Apr 19, 20213 min read

HYDE + seek

after a year of listening, learning & creating, but rarely sharing my own music

i figured it was about time...

for me, making art is like shadow boxing. i know it's a vital form of facing myself. sometimes i run from it, other times i run toward it. most times, i'm doing it 24 hours a day but rarely drawing up the resolve to share a few drops with the world.

i can blame it on my dislike for social media. or the confusion of the creative industries.

but the truth is, sharing art is vulnerable as fuck.

every day (but especially this year) most artists are required to confront the possibility that what we are creating is totally pointless. we probably create a million more of whatever we make than anything we'll share with even our closest friends. so when we DO share anything publicly, you can assume it's the 2% survival rate of whatever came with it.

that's how i feel about this two track EP...

after the weirdest times and a trillion songs, here's the lowdown on the survivor tunes that rode high tide to the surface, shored up on you. they're salty and sweet. souvenirs from a surreal year we spent recycling painful life material, making gifts, grown out of grief.

Kenyan artist/producer, Nu Fvnk, and Polynesian Croatian singer/songwriter, Loa Myst, share their second release: a two track EP titled, HYDE

“If we were living in the days of vinyl, this wouldn’t be an EP at all. It would be a double sided single. I wish we could share it like that, but alas this is the digital era…” smiles Myst.

⇛listen to HYDE here⇚

Track #1 “Your Halo” exudes warmth and light heartedness, as Myst’s husky tone and intimately voiced melodies float across Fvnk’s break-beat inspired bounce and live bass in a somewhat nostalgic groove, invoking the feeling of simpler days.

“We actually started 'Your Halo' on the last day before quarantine,” says Myst. We were at a friend’s house having a bbq when we all heard the report of our first Covid case in Kenya, so we knew it would be a while until we all saw each other next. We ate, drank, hugged everyone a lot, made the beat and wrote the verse for this song, went home and didn’t leave our apartment building for months…”

If “Your Halo” is the sun drenched daylight where friends chill together in a garden -

Track #2 “Bad Mood” is midnight.

Steeped in the moonlit moments we prefer to spend solo in our feels, this track is made of moody synths and rhythmic percussion patterns that match Myst’s unapologetically unique flow of lyrical prose. Somehow, “Your Halo” and “Bad Mood” become mirror images of each other - like light and shadow - reflecting the highs and lows 2020 and 2021 have had on our inner and outer worlds.

“It’s been a strange time for artists to put out music, but we felt it was the right time to share these songs and let them live outside of just us,” says Fvnk.

“We were just caged in quarantine, creating a lot of things to stay sane,” adds Myst. “These two songs were the ones we kept coming back to...