events and linked with student bands. He pushed CDs the old-fashioned way, first winning over the kids from his own high school, then expanding outward. “I was right on State Street, asking people to listen to my mixtape and promising them that it was hotter than they thought it was,” he remembers. “The only time I sold CDs was when I got them to actually put the headphones on.” 10 Day, released in 2012, was the last and most professional of his four high school mixtapes, a loose conceptual project based around Chance’s real-life suspension for smoking weed, and it solidified his status as a local favorite. (It also featured a pair of beats from Peter and a somber solo courtesy of Nico.) By that point, technology was catching up to Chance’s hustle.

“It’s so dope that I was able to be the age that I was when I was coming up,” he says. “People were just realizing how to use YouTube on a DIY level. Twitter, SoundCloud—all that shit was just starting to pop when I was making 10 Day. A lot of people out of Chicago were able to flourish because it was so new.” While the out-of-town press has often propped Chance up as an alternative—or even antidote—to the more street-centric drill music of fellow Chicagoans Chief Keef and Lil Durk, he remains adamant that they are all part of the same scene. “It’s all the same shit,” he says. “We got all the same fans in the city. We’re playing the same venues. Musically, our sounds are different, but we really need each other in order to exist. We need the idea that rapping is important for people to help us to continue to thrive.”

Also integral to this scene was Kids These Days, a seven-piece alt-rock/jazz-rap/everything-else band of high school friends that counted both Nico and Stix among its ranks, as well as rapper and frequent Chance collaborator Vic Mensa. Their 2012 full-length, Traphouse Rock, was co-produced by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and Beastie Boys engineer Mario C. Though not without its charms, it was an overwhelmingly referential project, a case of too many talents cramming a narrow space with all the music they’d ever loved. Radiohead bumped up against Chi-town fast-rap legends Crucial Conflict; funk metal morphed into funeral jazz. Still, through that cacophony you can quite clearly hear the DNA of The Social Experiment, that same ethos of defining your influences and then pushing them to their logical extremes.

Peter Cottontale came up kicking around that same constellation of young Chicago musicians—and with similar genre-bending instincts—making beats for both Vic and the jazz vocalist Lili K while playing keys in the rock band Mathien. Nate, however, stands as a bit of an outlier in the group. He’s not from Chicago but a small town outside of Pittsburgh, and he’s the eldest by far, nearly 30 in a crew where everyone else is just barely old enough to drink. He studied studio engineering and has a decade of more traditional hip-hop beatmaking under his belt, for the likes of Machine Gun Kelly and, recently, Big Sean. He met Chance at SXSW in 2012 and began sending him instrumentals shortly thereafter. Four of those beats landed on Acid Rap, and Nate was quickly absorbed into the fold. Like the others, he seems grateful for the creative freedom that comes with being in the band. “The most incredible thing is that Chance is so open to whatever everyone else thinks,” Nate says. “He’s willing to put in all of his resources, all of his cards, everything on the table to make it work, to make it whatever [Nico] thinks of.”

“Surf is Nico’s project,” Chance says matter-of-factly, back on his borrowed porch as night begins to fall. “He was working on it when we decided to be The Social Experiment, so we decided that his project should be first.” This might seem like an extraordinarily humble gesture on Chance’s part—while many artists put their homies on, very few put them first. But in talking to him, you don’t get the impression that he ever gave it a second thought. He came up in a small, tightly knit creative community and is now instinctively using the cultural capital he’s earned to sustain that same circle. It’s only revolutionary when you look at it through the lens of a bent industry that has built its business model around severing stars from the scenes that birthed them. In a better world, it would be a given that making music for the sake of the music comes before marketing yourself, that community is more valuable than celebrity.

After Ali, the four musicians head to The Fox Hole, Nate’s West Hollywood studio, located in one of those ghostly, two-story hybrid strip malls/professional buildings common to L.A. Chance wants to preview some tracks from Surf, and his TV speakers aren’t cutting it anymore. The record is a whole lot to digest in any setting. In some ways, it’s a logical extension of what Chance was doing on Acid Rap, with the most organic elements of that album teased further out of the typical rap production framework and blown out to their most grandiose extremes. Nico’s robust solos anchor most tracks, but they frequently run parallel to double-time raps. Lush neo-soul hooks crumble into blippy house.

These are the sounds of a pack of band kids who hold Miles Davis, Rich Homie Quan, and Kirk Franklin in similarly high esteem and who have been given carte blanche to touch on all of those influences and more at once. They like to define their target audience as “grandmas and babies,” and that makes some sense—the record roughly splits the difference between spirituals and lullabies. It’s also so densely packed with sounds and ideas that it’s hard to imagine either of those demographics being able to detect the nuances. Or, as Chance suggests, it might just take a little time.

“A song should have a different meaning for at least the first three times you play it,” he says. “That’s the biggest thing to it—adding onto the track, just making as many different sounds and small peculiarities and accents that make the song what it is. Like on [Michael Jackson’s] ‘P.Y.T.,’ that little wah wah-a, that one little sound that Kanye ended up sampling for ‘Good Life’ only happened once in the song. You wouldn’t know that unless you listened to the record over and over again and found that one piece that you like.” It’s almost as if Chance and his friends are aiming to reverse-engineer the act of beat-digging. Where earlier generations of hip-hop producers foregrounded small fragments of music from the past, The Social Experiment buries new ones for the future.

When Surf comes on, everyone moves. Peter spins around in his swivel chair. Nico mimes a slap-boxing match with Nate before sliding into a mechanical Bernie dance, barefoot on the hardwood floor. Chance closes his eyes and bobs his head. At one point he steps out for a cigarette, but when a track hits a particularly complex vocal section, he swivels most of his body back around the apparently not-so-soundproof door, leaving just one arm out with the smoke, and shouts, “Eight part harmony!” He’ll later brag about how, during one Chicago session, they recorded 610 different tracks, so many they needed to take them to a better-equipped L.A. studio to finish the song.

With Surf, The Social Experiment tends to prioritize this stacked sonic architecture over traditional song structure. It’s music to sink into. “Donnie is so unique as a musician in his ability to transform the tone and sound of the trumpet for the song,” Nate says. “It’s almost like a lead guitar, like he’s Slash. Every song, the trumpet is different—it’s a different tone, a different style.” The workflow is ever-changing too, with no one contributor stuck in a single role. Chance contributes on the production side, and Nico has been using the project as an excuse to flex his talents as a percussionist too. “It’s really never been like ‘Peter lay keys, Nico lay some horns, Nate put down some programmed drums, Chance write a rap verse,'” says Chance.

This communal approach extends well past the main quartet. Surf is a collaborative project without borders, and most tracks are tangled and packed with different vocalists and instrumentalists who aren’t immediately identifiable. “Every record has like 50 people on it,” Chance explains. “The idea is to make a singular, four-minute-and-30-second song that feels like a year’s worth of music.” As he plays the album, he seems to strategically skip around certain tracks as if to conceal the presence of more prominent stars. When he does mention collaborators by name—like fellow Chicago spitter Noname Gypsy or the budding Atlanta singer Raury, who appears on Chance’s favorite track from the project, an airy number called “Windows”—he tends to refer to them as “my friends.”

Surf demands repeated listens, which is not exactly what their manic listening session today affords. As a vocalist, Chance floats in and out. Sometimes he’ll be buried under a stack of sounds, just one voice among many. Elsewhere he’s at the forefront, singing in a hush or rapping like the room is running out of oxygen. Either way, he comes across as just another of the many small peculiarities in the mix. “People hear what they wanna hear,” says Nico. “If they only wanna listen to the songs with Chance The Rapper, they’re gonna have to listen to the whole project cover-to-cover because I’m not gonna tell them which songs [he’s on]. The important thing is just to listen. Listen to the music, then send it to your grandma.”

The next day, Chance, Nico, and Peter have found more fun. They’re shooting hoops on Venice Beach with a wider crew, including trombonist J.P. Floyd, another ex-Kids These Days player who they describe as an unofficial member of The Social Experiment. Nico is wearing the same shirt from the day before and visibly trying harder than anyone else on the court. Chance throws up bricks but seems not to care. Peter wanders off in the hopes of finding a record shop he’s heard about but returns only with a pack of Pocky.

It’s an unusually overcast Thursday for Los Angeles, even in December, so the courts and the boardwalk are mostly empty, give or take a small smattering of old heads who have probably been hanging there for decades. The Game is nowhere to be found. The only rappers milling about are the ones pushing their CDs hand-to-hand. One of them, who looks to be in his late twenties, hones in on Chance’s Sox hat and comes over to announce that he, too, hails from Chicago. He introduces himself as Ish Illa. They exchange blocks like business cards, and he condenses his life story as a reformed gang banger into a sales pitch. Chance is remarkably patient in the midst of this hustle, even though his face does register a hint of visible disappointment after he asks the man, “Who you fuckin’ with from the city?”—their city—and Ish responds, “To be honest, man, nobody.”

Eventually, Ish breaks out the old Coby discman for the last-ditch taste test. After about a minute of listening, Chance’s eyes bug out and dart around the table. “This shit cold!” he says. “I cannot even stunt! No jokes!” Chance insists that he has no cash on him, and after much bartering, Ish finally agrees to give him a CD for free and walks off. Chance’s enthusiasm remains, though he admits, “I feel like a dick because I definitely have five dollars on me.”

He turns to Nico and asks, “You know what memory just came back to me? Do you remember at Oak Street Beach, before the Kids These Days show at The Metro, when you, me, and J.P. stood at one of the little underpass things? You guys pulled out your horns, and I was freestyling over it, and we were selling tickets? That shit was hot, bro!”

As they reminisce on the distant past of just a few years ago, Ish swings by a second time. Having now completely dropped his salesman’s demeanor, he shouts, “Hey, one more thing! I know you Chance The Rapper!” The next day Chance will tweet “listening to Ish Illa” with a link to the rapper’s SoundCloud. Ish will respond in kind, posting the Acid Rap cover to his Instagram with the caption “God just used the music that he gave me to touch even a famous rapper!!” It looks like Chance may have just made a new friend.