Dreams, films, LA: In conversation with Casey MQ

The evening we excitedly planned our Zoom talk, Casey MQ’s day all the way on the West Coast was merely commencing. But as a declared morning person, he readily reciprocated this enthusiasm in a way slightly incongruous with 9am on a weekday, at least for most other people.

MQ’s name might be familiar to you from a divergent array of settings –  is it a dreamy track of his own that was stuck in your brain for a few days on end, is it in association to Eartheater or Oklou’s production, or is it a glimpse of his goofy TikTok presence you might have unearthed by chance? Might as well be all three, as MQ’s oeuvre spills across the overlapping dimensions of recent internet culture and its accompanying soundtrack.

Rubbing his eyes and gathering his thoughts, Casey took the plunge with some Club Quarantine nostalgia, independent movie club talk and the wonders of the English language, all as if from inside a reverie; a personal, intimately-woven reverie, that’s for sure. Funnily enough given the sleepy setting, Casey lost track of his nightly dreams, which so far have reflected a recursive, linear pattern in his music-making, and therefore leaving a dent in the way he creates and relates to the art realm. As he was moving studios and apartments at the time of our talk, our dialogue was insulated by a state of limbo, which we treated as intended by taking it all slow and hazy – with or without dreams to linger over.

Hi Casey! How are you? How is your early morning?

It’s been good! I just moved into this new apartment and we’re getting things going. I keep going on Facebook Marketplace to look for cheap furniture. So right before this I was contemplating on this dresser.

I feel like here we just pick it up straight from the streets, I don’t know what the culture is over there. Speaking of, what’s the atmosphere in LA these days?

It’s actually chill to be honest. I just moved, so my whole brain is isolated in this weird moving stage. I changed studios as well. So I’m very in between and not at all settled just yet, but the city itself has been nice. 

Sweet! Diving straight in, my first question for you regards Club Quarantine, as that is my first association towards you. Can you bring me back a bit into how that was for you? 

It’s such a funny thing to think about these days. It was when I was living in Toronto, which is where I’m from. The makeup of my life at that point was so integrated in the local pop culture scene. I was super into being a DJ and doing club nights. I am by nature a producer, a musician; but suddenly, when we decided to just spontaneously do the club, it took over this whole other side of my life, suddenly being a programmer and booking people every single night for three months straight.

I had never experienced something quite like that. It has been such an anomaly to the greater part of what I’ve been up to. Because we would do these club nights, but they’d be the kind of events that you’d be working on for a month in advance.

And then it shifted into this hyper-focused, condensed version of it, where you’d be DMing people two hours before asking “do you wanna DJ?”. It carried this really fast feeling at a moment when the world was quite slow. That contrasted with the pause feeling that I felt a lot of people were going through.

So often we’d be doing stuff for the 12 to 14 hour days. The club nights would start, but then the next day we’d have to be making the next one. It was really crazy and I think of it quite fondly.

At the time I was watching it unfold online from the outskirts, because it felt so outside of my realms. I was 16 or something. And I fully dove deep into this TikTok hole, seeing all these people do things that I never fully comprehended.

All these subcultures started spilling over onto each other because they needed an expression, we all wanted to bring it somewhere. It makes so much sense that would then start to pour through into the online. 

Should I assume you were also deeply ingrained in internet culture in quarantine? 

For sure. I’ve always gravitated towards internet culture and the ways it’s changed. As much as I try to sometimes pretend I’m stepping away, I’m always (at best) one foot in, one foot out. It feels like such a natural part of me at this point in my life.

Once your brain is formed around it, you can never really escape. Do you have a favourite internet niche or content creator or anything? 

It’s okay. This is internet culture. It starts to get really blurred in terms of the difference, actually. But that’s such a good question! I’m being fed the algorithm right now.

It’s really annoying because since I have been moving I’m only being shown how to make your Ikea and Eckert cabinets, whatever they’re called, or how to make them look nice in your home. So I’m stuck here right now. I assume once I’ll have all my furniture sorted, I’ll be able to get back to what I usually am watching.

It’s hard assembling your furniture when you live in the panopticon, I guess… I also have some questions about your music. I myself am super drawn to music that’s serene and has this guileless, childish wonder. And I feel your music also has that a lot, of course. Can you guide me through the process through which you create – from when you first have an idea all the way through its execution and production?

I’ve gone through many different ways of making music. For my last album, for instance, I really put some strong focus on sitting at the piano and writing a song, just to get back in touch with that feeling, because otherwise I am such a laptop-making, sitting on Ableton all day type of artist. I wanted to return to a traditional form just as an experiment, which then in turn, I still ended up moving onto my laptop, going crazy with the ways a piano could be rendered electronic. But now that I’ve made that, I’ve now come back again to being on my laptop and having fun continually taking songs or ideas and then splitting them apart, breaking them down and then making it again and all over. In the last five months or something, I’ve been caught up with taking melodies, synth lines or even a full loop and just seeing how far I could take that into another realm basically.

Sounds like an immersive process. If there is one word or phrase that would encapsulate your music, what would that be?

You already used such nice words previously, but I think the words wonder and wander. I like that the English language does that. And if it’s gonna be some sort of wandering through aesthetic or form or whatever, then the wonder is about the vastness of possible sound and music and lyrics.

That is a very beautiful way of describing it. Do you have a dream collab? Alive or dead.

Oh my God. [pauses] My immediate association with before dead was being included, was Rihanna. But what about Elvis? That would be kind of funny, right? I listened to Blue Moon yesterday and it’s just crazy.

It’s not that I think about Elvis every day, but as soon as you said dead artist my mind did inevitably. I would be really interested in how that would go.

Fair. I’ll probably listen to Elvis after, I don’t even know anything about him actually, apart from what Priscilla taught me. 

Me neither.

Speaking of songs, do you have a favourite song? Both yours and not yours.

Well, it’s an impossible question, isn’t it? But if I were to pick one right now, I’m gonna stick with Rihanna again. There’s a song called Get It Over With. I’ve come back to that song since it came out, there’s just something about the melody with those strings.They have this sort of digital quality, I guess, and I don’t know, I find it really beautiful. And I find the lyrics funny and cheeky, and then also it’s very heartfelt. As for my own, lately I’ve been thinking about Dying Til I’m Born off of my album. I’m really happy with its shape, I feel very satisfied when I listen to it.

What is your current morning routine?

I had a good one before I moved. I’m completely out of the loop for the time being, but I actually love mornings. They are the most precious time for me. What I was doing before I moved was I would get up, I would go for a walk outside and have coffee, read my book, as I am most alert at those morning hours. I choose something that’s kind of slower to set my mood. I’d try to read as many pages as I could get in an hour, and then pick up the day from that point onwards. 

I always tried to be a morning person, but I’m still in a process with it. Do you have a favourite piece of media at the moment, or a favourite book since you mentioned?

I watched the ContraPoints video last night about conspiracies, loved it. I’m also in this movie club in Los Angeles, where we get together on Sundays and there’s one person who picks a movie every week; the movie has to be something that they haven’t seen though.

We’ve been watching some really great movies. The one I have most recently watched was The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. And it was banging and so odd! Referring back to songs, there’s this Michael Nyman piece called Fish Beach. I guess he ended up scoring the movie and they use it in such a great way. That song breaks my heart every time I hear it. So then when we were watching the movie, suddenly that piece played and I felt connected and immersed. 

The bottomline is, I go crazy with movies at the moment. 

I want to thank you in advance for all the media recs; I feel like I’m on a curatorial mission. Perhaps unrelated, but do you have any recent dreams that marked you? 

That question touches me in such a way because I think dreams are so important and I hold them to a high esteem. There’s something going on right now subconsciously I think, and for that reason I’m not retaining dreams anymore. It’s a little heartbreaking that I’m not grabbing onto them like I used to. My days are feeling so chaotic that I can’t take the moment to hold onto whatever glimpse I can have when I wake up. So yeah, I’ve been actually thinking about it a lot and I’ve been writing about the fact that I’m not remembering my dreams. Even for my last album, it was at a moment where I was really deep within these dreams – I was interrogating them, I was thinking about them and loving them; it was such a part of my daily life. Now I’m somewhere else and I’m trying to address what that means and why the shift occurred. I wish that I’d go back, I think they’re really important in our life as there’s so much symbolism, there’s something energetic about dreams.

Funnily enough, I am going through the same stage at the moment. I think there might be something in the air…If you could have a conversation with your 14-year-old self these days, how do you think that would go?

I think there will be some good conversations. I was pretty chaotic as a child, I had a lot of energy which I still possess to certain degrees. I would hope that past-Casey would be open and that he’d be able to just speak freely and vice versa and for us to be able to enjoy each other’s company. I also think back sometimes on what the age that I finally clicked more into myself was, because I feel that there was a specific age range in which I would not even be receptive to a conversation with myself now. I am pretty sure that at 14 I still felt a lot of chaos in my identity. So I’m not entirely sure it would be a smooth conversation [laughs].

Do you have a favourite phrase or word right now?

I have started using “hell yeah” a lot. There must be other words I like but this is the one phrase I can consciously hear myself say out loud.

What’s one thing that once it happens you will know you can die in peace?

I’m probably going to always contradict myself, so I’ll preface that. So often, however, I’ll have that thought of “oh you know…if I die tomorrow, it’s fine”. I don’t know if i’m per se accomplished, there’s so many things that I want to do and that would be enjoyable, but I also am completely cool with everything so far at the end of the day. Maybe I’m being too stupid about it but it’s the way I think at the moment.