AUGUST FEATURE: DUUMU

Artist growth and evolution is the only way to go for Duumu!

 

When Charlie Kurata channels his creativity and funnels it into the Duumu project, the resulting sounds speak volumes for his growth as an artist. Debuting on the label back in 2017 with his EP Illuminate, Duumu made quite the impression on fans early on. Two years later, he’s a staple member of our Instinct roster and an irreplaceable member of the Monstercat family. Drawing inspiration from everywhere he’s been and everyone he’s met, he’s found ways to incorporate numerous different perspectives on music into his own thought process.

Even in the midst of moving around and travelling, Duumu’s capacity to work quickly always ends up amassing in some of the most vibrant music around. From future bass to experimenting with other genres, Duumu has made it a point to always keep an eye on where he’s been and where he’s going. Self-reflection on his journey to understanding who he is as an artist has helped him take two steps forward while forgoing the conventional one step back.

We’re celebrating the release of Duumu’s new single, “Talk! (feat. ÊMIA)”

This month, we’re catching up with Duumu to talk a bit about his upcoming EP and what it means to him. Writing the titular track alongside the talented ÊMIA, the collaborative venture sees two lyrical experiences merged into one in a way that allows for multitudinous interpretations. Check out our chat below!

You just moved to Singapore from France! What are you most looking forward to about being in Singapore now?

Mostly just being able to start playing more shows. The reason I came out here is because my managers are out here and so I’ve got a lot of opportunities for shows and other things out here!

What are some of the major differences you’ve noticed about Singapore from France?

Well, the weather’s a lot nicer and hotter! It’s Singapore. It’s right on the equator, so it’s hot all the time. The same weather every day constantly, but it’s fun. Culturally, it’s been really different [because I moved to a very typical Southeast Asian area]. As somebody who’d spent basically my entire life in Europe before… kind of a big culture shift. But I was also raised on some Asian, so not too big a difference there!

Would you say a lot of what you’ve experienced so far is what you expected?

I really don’t know! It’s definitely a little bit more of a culture shock than I expected to get.

Let’s take a quick trip two years back!

Two years ago, you released your first EP on Monstercat: “Illuminate”. Talk to me about your experience joining the Monstercat family!

So I got on through Mindsight, with whom I released “What Feels Right,” and, in true music industry fashion, he essentially knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy, and at the end of that list there was Going Quantum, Jon. “What Feels Right” was actually done and ready to release like a year before it came out but they wanted to do a solo release for it, and that’s the Illuminate EP with that solo release. It was a bit of a long process to start getting into Monstercat, but it was 100% worth it and pretty incredible considering how long I’d been a fan of the label before that.

What were your expectations for “Illuminate” before you released it?

I thought people might hate it. It was a really personal EP and one that I felt was necessary for me to make, but I was very aware that it wasn’t like a typical Monstercat release, and for it to be my debut was a little bit stressful.

What was the reception from fans like?

There were a lot of comments that said where’s the drop? Those who liked it really loved it, and for that I’m very grateful.

What did you learn in the process of putting together your first EP?

I kind of learned that I like making music that directly mirrors the mindset and space that I am in. I know there’s some artists who like building these incredible worlds to set their music in, like Porter Robinson or even like KUURO or Varien… but I find that I, personally, get more inspired by my actual experiences and writing about them as they are rather than in the context of a bigger story. Writing that EP sort of made me realize that and, since then, that''s how I’ve been making a lot of my music.

What is the biggest difference between Duumu today and the 2017 Duumu (Bathtub Galaxy)?

Well, I’m two years older! There’s a difference. Mostly it’s my mindset when it comes to music, and I think that comes down to the experiences I’ve had since 2017. In 2017, I was 18 and I was living at home and finishing high school, and I had been living at home for a long time and, while I had already traveled a lot in my life thanks to my family taking me on amazing trips since I was young, I had to travel like I have since I graduated high school. After high school, I moved to the UK for two years, which was already kind of a new experience, despite the fact that I’d gone there a bunch of times. I’ve travelled to L.A. twice since then, and around Asia—including Singapore and Manila—a bunch of times now. The things I did and the people that I met during those trips since high school really changed my perspective on music and life in general. Going to L.A. this summer and meeting all the people that I have, hearing all their perspectives on music and stuff is very inspiring and inspires me to progress my mindset.

As noted by Artyom Efimov in your guys’ conversation earlier this summer, a lot of your music comes together rather quickly!

Talk about that a bit! How are you able to work so quickly?

My music, when it comes together, comes together very quickly. I have two hard drives behind my laptop right now and they’re full of project files that are never going to [be worked on]. But the thing is, when I get into a track, when my mind is set on it and I have a solid idea for it, and it sounds good, I’m usually able to finish it within a few days because I keep working on it. I’m the kind of guy who’ll work on it for like six hours, and then upload it, listen to the export, and be like “I’m going to add something else” and then work on it for another six hours.
When I get into it, my work ethic? Pretty intense. But it doesn’t happen super often. This happens for one out of maybe twenty tracks that I try starting. Usually if the instrumental’s not finished within like a week, it’s probably not going to be finished for a long time. I say finished, I mean like in a semi-finished state. Right now, one of the tracks I started when I was in L.A., I’ve got like three quarters of the track. I don’t have a second drop yet, but I know I’m going to finish it because, when I started it, I just kept working on it for like three days straight.

You said you have two hard drives full of musical ideas and project ideas. A lot of artists like to write down their ideas and then come back to them later. Is that something you do as well?

Sometimes. Surprisingly, most of the time, if there’s an idea that’s started and it’s on my hard drive, that usually means I’m not going to finish. If it’s on my computer, I don’t know. I don’t often go back to older ideas. Whenever I do, it’s usually because I’m super low on inspiration and I’ll find something from an old idea to be like ‘okay, maybe I can use this.’

So it’s more like triggering something from when you first thought that idea up, rather than actually using the idea itself?

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I’ll export out little sections. Like I’m like oh, I’ll just export the arp out and drop it in my new project file or something. Or this lead’s cool, so I’ll take it, write a new chord progression, and make a whole new track out of it. But, most of the time, the old ideas or the ones that I make and then throw onto the external hard drives I tend to not finish… but I sometimes go back to them if I’m low on inspiration.

In your life, what would you say has had the biggest influence on your music?

The people that I’ve met and the places that I’ve gone, traveling over the past two years, more than anything, probably. I was in L.A. just over a month ago, and I went for two and a half weeks. I got to hang out with a lot of friends that I already had met in real life, and I got to meet more people in real life. I got to meet SMLE, and I got to hang out with Jaron. Jaron’s been on the rise lately. Just being around them was really inspiring because they all have such different mindsets and philosophies when it comes to music, and hearing their point of view feeds my own point of view more and then I’m able to be more inspired. I left that L.A. trip very inspired.

You’ve also said that you don’t particularly like to confine yourself to genres. Do you have a “philosophy” or set of guidelines you follow when creating music?

I guess to be passionate is the main one. Make what you feel because, if you’re not personally invested in the project that you’re making, it won’t turn out as good. That doesn’t necessarily mean emotional, right? Like if you’re super invested in making this banger as hard as possible, then that’s just as valid. You need to be personally invested. Especially after this trip to L.A., like I mentioned, that’s been my mindset for making a lot of the music that I’ve been making since then.

Over the past year, you’ve been actively pumping out Speed Beats videos on YouTube. Let’s talk about it!

Tell us a bit about the series! What do you do in each video?

Yeah! I haven’t actually done one in a while because I’ve been travelling and moving to SIngapore from Europe, which is a bit of a process. It’s basically a series where I usually have my Instagram fans suggest rules for me to follow while I make a beat, and then I’ll select three of them at random by putting them all in a randomizer. Then I have an hour to make a beat following those three rules.
It’s something that we used to do with my friends all the time. We would call them challenges or beat challenges or beat competitions. We would hop on a call and then we’d go around the order of the call like three times. Everybody would give a random word or an idea. We’d throw it into a randomizer three times and then we’d all have an hour to make a beat, and then we’d all come back on the call and show each other what we made. It’s a good way to get ideas started and get creativity flowing.

When did you decide to start doing Speed Beats?

I think the first episode was a year ago? I really don’t remember when I started them. It was a while ago. I wanted to do more YouTube video content. The reason for that was because I couldn’t Twitch stream. In my apartment last year, the internet was not good enough for me to stream, so I was like let’s do some video content on YouTube, instead! So I decided to do it then. I was thinking of ideas, and I thought, well, why don’t I take the beat competition thing that we do with my friends and turn it into a series? So I did.
I’m hoping this year, now that I’m here and I’m going to have better internet, I kind of want to make a hybrid of the two. So I’ll do the Speed Beats live and then edit them and put them up on YouTube or something.

Which one has been your favourite to do so far?

I don’t even remember all of them at this point! I think the one where I had to use Minecraft sounds was pretty fun. I mean they’re all fun ‘cause it’s a challenge. It’s like hey, here’s these three wacky rules and you got an hour to make a song. Plus you’re under pressure ‘cause you’re being filmed.
I think the third one that I did wasn’t very fun because I had already recorded the episode and all my audio just messed up, so I had to make a whole new episode a day after I had already done everything else. So that was definitely my least favorite. My favorite one was all of the other ones, I guess, ‘cause they went smoothly and they’re fun to do.

A lot of your music sees you collaborating with other independent artists—especially vocalists!

Aside from making lots of new friends, which is such a huge part of what makes the EDM community so special, what are some of the advantages of working with other artists?

You send them an idea and they bring a whole new perspective to it. A whole new version of your idea with their twist on it. That’s what I love about it. Obviously the artists I collaborated with are artists that I look up to or like their music, so hearing essentially what is their twist on my idea and then working together to keep that rolling is awesome. Plus there’s the really good upside that, if you’re stuck on an idea, you can send it to someone else and rely on them to finish for you.
Vocalists as well. I love getting vocals back from vocalists. How I tend to work with vocalists most of the time, this has been different for a couple of tracks, but most of the time is I’ll write an entire song and then find a vocalist for it. And so, by that point, I’ve heard my track a bunch of times and I’m like alright, well, I’m kind of tired of this now, and then I send it to a vocalist and they get it back to me with these amazing vocals and these amazing lyrics and I’m like wow, well now I love the track again. It breathes new life into a track that you might’ve given up on.

You write the lyrics too, right?

Sometimes I play a part, but I’m not a very good lyricist so I usually let the vocalist handle that part.

How do you end up choosing a vocalist for a specific track?

I used to have a list of vocalists that I wanted to work with. I guess the way that I choose which vocalist to work with is… well, it depends on the track. I’ll usually hear the track and then be like alright, what kind of vocal am I feeling on this? Am I thinking more like chilled out, or am I thinking more like pop? And then I’ll pick the vocalist, at first, based off of the tone of their voice, and then, after that, I’ll take a listen to their lyrical content and see if any of their stuff would work. Like, if their lyrical style would work with the track that I’m working on.
It’s kind of an overall thing. I tend to work with the same vocalists a lot. I’ve worked with ÊMIA twice, now. I’ve worked with Slyleaf a lot, even though we’ve only released one feature together, but I’ve worked with her a lot. Those vocalists are my friends and I also think they sound amazing and are great writers. If it’s somebody else, I’ll ask around and be like do you know any vocalists who might sound good on this? Usually I get pretty good suggestions.

If the vocalist is writing the lyrics, do they get a say in the final title for the track?

I’ve never really thought of that. It tends to be natural. I tend to take a bit of the lyric out that I think works for the title, and then make that the title. I mean, they would. If I picked a title and they were like this isn’t good, I’d be like oh okay, what do you suggest the title’d be? But it’s never really happened. Every time I’ve picked the title, they’ve been like cool, that’s a great title. Plus, when it comes to the lyrics, even though they’re the ones who write it, we tend to have a conversation before they start writing about what the track is about to me, and then they can write something based off of that with their own experiences in it as well — because it is a collaboration, even when it’s just a feature, it’s still a collaboration. It’s still both of our track. I’m usually like this is what the track means to me, what does it mean to you from hearing the instrumental? Let’s put those together and make the lyrics about that.

“Talk! (feat. ÊMIA)”, released August 20, is the latest in your illustrious lineup!

You had the opportunity to work with ÊMIA last year on your track “Forward (feat. ÊMIA)”. What are some of the similarities and differences between the two songs?

The sound of the two songs are pretty different. They sound pretty different. “Forward” is more lush future bass. It’s future bass at its finest — which is kind of a meme between producers, but I still like “Forward” a lot. In terms of the writing process, it was definitely different because “Forward” was featuring ÊMIA whereas “Talk!” is an and. It’s a full-on collaboration. Even though I did all of the writing for the track and she did all of the writing for the lyrics, it still was a collaboration overall.
This was kind of different from “Forward” where I had an old track and I sent it to her and she wrote the lyrics, this time I had half of a track. I sent it to her, she wrote some lyrics for it. Based off of that, I continued the track and then sent her the second half and she wrote the second half. It definitely was a different process from “Forward” because “Forward” was the first time I was working with her and it was kind of more like here’s a track, here’s some vocals, have a good time. This one was more of a collaboration where it’s like, every now and again, we’d have conversations about what the track is supposed to be about, what we felt was appropriate for the lyrical content, and then it usually devolved into a bigger conversation about what music means to us. I think that helped shape the track into a more meaningful track in general because it was a full-on collaboration.

How did you initially meet ÊMIA?

I found her through some friends, actually. Have you heard of Laxcity? He’s been doing well lately. He worked with her and I thought it sounded good, but, before that, even, she’d worked with some other friends. I heard her from friends that are outside Monstercat, and I was like she sounds great, I’m going to message her and see if she wants to work and that’s kind of how we met. It was like we were working on [“Forward”] in March of 2018, so I must have messaged her a little bit before that.

How did you initially get the idea for “Talk! (feat. ÊMIA)”?

It’s a very similar process to a lot of my favorite tracks that I end up making. I have a library of acapellas on my computer that are both from acapella packs and also from released songs by other artists. I like to start the songs by throwing an acapella on and starting to write under it. It technically started out as a remix of one of my friend’s songs and then I took the vocal off and put my own on.

Production-wise, did this song take about as long as your other songs?

I’d say so. I mean, my songs vary so widely in terms of how long they take to make. Some of them take two days and then others I’ve been working on for like four months. The first track on the EP, the one that I did vocals on, I started that one back in November and I didn’t finish it until July — but there was a huge gap in the middle where I just never worked on it. “Talk!” was made in like little bits, over time. Because it varies so widely, I’d say it took about as long as most. Maybe a little longer.

What do you want listeners to know or take away from “Talk! (feat. ÊMIA)”?

That I am growing as an artist! Because this EP is kind of different, stylistically, from a lot of the stuff that I’ve done. I mean, maybe I’m the only one who hears that because I’m the one making the music, but I see this EP as a stepping stone into the next phase for the Duumu project. So it’s kind of like a middle stop, right? I’m super proud of it and I think it’s definitely some of my best work. I think the main message to come form the EP is Hey, I’m growing. I’m changing. Things are happening. The difference even just between “Illuminate” and “Forward” is worlds apart.
It’s just natural artist progression. Some people tend to think artists have to make the same thing over and over again, that gets boring for me. I think growing as an artist is definitely the way to go. The whole EP is about growing as an artist and growing as a person as well. I mean the title is “Talk” with an exclamation point, which is essentially me yelling Speak, come on! Speak up! If you’re tired of your life as it is right now, like I was tired of how my music was going for a while. I decided, “Talk!” is me speaking up and doing away with all the limitations and making what I want to make.

What is your most memorable Monstercat moment?

Oh man! Epic Monstercat moments. I think my Call of the Wild takeover was really fun. I don’t remember which episode it was, but it was the episode of Call of the Wild where Skyelle hosted the episode and she was doing games with a bunch of the artists. I had the privilege of being in one of the games — it was Monstercat Trivia and I got three out of five questions! It was for the Monstercat five year anniversary and I messed up the date of when Monstercat launched. I felt like an idiot!
But yeah, that was definitely good — not only because it was a lot of the fun at the game and I know that a lot of people thought that my response to how much money I make was funny because I said three dollars — but, also, it was kind of memorable because when it aired I wasn’t able to be there because I was on the plane on my way to the first time I was going to L.A. The combination of all that, and then Skyelle recorded the episode for me so I could watch it afterwards and see the chat reactions, that whole experience was definitely a memorable Monstercat moment!

With the “Talk!” EP set to drop on September 20, Duumu is on the clock!

In just two short years, Duumu has endeared himself to Monstercat fans around the world. He’s been here, there, and everywhere, meeting people that have helped him gain a new perspective on the value of music. Now that he’s settled into his new Singaporean space and has a new EP on the horizon, he''s sharing a bit of that insight in a message telling us it’s time to speak up. We all need a push every now and again to take a look at where we are and where we want to be. It’s not easy, but the first step in getting there is venturing outside of our comfort zone and letting those around us in on thoughts unsaid. The time for talk is not over.