Degenerates Club: Why “DELAY.”?

DELAY.: I was 13 when I picked that name. I was pretty young and stupid and I didn’t put much thought behind it. I had all this music I was sitting on and I wanted to share it with the world, but I didn’t have a name yet. I was like, “Damn, this delays everything.” And I was like, “Okay, let’s just call myself ‘DELAY.’” I didn’t realize it’s such a widely used term when it comes to music, production, and the language in general. I stuck with it and I still hate it, but I’m just running with it.

DC: Does your hometown influence your artistry and music?

DELAY.: The people here in Amsterdam are open-minded. It’s a mindset I’ve always had, to be open to new things and genres when it comes to music. Nobody is afraid to be themselves. I try to be that way when it comes to music, too, so in that way it influenced me and my music as well.

DC: Were the people who raised you musically inclined? What brought you to producing and music in general?

DELAY.: Not really. My Mom was in a choir at a church. I used to go to church when I was little. My sister played piano. My other sister played flute. I never really played instruments myself. I tried getting into drumming when I was younger. At 14, I realized that I had to start making beats because of the instrumentals I was hearing from the hip-hop beats sounded easy to make. I thought I would be able to do that. I was wrong when I first started. That shit was hard for me to get right and it took years to do, but in the end, it worked out. I’m glad it did.

I was getting my influence from TV, and YouTube when it first started. Around 10, I started to get into hip-hop and listening to artists from the U.S.A. such as Lil Wayne. At one point I was just listening to records because I really liked the beats. I started to deconstruct them in my mind and recreate them in FL Studios. It didn’t work out at first, but after a while I started getting better. I use FL Studios 12 currently.

DC: How would you describe the music you create? Are they based off your own experiences?

DELAY.: My music is mostly inspired by my background. I’m half Asian and half Black. I tried to fuse those two worlds into one sound. That’s why you hear a lot of oriental influences in my music. I really dig that style so I kept rolling with it. I wanted to discover more of my Asian culture by doing music, so I started looking up the different instruments, their origins, and everything that evolved around it and what made them so great. I lowkey studied the culture to understand my background better. I thought music was the perfect and fun way to do it.

DC: What’s the process like creating music for you?

DELAY.: Usually I start in different ways. Sometimes it’s the instruments I’m hearing in a song or a performance. I’m like, “What is this instrument?” “Where does it come from?” “I should try implementing it in my own music.” Sometimes I’m more like, “Oh, this drum loop is tight” or I have this melody in my mind that I build around. My music comes alive in different ways like that. I don’t have one way of working.

DC: Let’s talk about the remix you did of Iggy Azalea’s Black Widow in 2014. Was this your first upload? How do you feel about it today?

DELAY.: I think it really sucks to be honest. [laughs] I kept it online because of the amount of people that listen to it on the daily. About 4,000 people a day still listen to it. The remix started out as a joke. My friend wanted me to make it better. I gave it a shot and did it in an evening. People picked up on it and sent it to Trap Nation for fun when they had 200K subscribers. They were young and small compared to where they are now. It went viral for no reason at all. It helped build my following though. I’m grateful to my friend for telling me to remix it.

I started uploading music in 2013. Those tracks I made private because I don’t want anyone to hear them. I’m ashamed of them. [laughs] The sound quality and everything is just cringy to me, and I’ve never looked at them again.

DC: How did your track 808’s from Asia come into fruition?

DELAY.: I started working on it in the summer of 2015. I decided to take a break from school and focus on music. It was a long summer without work and all the time in the world for music. I tried to do something sample based. I made the beat originally for a rapper.

I uploaded it to SoundCloud to preview it to my listeners and to see what they’d think of it. The track blew up for no reason again. It went crazy for that time. Producers like Stööki Sound reposted it. I was getting 30K plays on it that month. To me, that was a huge deal because my tracks used to have 1,000 plays. In my opinion, it blew up and I knew I had to build on this sound. I wanted to build a project around this because it was doing well and I dig the sound.