POP CULTURE! Issue

Finding the
C-ORE with
Mykki Blanco
Interview by Nicola Phillips
Photography by Oliver Blohm on Impossible instant film
Uniting the two worlds of hypermale hip-hop and the gender-bending
queer scene of NYC, Mykki Blanco has been creating swag since his debut
in 2012 with “Mykki Blanco and the Mutant Angels EP”. The multi-talented
art-activist declared in early 2015 that he would be stepping away from
his solo project to focus on something new. After a short panic amongst
his fans and as always, the media, it was announced that Blanco had
teamed up with !K7 to launch Dogfood Music Group. In an era where “the
next big thing” appears every time we hit refresh, Dogfood was finally the
answer we were looking for. A label that gives a voice to underground
artists and shares Blanco’s vision in transcending conventional cultural
boundaries and constructs. A platform that doesn’t exist just to create
zeroes and ones to fill up yet more space on the internet. A project that is
anything but the norm. The very beginning, the C-ORE.
V I O L E N C E
The C-ORE compilation is the first of its
kind to be released on the newly founded
Dogfood Music Group label, could you
tell us how you put all of your influences
together and how the process worked
out?
Sean: The record was proposed by
Mykki and !K7. They wanted to do some
things with Mykki and kind of offered a
platform. We’ve all been close with him
for different amounts of time, but the
album basically consists of older and
newer music, like Yves Tumor which is
one of my side projects, V I O L E N C
E [Palmtrees] and PsychoEgyptian is a
New York based artist. All the songs they
just happened to fit really well together, it
was kind of weird.
So did you take pieces from different
tracks?
Sean: Not exactly, there’s different pieces
of unreleased music from all of us. Some
of it has already been out but we took
it offline and then we went over a few
songs, mastered it and everything.
Palmtrees: I made all my songs pretty
much that week, only one of them I’d
started earlier.
Sean: Yeah same actually, I made mine a
week or two prior. When you made “This
Is Unholy”, that was for the project?
Palmtrees: That is the only one that
started before.
You were all working in different places
at the time in your own individual ways
and then put it together?
Palmtrees: Well Sean organised it.
It’s very fragmented in the sense that
it has all these different energies and
tracks, but still has one really fluid thing
that ties it all together
Mykki: I toured with each other them, but
not at the same time. So in 2013 I toured
with PsychoEgyptian. Sean and I had
toured together the longest, basically
almost a year from like the end of 2013
until all of 2014 basically. Then V I O L
E N C E and I did kind of a West coast
tour in March and well, I thought of the
project during that time because first of
all I was going to do this Asia tour and
then when I got the deal with !K7 Sean
said one of the options they gave me
was that I could start working on my
own solo album or I could start my own
label which would be a part of !K7. So I
thought that was a cool idea and now
we’re doing it!
7
Also you have more of a freedom to
really curate something and build
another movement, rather than just
doing your own album where you focus
solely on yourself
Mykki: I personally thought that I needed
a break from Mykki Blanco.
But it’s great, because you get a lot more
creative input from these guys and then
when it’s out there it inspires a new
thread of conversation amongst your
fans, I mean how have they perceived
this collective approach?