MIKE
Words by Ruth Gebreyesus, Photography by Christopher Currence
Video Stills: Justin Morris, Photo Assistant: Fallou Seck, Wardrobe Stylist: Christopher Smith, Wardrobe Stylist Assistant: Kinjhi Vincent, Groomer: Kara Yancey
One Sunday night in February, I catch MIKE as he makes his way home from a music video shoot for his frequent collaborator and friend TAKA. On our call, in the pitch black of his car ride through Brooklyn, the producer and rapper previews his week ahead: a couple shows in New York, including a DJ set under his producer alias, dj blackpower, kicking off the Dweller Festival, which celebrates and centers Black electronic music artists. A couple days later, he’ll be at World Dweller, a joint party between the revered electronic music platform and Young World, the free summer concert series that MIKE and his friends have organized three editions of in Brooklyn. The lineup for that night features a mix of musicians, including Anysia Kim, Liv.e, dav1d, and Salimata, with whom he’s shared both songs and stages. Just three days after all his Dweller duties wrap, MIKE, along with Salimata, Niontay, and 454, amongst others, set off to tour Europe and North America in support of Burning Desire, his eighth studio album released last October.
After he shares all of this, I offer that he takes time to decompress before we resume. I confess that his schedule is intense to listen to, let alone experience. “I feel like it's ridiculous because I'll be posted in the crib for hella long, just working on music from my bedroom, and then it's really a long time not feeling like you're a rapper, or a musician,” MIKE shares. “And then all of a sudden it's like, ‘Yeah, you're a DJ, musician, creative person.’”
Even from a secluded bedroom, MIKE and his music are part of a compelling and dynamic constellation of musicians, visual artists, and cultural workers in creative connection with one another. A decidedly collaborative practice has been MIKE’s way ever since the beginning, which can be counted as sometime in 2012. At fourteen, having recently relocated to his father’s in Philadelphia after a five-year stay with his mother in England, MIKE recorded his first song: a speedy and combative rap over Madvillain’s “All Caps,” a collaboration in absentia but a collective effort nonetheless.
Two years later, MIKE left Philadelphia for New York and went on, in 2015, to form sLUms alongside Adé Hakim, Jodi.10k, Darryl Johnson, King Carter, and Mason Dreiling — a crew of musicians who took their shared digital sonic and community sensibilities into underground performance spaces around Brooklyn. Since then, MIKE has expanded his universe of sounds and visuals, but collaboration remains the connective thread. “I guess I'm kind of head ass for this — [these] are two different people from two completely different worlds about to come together and discuss something that they're both familiar with,” he says, amused by his own enthusiasm. “I just always be so excited to see different techniques, different ideas come together, whether it be musically or even just having a discussion with the homies. I think that's usually what draws me towards people — when I could have a feeling that maybe [this] is somebody who's interacting with life in an interesting way.”
That curiosity is on striking display on Burning Desire, MIKE’s latest album at the time of our conversation. (Two weeks after our chat, he released Pinball, an eleven- track collaboration with Brooklyn producer Tony Seltzer, juxtaposing MIKE’s light-touch verses over Seltzer’s labyrinthine beats.) Spanning 24 songs, Burning Desire is an emotionally and sonically expansive journey grounded by recurring themes: adorned samples orbit around agile and earnest lyrics; horror as a genre is woven into the music and visuals, including a Nollywood twist on the canonical “Thriller” music video for “Set the Mood,” starring Nolly Babes’s Ebele Anueyiagu. The production, mostly by MIKE himself, stretches from the orchestral and poignant on “plz don’t cut my wings,” featuring Earl Sweatshirt, to jazz and R&B melodies passed through progressive electronic treatments on “REAL LOVE with fashionspitta” and “U think Maybe?,” featuring Liv.e and Venna.
MIKE shares with me that the album came together from a series of serendipities, starting with an audio sample from GTA: San Andreas that he used for the titular track. “I went and low-key did some kind of history on the actual mission that [sampled] video clip comes from, and the mission was called ‘Burning Desire,’” he recalls. “This is how I always come up with my ideas. I'll find one piece and then just add hella different parts to it, kind of like some mixed-media type of vibe.” The horror theme, quite vividly illustrated on the album cover by the prolific Ghanaian painter D.A. Jasper, spun out from self-lore MIKE jokingly built around a fib that he was born on Friday the 13th, though he was born on a Tuesday. “I was so happy and proud of Burning Desire because it felt like everything was making sense. Everything just fell into place,” he shares about the album released on his birthday last year. “Even with my birthday, it landed on Friday the 13th.”
"I was so happy and proud of Burning Desire because it felt like everything was making sense. Everything just fell into place,"...
In surveying the scene, it might be tempting to place MIKE at the center of the creative constellation he’s a part of, a gravitational force around which projects and collaborators auspiciously rotate. Fandom, after all, isn’t free from our worst patriarchal impulses—it doesn’t take much for us to buy the often-sold tale of a genius man who orchestrates all movement around him (artist profiles are especially guilty merchants in this trade.) True portraits of artists and their creative scenes show the energetic yet nebulous points, where people and their ideas and efforts coalesce into one another across space and time. “It's very easy sometimes to get mistaken as that [center of a] magnetic field. Because I know a lot of times it comes from praise, which I appreciate,” MIKE tells me. “But I feel, in honesty, that there's a lot that goes into it. The main component is just the love everybody has for art and each other.”
There is also a palpable, playful energy around the extended Young World universe that suggests a sincere appreciation for artistry unimpeded by self-seriousness. “When it comes to it, it’s a group of friends who are having a lot of fun. We prioritize a good time. We create in that magnetic field,” MIKE says. He. He credits his friend, manager, and co-conspirator Naavin Karimbux: “A lot of times, a lot of these things I feel already have a spirit or soul of themselves, in a sense. Me and especially my homie Naavin just do a lot to make things easier to enjoy or shine light on things that people may have not necessarily been paying attention to.”
A decade deep into his practice, there’s a self-assuredness that has arrived for MIKE. “I think the older I get, the more I realize everybody has their purpose, and maybe music is my purpose. So that's why I always feel most purposeful when I'm in the mix, doing the music thing,” he tells me. But he has moments of doubt as well. “The way that I started making music is how I still make music today,” he adds, sharing that his first album was made on a stolen microphone (“I know God is going to deal with me for this”) and a cracked version of Ableton on a laptop his sister gifted him for his high school graduation, which he finally replaced last year. “Sometimes I feel like there's a self-guilt thing in me, where I'd be like, am I cheating my way through this?”
“I think the older I get, the more I realize everybody has their purpose, and maybe music is my purpose. So that's why I always feel most purposeful when I'm in the mix, doing the music thing..."
But just as quickly as he spirals down that dubious path, he turns to clarity, even advice, about the spellwork that is creativity. “Sometimes it's hard for people to believe that they could turn something that's not tangible into something tangible. Like, ‘Oh, this is just a thought that I had, now I'm about to turn this into artwork, and I'm about to turn this into the album title’,” MIKE says. “You are low-key world building, in a sense. And I think people sleep on their ability to do that.”
“This music thing is…” he trails off. “Maybe I had to believe it for myself so I could be as dedicated to it, but it literally felt like magic.”
