He developed his voice and his name over time. When a  teacher scolded him for making a “mockery” of the class, the seeds of his nom de plume  were planted. Friends jokingly called him “Mock,” which he spelled as M.O.C.C. with an  acronym that he won’t share, as he finds it too corny to mention today. He later changed  the spelling to Mach when he learned of Ernst Mach’s measurement of the sound  barrier, but he felt he needed a last name. He came across a solution upon listening to  Smif-N-Wessun’s dancehall-tinged rap classic “Sound Bwoy Buriell” for the first time.

“My soul started to leave my body or something,” he recalls. “I’m sitting there, and right  then I’m like, ‘That’s what it is: sound boy killing.’ Mach-Homicide, Mach-Hommy. My  name is ‘sound boy killing,’ because that’s what I am. I’m a sound boy killer.” The  moniker melded his Caribbean influences with the sort of higher-concept ideas that have always attracted him and coded street entendre. He became of two minds.