My name is Kazi. He/him. I’m a singer, rapper, songwriter and producer. I was born and raised on the Lower East Side, moved to the Upper West for a few years, and now I live in Brooklyn. I’m Chinese and Italian and will not choose a cuisine between the two. I’m lower east, upper east, upper west, Harlem, Brooklyn and will not choose between them either. I have two amazing parents and 3 genius younger sisters. I grew up singing and playing piano, guitar, bass, classical, rock, jazz, hip hop, pop. Though my training was all over the place, I think those years equipped me with the tools I needed to create my solo project and do something that’s uniquely me. I’ve been independently releasing music as a solo artist since 2017 and can proudly say that I’m still unsigned with full ownership of my entire catalog. The video up top is a recap of the last 4 months. Gonna do them every few months. Feels like there’s a lot going on right now on the internet so I’m gonna try using Mirror to give y’all a fuller picture of what we’re working on, beyond what we were able to catch on film. For whoever is interested. :) <3

I released one song during quarantine, right at the beginning in April 2020. After that I decided to take the rest of the year to experiment with new sounds and come back fresh. I had never shot a solo music video, but I’d been experimenting with short-form freestyle videos made in my room during lockdown. By the time I was ready to release a new single, it felt like it was time for a full blown video too.

I hate trying to explain my art - I think most creatives do - but the general intention behind real ones was to reintroduce myself post-quarantine in a way that felt more fulfilling to me than what I’d already done. COVID drained a lot of the color from New York City, where I was born & raised and have always lived. When things started to open back up, I noticed myself gravitating towards more colorful things, more bubbly sounds, and coming back to a lot of the pop music that I grew up on and that COVID made feel like a lifetime ago. I experimented with new sounds, reproduced, rewrote, scrapped entire projects, for over a year.

real ones was the first finished song to come out of that experimentation, and I pretty much devoted the rest of the season to its release. Before COVID I felt a lot of pressure to sustain momentum by releasing music as frequently as possible (which still wasn’t very frequent because I’m picky and a perfectionist lol) but I always felt like I was a little behind schedule and couldn’t catch up. So for me, one of the only silver linings of COVID was that it gave me space to pause, reevaluate, and then start releasing things again feeling more equipped and ready for the long run.

The real ones video is loosely inspired by my childhood. I have three brilliant, insanely talented younger sisters, and an incredible mom who’s been a lifelong teacher. I think growing up that way made me a nurturer really early - I don’t remember ever not having that role, for better or worse - and it also caused me to attract other people who have that same quality. Growing up I spent so much time playing rock and hip hop, and it took a while for me to branch out of those spaces as an adult - so coming out of lockdown, I wanted to bring more of the softness from my childhood into my world without losing the fire that people liked about my earlier music.

The video concept came to me really easily - I didn’t really think about it too much - and pulling it together was the most fun & collaborative project I’ve done in my career. It felt necessary to do a video with only friends (and friends of friends) for a song called “real ones,” so that’s what we did - and it blew my mind to see the way everyone around me stepped up and went above and beyond what I asked of them. We had the studio owner helping with lunch orders, a makeup artist running a bubble machine, actors doing set dressing - I’d rather you just watch it than listen to me talk about it, but making this video alongside my incredible, incredible team lit a fire in me that I think will burn for a long time.

There’s a festival that happens every summer in LA called KTOWN Night Market. It’s a beautiful thing and it features Asian artists from all around the world. In 2019, my boy Flannel Albert brought me out as a guest during his set, and I ended up doing a last minute set on my own, too. Here’s a vid from that show:

LA, and specifically the Ktown community, have been so supportive of me since that summer, and this year the lineup was curated by my guy Ted Park and I was finally able to come back as a headliner. It was by far the craziest show I’ve ever done. The Globe Theatre is the biggest venue I’ve played, so I wanted to try stepping up the live setup. It was my first time using LED screen visuals and in ear monitors, and I copped my own wireless system so I could use my custom vocal chain. Something about doing shit myself has always been really fulfilling to me, so I built the new live rig myself, downloaded the After Effects trial and learned how to animate my visuals the day before the show. In hindsight we did a lottt more experimenting than we should’ve done for one set, but it was fucking lit and I have no regrets. Lol

real ones came out the day before the show. I went to LA a few times earlier in the year, but this trip was the first time I had seen my manager and a lot of my friends since before COVID. It was great be around friends for the first release post-quarantine, and kinda wild that my first show back was for the biggest audience of my career.

We dropped real ones independently, so every bit of love + support we got on it felt surreal. We premiered the song on Early Rising and got a sick writeup from Lyrical Lemonade, and a couple of days later we woke up to playlist placements on Spotify’s hyperpop, anti pop, Fresh Finds, Fresh Finds: Pop, and Apple’s Glitch playlist. The video premiered a week later on Ones to Watch. I’ve always felt like Spotify’s top editorial playlists were really difficult for unsigned artists to get on, so seeing all of that support made me a lot more confident in the new creative direction I had developed and made me ready to push it further.

While I was experimenting with new sounds during quarantine, I also wanted to visualize what a reimagined ~Kazi World~ would look like. I had a lot of ideas, but it took me some time to find the line between things I think are cool and things I think represent me accurately in an engaging way. The process of creating the final cover for real ones brought me a lot of clarity. I think because it felt like a chance to reintroduce myself & held a lot of weight for me, the trial & error naturally pushed me to make something that feels true to me & also engaging to new eyes.

We loved the artwork a lot - it was fresh and different from my past work and felt like it represented a completely new chapter for me and for us as a team. I decided to repurpose elements of the cover to create 2 tee designs and released them as a capsule collection. Production was a wholeeee thing… my friend & stylist Molly Mundy spent like a week trying to find the right blanks in LA. Definitely reached a point where we thought we might not find what we needed, but after a few painfully late nights of me Googling shit and her running around LA, we did. I shot the merch myself and put it online the day I got the shipment in New York.

I came back to New York still buzzing from the LA show and wanting to do something for my hometown. I wasn’t ready to do a show yet, but I hadn’t done an event in New York since before COVID and I wanted to get the community together IRL. Matt and I did a merch popup together on my last project, and we decided to take what we learned there and do another one with the new capsule. We put out the merch, brought in some of our props and furniture to make the space resemble the set of the real ones music video, and set up an area for people to make their own jewelry. Just like at the LA show, I saw a lot of old friends here for the first time in over a year.

It’s been an insane season. In the midst of all this, I also moved from uptown to Brooklyn, which if you know New York you know is a huge change. Most mornings I’ve been waking up here feeling blessed and grateful to live here and have the life that I have. Thank you for caring about & following my journey. Means so so much. <3

-K