LAMP Mix #321 feat. boiish
Hey LAMP Fam. Been a crazy couple of weeks with everything going on in the world. We hope this finds you all happy and healthy. We are very excited to share this new mix with you and think it will be just what you need to lift your spirits. For our 321st mix in the series we have an upcoming duo, boiish who has been absolutely smashing it this year. Coming from Miami, Kristin and Amanda have been very busy busting out remixes for Kesha, Kaleena Sanders and mosts recently they have joined the HE.SHE.THEY. family with their latest track "Do Too Much"(Download HERE). Finding time between their day jobs these two are committed to putting together top notch tunes and growing their brand and so far 2020 has been very good for them. In addition they have a dope mix series called "Nothing Fancy" that the two hope using their background in live events will parlay into a event series once we are allowed to go back to having such things. I know I would be first in line when they kick it off, more on that below. For now sit back and enjoy this incredible mix from the wonderfully talented boiish. Full interview and tracklist can be found below along with socials to follow. Enjoy!!!!
boiish Interview:
PZB: Hello boiish and thank you for taking the time to put together our latest mix on LAMP. We are really excited to share your music with our audience. Can you give us a little insight on your sound and what to expect from your guest mix this week?
boiish: Thank you for having us! We appreciate the support! For this guest mix you can expect a dance party with hints of house, indie dance, and disco/funk! Get ready to non-stop grooving.
PZB: So the big news we want to talk about is your debut single “Do Too Much” which just dropped this Friday on He.She.They. Can you please tell us a little more about that track and how you got connected with He.She.They.?
Kristin: Do Too Much is a tech-house stomper that we made with our friend Mike Antix. We had sent it over to HE.SHE.THEY, and we developed a really promising connection with everyone on their team from the very beginning. Being an inclusive label that creates space for all artists, we knew that their vision definitely aligned with ours. We are so excited to now be part of the HE.SHE.THEY family.
PZB: If you wouldn’t mind can you please give us some background on boiish? How did the two of you meet and what made you decide to take on the world of house music?
Amanda: So we were working together, and our desks were within 4 feet of each other, back to back. It’s actually hard to remember what came first, if we became friendly because i’d be playing music on my computer, or if we became friendly so i felt comfortable enough playing music. Either way, we would play new heaters and talk about music in between working - or not between working… I was definitely a distraction!
Kristin plays guitar, bass, drums, piano, and sings. One day, she invited me over to her spot after work to jam out, and we ended up with a little indie-dance track. A few jam sessions later and boiish was born. We were also teaching ourselves how to DJ at the same time. We wanted to be able to play tracks that we were creating, and since we were both in such a house frame of mind, it only seemed fitting to start creating house music (without deserting our indie dance roots/influences).
PZB: You are also coming off of a couple of hot remixes for Kesha as well as a favorite of mine Kaleena Zanders. What drew you to those songs in terms of creating the remixes and if you could tell us a little about the process you went through creating those remixes?
Amanda: We were drawn to these tracks mainly because of the vocals. Wrabel, Kesha, and Kaleena are all top notch vocalists who we were thrilled to be working with.
‘Since I was Young’ by Wrabel and Kesha had really beautiful lyrics and a message that definitely stuck with us. The original track was a completely different sound from what we had been working on, so we were excited to challenge ourselves to put our boiish spin on it and create something totally unique to our project.
With Creme Brulee, we loved the R&B vibe of Kaleena’s vocals, and had a lot of fun chopping them up. We had played around with a few different versions before deciding on the final acid tech house remix that we ended up submitting. We are so thankful to have been able to support these releases, and to have received so much love and support in return from everyone involved.
PZB: When did you start writing/producing music – and what or who were your early passions and influences? What is about music and/or sound that drew you to it?
Kristin: We started producing music together as boiish in early 2019. Our early influences in this project were a range of all genres, from indie dance, to house and techno. From Odesza and Rufus, to Gorgon City, Claude Von Stroke and other Dirtybird artists. What drew us into creating music together is that we loved the emotion and the feeling that certain tracks would evoke from us. We wanted to be able to create a unique sound that would encapsulate our eclectic music tastes, a sound that is all our own. Music is a universal language, and we just appreciate the opportunity to be able to express ourselves through music, and hope that we can evoke the same emotions through our music.
PZB: Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece or album that’s particularly dear to you, please? Where did the ideas come from, how were they transformed in your mind, what did you start with and how do you refine these beginnings into the finished work of art?
Amanda: When we started writing our first single, People Wanna, we had actually already been working on an EP for a few months, and we just wanted to start something fresh, like a fun and dancy house song. Once we got the groove and most of the instrumental track worked out, we kept playing around with this lyric: “The people wanna dance.” It just came to us really naturally, so we ran with it. We brought in our producer friend Mike Antix for the final mixing and mastering process to help finish it off!
PZB: Collaborations can take on many forms. What role do they play in your approach and what are your preferred ways of engaging with other creatives through, for example, file sharing, jamming or just talking about ideas?
Kristin: Being a duo, our whole project is built on collaborating. We enjoy collaborating with each other and with other artists, and have been doing more and more file sharing especially now throughout the pandemic while we are each working independently from home. We have been doing production sessions together over Zoom, and collaborating with other artists by sending tracks and stems and vocals back and forth. We love a proper jam session too, so it will be exciting to actually get in the studio with more artists eventually.
PZB: Our industry is constantly going through changes, and we as artists are competing for ears with so many others out there. This has never been more prevalent than now during these great times of uncertainty and change dealing with Covid-19. Listeners are bombarded and overwhelmed with the amount of music out there, whether through Spotify, Soundcloud and now we can throw streaming platforms like Twitch and even Zoom. How do you try to connect with your audience, and what do you feel helps you stay relevant and cut through all the noise that is out there?
Amanda: We feel that we are not trying to compete with other artists. Rather, we are just going to continue to be authentically ourselves, and hope that as people continue to come across our music and pages, that they see and appreciate our unique sound, and relate to who we are as artists and as people. We want our growth to be organic, and hopefully that is what creates a space for us in this growing industry, not competition with other artists - there is space for everyone!
PZB:Production tools, from instruments to complex software environments, contribute to the compositional process. How does this manifest itself in your work? Can you describe the relationship between yourself and your tools?
Kristin: We are so thankful to live in a time of such great accessibility to the technology that allows us to create music from the comfort of our homes. We would love to build out a proper dream studio filled with instruments and synthesizers, but for now, we are making the most out of our home studios and just pushing ourselves to continue on this never-ending learning curve that is music production.
We love using Ableton and designing our own sounds in plug-ins like Serum. It would be great to have a studio full of synths one day, but fortunately we are able to re-create those sounds through other means in the meantime.
PZB: Let’s say you’re working on a new tune and you’ve got the chance to program some remixes for the EP. If you could have your pick and money, time etc were no object who are some of you favorite producers right now that you’d want to have a go at reworking your tracks?
Amanda: This ones easy. If it’s one of our more house leaning tracks, it would be Gorgon City or Chris Lake. And for some of the more indie leaning stuff, Odesza or Bonobo. Or switch it up the other way - it would be amazing to see what each of these producers (who inspire us so much) do with tracks that are completely opposite of their genres.
PZB: Outside of music what other passions and creative outputs do you have? What are some that you’d love to add to your mental vocabulary?
Kristin: We both like to think of ourselves as being creative, so we always try different outlets, individually and collectively as part of boiish. I enjoy photography, have even taken some of our boiish portraits for us, and during the pandemic I started picking up and learning more about video editing. Amanda draws, paints, and plays around with graphic design, and most of our artwork for our project has been created by her (IG: @crimepieceartworld). Our background is in live events, and once events are back we’d like to get back to that too. We would love to one day use that for this project, ultimately throwing ‘Nothing Fancy’ parties that bring the same no-frills vibe from our Nothing Fancy mix series to the dance floor.
PZB: Is there anything else coming up in your world that we should know, or you want to tell us about that we should be keeping an eye/ ear out for?
Amanda: We have some collaborations that we’ve been working on with other artists that we’re wrapping up, and we’re really excited for those to be out hopefully soon!
PZB: Thank you so much for your time and the incredible mix you put together. Please keep us posted on future releases and if we are ever allowed to do shows again (I’m sure we will it’s just a matter of when) I would love to see you the next time you play here in LA.
Tracklist:
boiish, Mike Antix - Do Too Much
David Penn - The Heat
Nina kraviz - Ghetto Kraviz (DJ Slugo remix)
Yolanda Be Cool - In Your Arms
Wongo, Greyson chance - Dance
Ship Wrek - Danger
Ocean Roulette, VNSSA -Magic (Steve Darko remix)
Disclosure - My High
Never dull - Voodoo Babe
Jamie Jones - Rushing
MJC - Would You Kill (4 Me)?
John Summit - Deep End
Michael Bibi - Lemonade
PAX, Rui Da Silva - Touch Me
Eden Prince, Nona - Memories
DJ PP, Thousand Nights - Time Is Now
Kaleena Zanders and VenessaMichaels - Creme Brulee (Boiish remix)
Jahjaylee, Justin Jay - onmymind
Catz ’n Dogz feat. Nick Monaco - Inside
Mikey Lion - I Feel High
Sofi Tukker & Gorgon City - House Arrest (Chris Lorenzo remix)
Hot Since 82 - Make Up
Kyle Watson - Major Games
Channel Tres - Controller (Walker & Royce remix)
Rrotik & Smalltown DJs - Do You Want Me
John Summit & Dead Space - Impactor
Love Regenerator, Steve Lacy, Calvin Harris - Live Without Your Love
Mancodex - For Ya
J. Worra - Now Ya Know
Prok & Fitch - Indiance
Yolanda Be Cool - Dance and Chant
Mat.Joe, Kevin Knapp, Maximono - Dummer Loco
Cut Snake - Desire
Poolhaus & Local Singles feat. boiish - ID
TAYA ft. Tashmenn - Rare Breed
KC Wray & Andre Salmon - Hugs
Lee Foss, Martin Ikin ft. Hayley May - Gravity
boiish, Mike Antix - ID
Follow boiish:
https://www.facebook.com/boiish