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This article covers the rise of the Karupp Cypher, South India’s largest underground hip-hop gathering, returning on November 16, 2025, at SD Scapes, Kochi. Curated by Karupp Records, an imprint co-founded by the creative collective ALTPLUS, the Cypher brings together over 500 rappers, beat-makers, and filmmakers from across Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Bangalore.
In 2019, a small rehearsal space in Kochi witnessed a convergence of voices: young rappers trading lines in Tamil and Malayalam, beat-makers passing USB sticks across languages, filmmakers filming street-circle performances. This informal gatherings of peers swiftly evolved into something more organised — a community grappling with boundaries, identity and creative autonomy. From those modest roots emerged the Karupp Cypher: a platform born out of the region’s underground, now one of South India’s largest communal hip-hop gatherings.
The Cypher is curated by Karupp Records, an imprint that shares origin with the collective ALTPLUS. Co-founded by ALTPLUS, the label has grown into a home for individual artists: it is a network, a podcast, a live-event ecosystem fostering rappers, producers and visual creatives across Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Bangalore. As independent creators cycled into rehearsal rooms, then shared snippets on social media, Karupp Records began formalising that energy — offering a stage, documentation, and most importantly, an influential conversation.
This year’s edition, the cypher is scheduled for November 16, 2025 at SD Scapes in Kochi, marks the movement’s most ambitious turn yet. With over 500 independent rappers, beat-makers and filmmakers expected to participate, the Cypher now occupies a space that is grand in both scale and intention. SD Scapes which was launched by musician Stephen Devassy just this year in North Kalamassery positions Kochi as an infrastructural hub for content and live production — precisely the kind of place a regionally ambitious cypher needs to prove that regional hip-hop is capable of building its own infrastructure, rituals, cultivate a collective momentum. Unlike conventional cyphers, Karupp’s format resists hierarchy. There are no headliners — a deliberate design to emphasize collaboration over competition.
A gathering of this size and density produces three things that matter for culture building. First, practice: repeated live encounters sharpen craft and performance instincts that studio hours alone won’t. Second, distribution: aftermovies, podcasts and social edits turn ephemeral performances into sharable artifacts that travel beyond state boundaries. Third, infrastructure: relationships formed in cyphers seed crews, labels and production teams that can sustain careers. Karupp Records seems to be deliberately engineering all three — programming live events, documenting them, and hosting conversations on the Karupp Podcast so the movement records its own story as it grows; like a power-packed self-sustaining creative ecosystem.
As the Cypher grows, crucial questions that surface are: can it retain the democratic spirit; the open cypher-circle energy; even as it invites larger production values and sponsorship possibilities? Can it preserve multilingual plurality while reaching a pan-South-Indian audience? If it manages to, then what we’ll witness a milestone: of a region taking ownership of its voice, together.
Follow Karupp Records here.
