SYM1 stopped by to talk to Carbon Sound’s host Sanni about all things pop music.

Sanni Brown

Carbon Sound. I am so excited. I love having interviews. I love having them so much. In studio today is SYM1. And SYM1 is a Minneapolis-based hard dance, club, pop artist, producer, vocalist, and performer, as well as the co-owner of Freeze Pop Records, Carbon Sound family give it up for SYM1, yay! It's so cool to put a face to the songs that I've been putting into the show. That's so cool. Nice to meet you, wow!

SYM1 

It's great to meet you!

Sanni Brown

It's good for you guys to give your pitch speech, because I'm gonna give it from the fan stand perspective. So tell us who you are for those who have not met you and have not heard your music yet.

SYM1 

I feel like you summed it up perfectly, but one of the most cool ways that I've heard someone describe me before is an artist who makes irreverent dance music with a punk heart and a chronically online edge. And I was like, "that's me!" (Laughs)

Sanni Brown 

What did they mean by chronically online — that's so toxic. (Both laugh)

SYM1 

Well, that's me!

Sanni Brown

How do you incorporate that into music, into your sound? Because it's such a visual thing. And when I think of chronically online, I immediately think of argument. But that's not how your music sounds. Your music sounds free, like wild abandon. I feel like I'm about to go on a major shopping trip with my girls, and we about to spend like, $200 maybe $300 too much. That's how your music feels to me, like wild, free, girlish abandon.

SYM1 

I love that.

Sanni Brown

But they associate it with the toxicness of online. So help me understand! (Laughs)

SYM1 

Chronically online, I so resonate with being chronically online.

Sanni Brown

No judgments, no judgments. Me too. 

SYM1 

But not the angry parts of it. I think about this all the time, and I talk about it a lot, about how the internet, it wasn't such a toxic, angry space. It didn't always have that energy, but now it does. But it used to feel like — remember the golden era being online, and it just feeling like so exploratory and full of community and potential and discovery? It feels like that, it has that freedom, that wild abandon. And I feel like when I was growing up, I was very sheltered, so connecting with people online and playing video games was definitely —

Sanni Brown

Your window to the world?

SYM1 

Yes, so the sounds that I use, the references that I'll use, and the way that I perceive a lot of my life is also through that lens, so I think chronically online kind of comes from that.

Sanni Brown

I love that. Because I do think it's easy to just immediately think about the current state of the internet. And I was there during the golden days of the internet, when they were like, "this is a web page, and you want to look at who made the web page." (Laughs) And you're right, there was this element of — I think the program was called Internet Explorer. I don't know if it's still called that anymore, but that idea of exploration, and I grasped that from that song, "I Don't Have To Pay For This." I'm like, girl tell me more. Why you don't gotta pay for it, sis? Like, tell me more.

SYM1 

I'm so glad you liked that one. (Laughs)

Sanni Brown

No, because I heard it and I was like, no, I see myself in the Jeep. I see the doors down, the sun is shining. I'm not paying for any of this, you're gonna make it happen. And I like that. There's a very energetic and freeness to that. Do you think that that is connected to your — you said you had a sheltered childhood. Do you think that's connected to it? Are you allowing your inner child to come out in your music?

SYM1 

I 100% am. All of my music is almost directly a trauma response and working through all of my childhood trauma.

Sanni Brown

No but music is so therapeutic like that. So what is the process of doing that? Because I'm in school for rap, and we have a class called rhymeocology, and it's basically showing you how to channel all these really deep, dark things, and how to transfer it into our lyrics. And that class, I struggle the most, and so here you have sounds like "I Don't Have To Pay For This." You've done this so eloquently. So what's your process of taking these things that you've been through and then channeling them into lyrics and into sound and into a whole vibe, really.

SYM1 

I wish it was a more intentional and focused process, but it's really not for me. Generally, I'm making a beat, and then I am singing in gibberish over it, and I find the words through the gibberish and whatever resonates, I pick it out. And I don't even realize how much my music and my lyrics connect with me and what I've been through until much later.

Sanni Brown

So you let the song speak to you. I say that because when I talk to artists, they say the song has to (speak to you). So wait, you are the co-owner of Freeze Pop Records. And before I go further, because I like pop music, but what I find is that I think the world likes to go, "If you're a Black artist, you go hip-hop, or you go R&B, or maybe blues, if they really respect you." And so when I hear pop, and I see Black artists making pop, oooh! So what is pop to you?

SYM1 

Oh my gosh, it's everything. It's like, my first love.

Sanni Brown

It really is! I feel like that's the genre of youth. I really do feel like that. And so I found a Wyclef album that was pop. I didn't think it was pop. And I see Beyoncé songs that are pop, and I thought they were R&B. So you said it's everything, but what do you mean? Can you elaborate that pop is everything?

SYM1 

Pop is popular music, but what I consider pop is music that has a hook to it, like it has a pop structure. So it's gonna have probably a verse, maybe a pre-chorus, then the chorus, and the chorus being the hook. I like my pop to be very hooky. I guess I would describe it as that.

Sanni Brown

And every artist, hey. If Van Gogh can eat paint chips —

SYM1 

I feel like there are definitely different sonic qualities, like different sounds in pop music, in R&B, in rap music, in hip-hop, that you'll be like, "Ok, this is more solidly now that genre, because they're using these songs." Like you hear certain sounds, like quick hi hats, it's probably gonna be in a hip-hop song.

Sanni Brown

As a music consumer, we're just taking in you guys as vibes. We're not understanding the breakdown of things. And I'm nerdy. I like to see the bricks of how are you creating these vibes. But I want you to keep your juice to yourself.

SYM1 

Oh they could never repeat. (Laughs)

Sanni Brown

Very Prince! Okay, we're gonna pause right there. You got some events coming up, and so we're going to take a break right now, and I'm going to play some music, and then we're going to get back to SYM1, Minneapolis, based hard dance, club, pop artist, producer, vocalist, performer, as well as co-owner of Freeze Pop Records in the building. We will be right back. Do not go any place. We are in Music Class.

Sanni Brown

We are back with SYM1 on The Message, Carbon Sound Music for Life. We're in Music Class, and in music class, y'all know I like to break stuff down brick by brick. And so SYM1 has let us know — well, basically, I let y'all know and she agreed. She's the co-owner of Freeze Pop Records, Minneapolis based, hard dance, club, pop artist, producer, vocalist and performer. You've got some events coming up. Can you tell us about that? And what's the purpose of it?

SYM1 

So the next event that's coming up is on March 22 and that is the Hyper Pop Dance Party, it's now presented by Freeze Pop Records and Internet Kids are co-sponsoring it. We're co-sponsoring it together. I admire them so much, and they're some of my friends. I'm just so excited, and I'm bringing out an artist that actually is from New York City that is featured on my latest single, and her name is Moist Breezy, so she's coming through. We're gonna do the song together. She's gonna do a set. I'm gonna do a set. It's gonna be incredible.

Sanni Brown

And it's a dance party. What is the mindset behind making a show a dance party? What's that about? I mean, excuse me, I'm a dancer I love it, I know, but —

SYM1 

Sometimes you gotta tell them, "We're dancing, ok??" Because people, I think people forget.

Sanni Brown

You know what? You have a very good point, because I've performed for Minnesota audiences and what Minnesota audiences do, baby, they gonna give you their undivided attention. And so they don't always necessarily sway or dance or move. And I have been at shows and be like, "It's ok to dance!" And people start dancing. So that's why I see that here a lot. It's ok to dance Minnesota! Because Minnesota is just gonna sit there and watch.

SYM1  

They will sit and stare (laughs) —

Sanni Brown

Yes boo! I need somebody to come in and explain this to me. But it's undivided attention, it really is, and you got to respect it, I think once you actually understand what's going on. What can people expect? So you just said we're gonna dance, you just said Moist Breezy is gonna be performing, is Moist Breezy a DJ?

SYM1 

She is a DJ, but also a producer, vocalist, singer, performer, and she is a Eurodance artist, but she will be doing a live performance. Internet Kids will DJ, Evil Sound Guy is the DJ from Internet Kids, and he will be DJing. There will be CRT TVs stacked on top of each other, all playing glitchy things from early internet days and anime type stuff. The crowd will be dressed up in —

Sanni Brown

So you gotta dress up to go here?

SYM1 

You don't have to, but you'll stand out if you don't. It's like a rave at an anime convention, not a rave in an underground techno way.

Sanni Brown

Wow, I like that. I've never been to a rave — I have young people around me telling me what it is, because the raves that I had back in the 90s — not had but that they told us about, sounds scary. This sounds amazing. It sounds safe and fun and colorful. So is there anything else that (Freeze) Pop Records is doing that we need to be made aware of?

SYM1 

We are going to be having future events that are surrounded more so around community networking for pop artists.

Sanni Brown

So what's the deal with your — it's an artist led, community led label. Oh my gosh, we cannot end the show without this. Please let me know what that is about. Artist led, community led label. That's like foreign words to me. I've never heard of that before. What is that about?

SYM1  

It is so rare to have artistic development these days, anywhere. You have to normally go to New York or LA to get anything of the sort. And we want to bring that here and show Minnesotans, especially in the pop realm, that we have that community here, we have that talent here, and that we can do this together. We have lost a lot of our staples, as far as music education, music development has gone. McNally Smith, IPR are now no longer, and we would like to see just more programming and artistic development and opportunities for community, to get together, to grow together, because that's what it takes to have a good scene. So that's what we want.

Sanni Brown

I asked and you gave. You dropped so many nuggets in there. I was just talking to my fiancé about how I grew up with instruments in the classroom. One of the hours of my show is called music class, because music class was so influential to me. So that's why it's overwhelming, because this is an educational thing. And then you're pouring into the scene. Would you say that artist development is almost music education in a way?

SYM1 

Absolutely, yeah.

Sanni Brown

Do you feel like maybe that's why that's missing? People kind of feel like they can do without it?

SYM1 

No one's teaching it. They don't even know that they need it, because no one's teaching it. Artistic development, it takes the music side and the business side, the performance side, it takes all of those things. So when people just think music education, it's like, "Ok, learn music theory, learn how to read music, learn how to play an instrument." No, there's so much more.

Sanni Brown

We were in class late last night, and we're talking rhythm. It's called rhythm and style. Again, this type of stuff was in the schools when I was a young girl. And you're right. Rapping, people think you just get up on the mic and talk. No, baby. You need to know rhythms. When we hear people, old school rap is "boom bap, boom bap, boom." Now it's like "dadada dadada dadadada" (triplets) and if you do not understand that as an artist, your trick bag is gonna be really skinny. And so I'm so glad that you are using this work, not only to help actual artists, but to teach people the importance of the artist development. Wow, I'm sorry I had just had to walk through that again, everything that you just said. What inspired you to do that? Was there something that happened that you were like, "No, this needs to do this."

SYM1 

My own experiences of trying to find resources in Minnesota and within my community, and just not finding what I wanted to see, and finding other like-minded people who also feel that way, and then us getting together, doing events together, and then finally, being like, "You know what? Why don't we just do the dang thing?" Especially throughout the pandemic, we needed it more than ever then.

Sanni Brown

I'm hoping somebody that's listening is paying attention to how the Minnesota music scene evolved. Because I hear a lot of artists come in here and be like, "Oh, we started that during the pandemic" and now it's a full-fledged business that's serving artists. So SYM1, where can we find you? I'm stalking you, but where can we find you? So we can hear more music dropping.

SYM1 

Anywhere you listen to music, I'll be there. My website is no1butsym1.com, my social media is also no1butsym1.

Sanni Brown

And March 22 is the Hyper Pop Dance Party 6. It's SYM1's birthday bash?? Does that make you an Aries?

SYM1 

I'm an Aries! (Laughs)

Sanni Brown

Oh yeah! Ok ok, see, I'm a Leo. That’s that fire! Birthday bash and release party with Moist Breezy and DJ sets. I love it. I love your music. I love what you're doing. I love the shopping day girl vibes, okay, yes boo! I can't wait to hear more music from you. And thank you for what you're doing for the Minnesota music scene.

SYM1 

Thank you.

Sanni Brown 

SYM1, everybody. Hey, don't go any place. I still got music for you. We are in Music Class. Hey, so don't go no place. It's The Message, Carbon Sound, Music for Life.