Kilo KishSinger
Los Angeles, US. October 8th, 2020
Interviewed by Alexei Key
Growing up in New Jersey and Florida, I spent a lot of time exploring my personal style: cutting up clothes, drawing and painting. I didn’t really sing growing up; it was only during college that I explored music that way. I remember reading Vogue a lot and watching a lot of MTV. I think I’ve always been creative, so learning to work through art has been something I’ve practiced forever.
I realized at some point that making music meant an ability to connect in an extremely human way with others, and with myself. It’s also just really fun to make music and craft bodies of work. It’s a way for me to play and explore other realities.
Ultimately my music evolved into something I call Pophopalternatronica. It’s a mixture of all the genres I lean on to create my work. They’re all generally concept projects, in which they all work around a loose central idea or question, or something I want to explore more. Whether I write them from another perspective or from mine, many of my songs are personal. I like writing about themes more than specific people in my life; often, I’m writing to myself.
The biggest impact on my creative self happened when I moved to New York when I was 18, and I was immersed in a new culture of creativity. That move and change of location was pivotal. It happened again when I moved to Los Angeles. In those moments, things happened that didn’t feel like me, but they shaped who I am moving forward. Sometimes those moments helped more than positive events.
But the pandemic has allowed me to slow down and think differently about who I am and how I work. It’s the longest I haven’t worked, which means a lot, because I see part of my identity in the things I do and make.
These days I find everything to be inspiring; my mind is always running. The hardest part is maintaining the inspiration that’s needed to complete the more menial parts of a project, or to work past adversity.
As a performer, I love the beginning of an album’s process, when you’re searching for what it’s going to sound like. And I love playing live.
When I’m writing a song, I don’t know that it needs to totally reflect the position of the artist who write it, or the person who sings it. Many songs are an amalgamation of a lot of people’s viewpoints and experiences, so it’s tough to discern a personal authenticity there. I think intention, connection and creativity are important, as well as fantasy and play. I would love for us to process music the same way we do with books or novels, rather than social-media profiles.
The process of writing, though, isn’t simple. I’ve made my projects with one producer, Ray Brady. We’ve been renting a house in the desert, bringing gear there and setting up in the living room, and we work when we choose to do so. He might start with drums or an instrument, and then I will write melodies, and we’ll continue to build out the basic song over a couple of hours. Over the following months, I’ll write lyrics and refine them.
I don’t listen to music I’m making daily, because sometimes you will fall in love with the demo and get used to an incomplete version of the song. So I’ll let weeks go by between listening sessions, and then I feel I’m able to see them more objectively again. As the project continues we choose songs to actually track in the studio, and we continue to refine everything as we work toward the end.
I feel most creative both at the beginning and the end of a project. At the start it’s quite exciting, and also light – anything goes, and you’re more open to different paths. Toward the end my creativity gets a lot more analytical, as though I’m finishing the project like a puzzle, piecing everything together out of what we’ve made, and making the whole project feel complete and translated to an outside listener. When I’m in the middle, sometimes I feel like there is so much left to do, and that can feel overwhelming, so my courage is tested a bit more.
I’m in the midst of all that right now: I’m in Los Angeles, working on an LP and everything creative that goes into it.
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