By Kat Boehrer

I walked into Danny Seth’s music video shoot in downtown Los Angeles and was greeted by a man with neck tattoos and hands covered in fake blood.

In the alleyway was a BMW i8 idling near hipsters smoking cigarettes and homeless people wandering from nearby skid row. Inside the venue, extras hung out between takes, enjoying cans of beer from a half empty 30 rack of PBR. Across the room, someone seemed to have forgotten to finish their mysterious lump of white powder that was strewn across a broken mirrored table.

It was exactly how I pictured my first hip-hop video shoot.

The guy with the bloody hands is the star Seth’s “Time is of the Essence” video, which he released earlier this month as a follow-up to his debut track, “I Arise Because.”

Danny Seth was a drum’n’bass and dubstep DJ in the U.K. before coming to the U.S. to intern for a record label that he later quit to rap full time. Since then, he has built a steady, underground following on rap blogs, before making his way to more listeners with a verse on G-Eazy’s “Lotta That” alongside A$AP Ferg in 2014. In September, he released a free album, Perception, a 17-track journaling of selected life experiences.

I caught up with Seth at the famous Canter’s Deli on Fairfax in Los Angeles, where he sipped lemonade and talked about his handful of tattoos -- a lily for his sister, the queen’s head, inspirational messages in English and in French, among others. It's important to keep these tokens of positivity around, because things can get dark, he said

“It’s a tough business being a rapper; especially when there are too many people in your circle, especially with what I’m doing. It’s very against the grain," Seth said. "I don’t have much support—I never really had support from where I come from. It’s mainly been just me and Jesse [my manager]. I can’t let negativity around me, especially if I’m trying to do something so different and trying to be someone great. I just can’t let that sh-- around me.”

So, Seth creates his own atmosphere. At his first L.A. show, put on by Brownies and Lemonade, Seth brought the energy and even bust his lip open when jumping off stage into the crowd of moshing fans.

Everything Danny puts out is meticulously timed, planned and perfected. His video for “Time is of the Essence” is the second installment of a series of videos he plans to release in relation to Perception.

In the "Time is of the Essence" video, Seth emerges from the desert and descends into a grungy nightclub. He runs into the man with the bloody hands, who begins on a journey to uncover where the blood came from. "He sees me performing, and I’m covered in blood, which is kind of symbolism. Like, him trying to flash back to where [the blood] came from," Seth explained.

As our main character leaves the club, he finally finds a body—and then bumps back into Danny Seth, like deja vu.

"The symbolism is that if you do something terrible, you live with it for the rest of your life," Seth said. "It’s one loop."

The multi-chaptered storyline of videos follows the same format as Perception track listing. If you string all the song names together, you'll get three sentences that tell a short story:

"Monumental how I dream;

I arise because time is of the essence.

Never forget our city,

(Pause)

Stay with me on this trip past forever.

(Play)

Danny darling, be safe, remember yourself."

The imagery in his videos deliberately matches up to his lyrics, too.

“There’s a scene where I’m saying, ‘here to bend the rules,’ and there’s a girl bending a spoon in the corner," he said. "I’ll say a line that’s a reference to something and people will do something as I say it. It’s perception; it's how you see it. Some people will see it and some people won’t.”

Perception and its video, he hopes, will help break down some listeners’ preconceived perceptions of him as a white, Jewish rapper from London. Because, according to Danny Seth, “perception is everything.”

We switched over to talking about our favorite music, as Seth poked at his noodles. His taste spans the genres -- a reflection of his eclectic musical past -- and we reflect a bit on old Calvin Harris records. “I can’t wait until they say ‘the old Danny Seth,'" he said.

At the end of our talk, Danny wasn’t hungry, so he ended up boxing up his meal before we left. We said our goodbyes and walked out onto the busy street where Seth handed his box of $9 mac and cheese to a homeless man on the sidewalk before heading home for the night.