¿eaux

What item did you choose?

This plant is Victoria. I've had her since 2016, which was a great time of flux for me. I had been in London for a couple of years, but I was with my ex-fiance at the time. We first moved down together and I was living in Roding Valley, near Woodford, but when we broke up I moved in with best friend Moli. I literally had nothing. I had these speakers, a laptop and a bed. I moved into this massive room and I was like “I need to do something in here”. It had a lot of light and I remember getting plants, I was really going through it at the time. It was a time where I turned into much more experimental type music than I had been making, I was really just making whatever the fuck I wanted to make and seeing myself expand as an artist.
The catalyst for this plant, which I named Vicky, was that I used to go to Victoria Station every day, night and day, and years of depression turned into me caring about something that wasn't myself and I wasn't consumed with in my own mind. Even since looking after plants, she's always been there, she's always been a centre point. I love Vicky. It's a marker of growth, to be honest. It's growth but stability. I've always been in a state of transience, I was quite fluid in my time in England and I felt like getting a plant, one of that size as well, definitely recognised “Okay, got to sit down a little bit more”. I pretty much have always been a suitcase transient person, and that was something that was like “Here's your place”, something that stood there. There's solace in it and looking back, I think that that's probably what the plant did for me. I know it's weird. House plants are omnipresent, especially in creative spaces, but I look after my babies.

You have the idea that in taking care of the plant, that you may accidentally cut a leaf or hurt it in certain ways, cut too deeply when you're pruning, but I don't know, it's sort of representative of maybe shedding things in order for them to grow. It's a healthy dynamic, whether that be personal and in interpersonal dynamics, or whether that's creatively, where you cut something off in order to maintain its health.
Habits are something that I'm definitely focusing in on right now. I think me finding solace has been forcing me to look at my habits more: how I deal with grief, how I deal with stress…Even with habits when you're making music and what you would normally go for. Would it be this model of “alright, I made a beat like this before, I made a track like this before” and just doing the exact same thing, or “I’ll try starting with a kick instead of playing keys” or vice versa, or “let me move away from this synth, let me try a different type of percussive instrument”? You are in constant growth and you have to prune habits. Growth is uncomfortable even when you're a kid and your bones are growing and expanding and your muscles are getting bigger. It's a part of your body, but your body didn't know that that was about to occur, it's just doing what it does and that shit's painful.

What does home mean to you? 

“Papa was a rolling stone. Wherever he laid his hat, was his home.”
Home is representative of this source of your identity. I don't think home is something that you're able to change. I think your home is your origin, because we're in such a world now where everyone's fluid, people are moving, people are going here, people going there. Your home constantly changes, but I think your origin always sticks with you, so I think of origins when I think of home, place wise.
I was born on the south side of Chicago and I will always represent the south side of Chicago. I've lived away from there for half my life and that doesn't mean my accent or anything, but my sensibilities, my morality, the way I interact with people is all the origin, that's home. When you go back and you smell something, you may cook, learn a new recipe and 10 years from now you'll still love that recipe but you'll have something from that you had when you were like five, when you were a kid that gives you a sense of “tastes like home”, that's why you say that: “tastes like home”. It doesn't have to be a finite exact place like your room or anything like this, it's your origin. I say “I'm going home” not in the everyday sense. It’s about going back to where you come from: home. You think of that Kendrick track “Momma”. He went home to where he feels his soul originated from, where he saw people that were like him, his traits and shit. I go back to Chicago and I see myself and everybody that is creative - and not fully, because I've had an English mother, but still when I'm like “these motherfuckers out here doing that shit” and people can understand what I'm saying, they understand what I'm saying. My movements, body language, things that when I meet people here, they look at me and think it might be aggressive, I'm like: “no, no, no, it's the Chicago in me”.
Maybe it's because I've been so far away from home that I see it in that perspective as opposed to me saying “it's where I keep my things” or “that's what spiritually means to me”, for me, it's the crib. Quite literally the crib, that's home. I love to think of it that way because there's a nostalgia to me in home and I think because of my lifestyle all over the place, I moved quite a lot, there could ever only really be one home. I'm always going to miss my “Italian Fiesta” a spot there or “Flaming hearts” with cheese that you get at the corner store.
I don’t think I see home as safety. For me, when I go home, home changes, home alters, but I love that, because my home is growing as I'm growing. 

What about home in a more roots / family / origin way?

I look back to especially having African-American roots, being amongst that feeling a lot of people have – for instance I met some other guy from Chicago on the weekend, and this woman who I’m seeing suddenly was able to see me in a completely different light - she said “Oh, that's you! That's you” and I think that dichotomy of home really shows in that sense, because you're able to be at your fullest. You're probably most able to express who you are when you're comfortable and you’re comfortable around people who also understand what that is, so that could be a dynamic home.
Having an immigrant mother allowed me to see home as a place that we come back to, that was always encouraged – knowing that no matter how chaotic the world you are in is, or where you go, the space you’ve re-created, this cultural phenomena of the people you feel closest to, that's your home. It's how you learn what things are. Your early socialisation creates a dynamic of where you are. When you're born into the world, you don't know where you are, you were just brought there, but what happens around you in those early developmental years is what creates home: those people, what they say to you, how they talk to you, the music that you're hearing, the emotions that you're allowed to feel, the emotions that you're not allowed to feel, what’s right and what’s wrong.

My mom and I are quite similar. My mom is an ambivert and I think that's because I've had this duality, that for me home is a tight, close circle. It’s close proximity and safety, but we also have to perform in the outside world: you leave your home in the morning and you are your representative of that home, but you're not at home. You know how to manoeuvre certain ways because you’re dealing with other people's home effectively. It's crazy to think of it that way, but you're always in contact with other people's homes…and I'm a social person, but I love being alone. I really used to look at my mom and feel so confused: “are you lonely, mum? You don’t have a lot of people around you”. Then on the other hand, my stepfather is the most sociable n**** in the city, so there's always people around but even then after that, I would be like “alright, I need to go into my room and chill out for a fucking moment because this is a lot”. When people are there and I have that battery it’s like “yo, what's good, what's happening?...” and then I'm like “alright, it's time for you to go because I got to recharge”.

How does the concept of home influence your work?

Creatively, I tend to always try to put a bit of my heritage in all of my music. Especially being from the Midwest, dance music is a big part of it. I never thought I'd make dance music, never. I mean, I think it's hard to even define my music as dance music, but the roots are there.
For me, dance music is meditative, and I think that that was the origin of where that shit came from - like house music, of course it was there, but I grew up listening to juke music. That shit fast as hell, and we didn't have clubs to go to…you’d listen to that at the crib, the car - that was before mobile phones. You could only listen to it when you’d go to somebody's house…you’d have this new Spin CD mixtape, literally like mixtape CDs at the time, and you would just sit and listen to this where it would be in the background, it’s almost like meditation but we're talking like “bounce that ass”. It sounds crazy to other people, but for me, that's home, so when I'm making music, a large part of what I'm doing now - because I've been inspired by so many other things, is to provide a space of meditation and chaos, so for instance, I’ll get hyped to modal jazz, like “that fucking chord change is crazy”, but if I put on when Machinedrum used to do juke, that is calming to me. I think that that's one thing I've been trying to do when I'm making music: “how can I bring a calming sense to dance”? It doesn't have to be this very hyper thing. We look at everything with such intensity at the moment, so considerably now when I'm making music or making art, it's “how can I make chaos peaceful without taking away the essence of the chaos?”  and for me, I'll put in some juke or I'll have a juke drum pattern and I'll slow that down. (I'm giving away my secrets…!).
I’ll think of how I felt when I was at home, the first time you felt these visceral emotions…how can you put that in your art? Because your art is a representation of you. What excites you? What you're expressing, what makes you fearful, sad… How are you placing that into what you're making? I always try to give a slight homage to home. There's this phrase with a lot of Chicago rap and drill and I've been wanting to put that in my songs, but subtly, maybe have it reversed - those little things that somebody at the crib, somebody at home can recognise and be like, that's Chicago, I can recognise that. A thing with being from Chicago is that it's everywhere but no one really knows it. We listen to reggae: Jamaica, even italo disco, all these things that we know, come from a place. You think grime: you think London. We think of house music and even though we know Chicago, it's a known thing, people look at it as “Ooh, it's my party music”. While people might look at “Oh, that's Chicago house”...no, that's house music. You have variations of house, not us. Us is not a variation of it. When I listen to house, I can hear a 909 from Larry Heard, I can hear Robert Hood, that Midwest sort of feeling. When I want to get deep, that's when I listen to it. It's really strange, but when I'm at home and I'm creating something, I like to create an aura of safety: I have my diffuser on, my plants around me, I keep a blue light on or I have really low orange type lights because that's the lighting of Chicago (we don't have the white LED lights, we have those really orange lights for the entire city) –, that puts me into a level of serenity to create something. Then no matter what I'm making, I’m always like “how can I put a little bit of the crib in it?”. Even if this is the smallest bit, where someone from the crib knows, because I wear my home on my sleeves.
I talk about Chicago all the time, love that fucking place. I would never live there again, but I love it with my fibre and because I've been able to look at it from afar, I know how much more home is in me. It's weird, you see your home and so much more…I'm like “shit, I want some mild sauce on this!”, or “I know why this drum pattern is like this”. People use phrases and stuff when they're trying to create juke music or they use certain strategies when they're trying to make house music or things from that region and don’t understand why it's there but for me, I know why that stuff is there and I get excited off of that. When you're creating something, you're creating a pocket of home for somebody, because in that space they're really deeply involved into what you're creating, then you're providing them a sense of peace, joy, sadness that started from their home. You learned how to act like that or feel that way from where you’re from, and that could mean the school you went to, or homeschool. That's my homeschool, it's my hometown.
I understand that it means different things for everybody, because some people could say “this space represents this”, and “I really feel like home is a spiritual thing” or “wherever I'm at, at that moment, is where I feel happy and peaceful” and I get that, I do. Home is always the start where an identity is formed.