Boody & Courtesy: An Alumni Conversation

The Red Bull Music Academy is committed to bringing together musicians from all around the world to exchange ideas. In a new series, we’re asking artists from previous Academies to continue that conversation.

In our first edition we paired up Copenhagen’s Courtesy and New York City’s Boody. Courtesy is a techno DJ, part of the Apeiron Crew and Dunkel Radio, throwing parties throughout the city. Boody, meanwhile, produces hip hop for artists like Le1f and DonChristian. Boody used to live in Copenhagen, however, and that’s where the conversation began.

Courtesy

When did you move from Copenhagen?

Boody

2010, 2011, something like that. I got real sick living in my studio and I had to go home to my mom.

Courtesy

It was filled with a terrible fungus.

Boody

Yeah, mold. I got pneumonia twice and couldn’t shake it. So I went home and lived with my mom in New York for a month and then went to the Chinese doctor, got strong herbs, and then just took tons of antibiotics and finally got better. After that, I was like, “I’m not going back to Denmark for a little while. I’m going to try to make a go of it over here.”

Courtesy

When you were in Copenhagen, I mostly knew your stuff from the label and you DJing, but I didn’t actually know you as a producer.

Boody

I was real cautious about sharing my production. I think especially in Denmark, because I never made particularly Danish-friendly music, at least at the time. I was making weird experimental hip hop and stuff.

Courtesy

Not now. It’s great.

Boody

I’m sure it’s really good now. I know plenty of interesting Danish producers who are doing cool stuff in that world.

Courtesy

I played at the Distortion Festival recently, and I did the warm-up with a techno set and then everyone else was some sort of hip hop-inspired electronic fusion, all different approaches. I was definitely the outsider. There’s a lot of really nice, young people doing parties now.

Boody

When I lived there, I would constantly wonder why more wasn’t happening in Copenhagen. It had all the ingredients as far as I could see. The level of musicianship and producers and the level of producers in Copenhagen – regardless of style – is so high. I would say in Scandinavia, in general, there’s a weirdly sharp ear for production–clean, professional sound. I always wondered why it couldn’t be applied to more interesting stuff. Of course I knew a million interesting musicians in Denmark. I thought, “Why isn’t this the thing?” The audience was there for it, it felt like. But it mostly seemed many of the producers, and the bookers and stuff, just didn’t put a lot of risk into what they were doing. It was very safe when I was there.

Courtesy

When I started DJing, there were very few DJs my age. I think a lot of it is also that Dunkel closed. A lot of those promoters spread out. I think sometimes it’s really good when institutions like that die, because then people have to find a new solution. Really good stuff started happening. We’re doing stuff at Culture Box, but also Jolene and Bakken especially has also become an amazing venue.

I’m starting my final master thesis this summer, and then I’ll be done in a year. I’m supposed to be a grown-up that’s going to go into the workforce and I’ll have to make money. Until then, I’m just going to enjoy having the opportunity to do these things. Hopefully I can continue, but I don't know obviously.

Boody

You’re going to enter into the workforce as what?

Courtesy

I really want to go into teaching. People often talk about teaching as this thing you do if you’re not successful. I got invited recently to go to a high school, and I went to teach a beginner’s electronic music class. It was the best thing. It was so inspiring. You could just feel like they’re just so excited to get this information. When I was done, there was a bunch of girls just sitting there like, “Oh, we wish you’ve been here earlier.” I told them that I’m not born with a specific talent in terms of DJing or producing music. I work really hard. It took me years to learn how to beatmatch. I still have to concentrate a lot. Being able to tell young people that you can actually achieve quite a lot of things if you just practice a lot… Obviously not everything... But that was really nice.

Boody

That sounds like so much fun. If you can be an artist and teach, that sounds like the dream come true. You are particularly resourceful person – it always seems like to me – in terms of getting professional work in the fields that you’re interested in, which is something that on my side has been extremely challenging. I did much better in that respect in Denmark. It wasn’t because of there were more jobs to be had, but rather because I was personally in a position to seek that out. I felt more confident pursuing that kind of thing in Denmark, whereas in the United States – until recently – I’ve only been able to see myself very strictly as an artist.

Courtesy

Why is it so different over there?

Boody

I don't know. I mean, I think I’ve always described it as having hometown syndrome. Even though I never felt quite American, I’ve always felt New York was my hometown, and so I had this problem… I don't know what the best word is, but basically, attacking this city artistically, engaging it fully, has always been hard for me. I felt more confident doing that outside of the city. I guess my process these five years has been trying to change that; to find a way to engage New York and represent New York because that’s who I feel I am. I’ve been able to do that as an artist, but I’ve come to a point in the last year where I want to have a professional life outside of my art that is still related to my art, but isn’t making music for a living. I don’t want to rely fully on making money by my music, because it’s so goddamn hard. You’ve always seemed to be able to have professional endeavors that make you money next to your music. Only recently have I been able to make that happen for myself. I got this job at Mixpak, which is really exciting. It’s my first real major attempt at a music industry job.

Courtesy

What is your new job, actually?

Boody

I’m a project manager, which is a pretty vague job. Basically, I’m doing a little bit of everything. It’s both creative and managerial. I’ve been doing everything from editing the website, to contributing to A&R and other broader long-term planning decisions.

Courtesy

How did you get in there?

Boody

I actually just saw it on a jobs website, and applied for it. It’s funny because I was in Tokyo with Dre Skull, and I thought that Mixpak would be a nice place to work. We were in the plane back together, and we talked about the ins-and-outs of running a label like Mixpak a bit. The idea of working with them floated through my mind, and then I sort of forgot about it. Then I was just looking at a jobs-listings website and saw a listing for a project manager at Mixpak. I looked at their requirements, and I was like, “I know how to do all of those things!” so I applied and I got the job. It was pretty straightforward.

Courtesy

I envy you having a job where it’s hands-on organizing, but there’s still some creative stuff. That’s what I want to have after summer, just not full-time.

Boody

I’ve always wondered how different musicians make money. Everyone has totally different ways of figuring it out. It always seems like you manage to have a lot of professional hustles.

Courtesy

I always think I could totally work more. If I’m not working all the time, I feel really guilty. But I basically tell people when I need work, which is a really good strategy. I’m just a big mouth, and opportunities come my way.

Boody

I think that’s a really good point. That’s something that I think I did more in Denmark. On the other hand, the way that I got this Mixpak job was not like that.

Courtesy

How’s it been after Le1f got signed to Terrible Records/XL?

Boody

It’s been great. He finished the record. I helped him do a bunch of stuff on it. I produced and wrote one song and then co-produced and additional produced a bunch of other songs. It’s going to be a really cool record. Hopefully it will be out in the fall. We just got masters back, and they sound really good.

Courtesy

How much are you involved with that?

Boody

A good deal. I think we had written three songs together and then he chose one of those for the record. Then, when he was trying to piece together all these different tracks including my own, I came into the studio for a couple of weeks and helped premix things. I did a lot of work at this strange stage of premixing with Jake Aron, the engineer: after Le1f had recorded most of the vocals, but before the mixing engineer had gone in an polished everything up.

Courtesy

What about your solo stuff?

Boody

That’s been a weird bumpy road. I’ve been involved with a couple of labels, developing things, and then ended up not doing anything with them for different reasons. I mean, it is what it is. I don't know. My solo music is hard to categorize, and a lot of it is stuff that just simply doesn’t work for a dance floor. I had a couple of weird experiences with labels, and that made me not really want to try to pursue doing my own stuff as a solo artist. Instead I just started getting beats to more rappers, vocalists, and songwriters. It’s been cool getting the opportunity to pitch beats to really big people. I haven’t had any full bites from the big leagues, but there’s been a few pretty big stars that have put beats on hold, so that’s something.

One thing the Academy helped me understand is that I could take the pressure of myself a little bit as an artist and just wait for the right moment for things to happen as opposed to having to constantly seek them out so actively. It was funny, because I expected it to give me the opposite message. I saw the many different ways artists live, and was inspired by the variety. I don't know about your term at the Academy, but during mine, everyone made music that was pretty relatable to one another – and to see how differently people would approach that process was totally inspiring for me.

Courtesy

I got rejected the first time I applied for the Academy. Did you get in the first time you applied?

Boody

Yeah.

Courtesy

I didn’t. The first time I applied, I was really lazy about it. Sometimes if you write something really fast, you can do something that sounds good but not real. The second time, I wrote the whole application, then I spent two months stripping it down, asking myself, “Do I really feel this? Is this true?”

Boody

I spent some time on it, but I think maybe two weeks, not two months.

Courtesy

Maybe you’re a more honest person than me.

Boody

Maaaybe. I mean, I just tried to have fun with it too. It’s like a personality test on some level. That’s how it struck me. I just thought, “Be yourself as much as you can.”

Courtesy

I have so many people ask me what they can do to make their application stand out. I was just like, “If you’re honest, it’s going to [stand out] because you’re different than everyone else.”

Boody

That’s exactly what I’ve said to people too. You focus on that selfness. “Is this really what I mean or does it just sound good?” I think that’s important.

Courtesy

What has it been like for you after the Academy? Did you have any major changes, except for you being more relaxed about your solo stuff?

Boody

I don't know about any major changes. It comes back in little pieces for me. I find myself reacting differently to certain things and having a different perspective with music. I think I can attribute a lot of that to going to Tokyo. I mean, it’s hard to pinpoint. I guess as an instrumental musician, a thing that’s been tricky for me is to be clearly understood in terms of putting a message in my music. I wanted to hear you talk about the idea of instrumental music as having a bigger idea inside of it that can be communicated.

Courtesy

I think about it a lot in nightclubs, playing music. Obviously you can have vocals in dance music that work really well, but it’s functional. It’s the drum, it’s the bass and this is how you make people move. For me, it’s in the surprises and the details. I make functional dance music in a lot of different ways, but where it becomes interesting is how you can make people dance in a different way. How you can put in sounds that are either forgotten or twisted.

I think that’s also something that can be great about sampling, where you can put in a snare or something that takes you back to 1988. Right now, I’m playing a lot of ’90s-inspired electro and Drexciya stuff. I think that, for a lot of people, it will be the first time they hear it, and they’ll be almost as surprised as the people who heard it the first time back then. For them, you get endorphins in your brain when you hear something you can recognize. How much have you been DJing now?

Boody

Not very much. I DJ for Le1f a bunch and I DJ for some of my other vocalist friends, as well as some things more closely resembling live sets, but I don’t really do a lot of proper DJ sets. I think it’s a great way to make money and it’s a great thing if you love to do it, but I never really loved to do it that much. I really love a good DJ, and that’s why I enjoyed doing it for a while, because I wanted to be able to do what I saw so many great DJs do. But I never had the urge to make music for the dancefloor per se – or at least not for that kind of dancefloor.

Courtesy

I haven’t really released anything as Courtesy, but it will have a complete functionality in itself. That is really difficult. It’s probably going to take me a while to get where I make something meaningful enough to put out the first stuff under this name. I’m constantly preparing stuff for my DJ sets because I’m doing so many parties on my own as a promoter. Even though I don’t have any releases out, people know what kind of sound I have because they can see from the people I book and hearing my sets. If you were doing dance music, I think the best approach is to do parties. Become a promoter, if you have that gene.

Boody

It gives you context. You’re absolutely right. It puts you in a context right away. I guess I did that with the label when I ran one.

Courtesy

Did you think about doing maybe not a dance party but creating a space where you could present the music that you represent...

Boody

I’m actually sort of doing that. I just got involved in something like that. I didn’t organize it, but I’m helping to promote it, and playing it. It’s called Back It Up and it’s organized by this guy, Dapwell, who is a real New York character. He was the hype man in Das Racist. He’s an interesting character and comedian, a thought provoker basically. He calls it a collaborative and supportive beat night. It’s for producers to play new beats and the idea is to play weirder, more experimental stuff that you don’t normally have a chance to hear in that live context. It’s at this cool venue called Trans-Pecos out in a neighborhood called Ridgewood in Queens. It’s a little bit out of the way, but it has a cool vibe so it works.

Courtesy

I know you did something with pizza...

Boody

[laughs] Yeah, my tumblr – New York Slice.

Courtesy

You just go plain?

Boody

Yeah, because I want a representative slice that can be visually compared. New York City invented this wonderful style of pizza. I try to cover as many quintessential New York style slices from all over the city and beyond. Outside the city, I have ones from Atlantic City, Philly, London, upstate New York, and a bunch of other places. It’s beautiful that the same thing can be done in so many different ways. The variation of the simplicity is what it’s all about.

Courtesy

What’s your favorite?

Boody

Sal & Carmine’s on the Upper West Side. That’s my favorite slice in New York City– partly because it’s my childhood slice. It’s a more Manhattan style thin-chewy crust, versus the more pillowey Brooklyn style slice that dominates these days. It’s finally become a pretty well-known slice. They opened in 1958, and are still very consistent.

Courtesy

It’s funny that you have this food side. I know a lot of people are passionate about food, but I’m... Well, actually, this is going to sound wrong (and it’s supposed to), but I’ve become known as the sausage princess of Copenhagen.

Boody

I’ve heard about this!

Courtesy

The last four years. It’s escalated. I think it hit a high point last year when I was in Tokyo. There was actually a Danish guy that I didn’t know, who asked me if I was the girl doing sausage parties in Copenhagen.

Boody

Amazing. How did this happen?

Courtesy

When I graduated from my bachelors, I had friends over for hot dogs and beer. I baked the bread myself and everyone just went nuts. They were just like, “These are the best hot dogs!” They’re called partypølser – really gross party sausages. It’s all about the bread.

That inspired me, so I had a sausage party. Obviously the connotation for that is the same everywhere you go. I basically baked tons of bread, invited loads of friends over, and then we also drew on my bathroom walls. We drew sausage poetry. If you take any famous poetry and then you take out “you” or “girl” or whatever, and then you put in the word “sausage,” it’s endless amounts of fun. Then it escalated with the Strøm Festival, where we ended up doing this street party for 600 people. Four of us from Apeiron Crew were in hot dog costumes, DJing techno at a street barbecue in the center of Copenhagen.

Boody

That’s incredible. I want to try your homemade bread.

Courtesy

Yeah, you have to. When you come, I’m definitely going to invite you for a sausage party.

Boody

I wanted to know a little bit about this label that you’re working on, the Dunkel Label.

Courtesy

Yeah, I’ve been doing the website for a couple of years. It just started as me interviewing some of the artists that came to Dunkel and then it just developed. We want to do a techno label called Buldermørk that focuses on Danish techno, because there are some really great labels here but they’re not strictly releasing Danish music. We wanted to do a label that’s focused on functional and experimental techno and then maybe international remixes. Hopefully we’ll have it started by the end of the year, which will be really exciting. What do you have coming up musically?

Boody

In addition to working with vocalists like Haleek Maul, Lakutis, Loui Foo and some others, I did all the music for this short documentary about this thing called Redneck Yacht Club. It’s basically a big mud pit festival in Florida where people come with their monster trucks and their weird giant boats on wheels and have a party... I don't know how to describe it. It’s just this big, debaucherous, gross American time. It was directed by these guys Kidshow, one of whom did the video for one of my songs with Le1f – “Soda.” They did a great job with the documentary – it’s this cool, dark little clip about this strange, uniquely American thing.

I did a song for it where I sampled a bunch of young, comfortable, white girls complaining about stuff on YouTube. The idea was basically to play with the tradition of sampling of people’s voices in a different way. Vocal sampling is so ubiquitous at this point, and can so often become an act of appropriation. You hear a million house tracks sampling important Black singers – just to capture a certain sound, and not necessarily because of any real love or respect for the source material. For me, that practice bears with it all sorts of complicated problems. For one thing, if it’s not about using the uniqueness of the voice or the specific lyrical references openly – then why is it necessary to keep taking from the same kinds of sources? Like, why not take from a very different kind of source that is not constantly exploited, and work creatively to make it work in context? If you aren’t trying to say anything with the act of sampling, then it ends up just being appropriation for sake of style, which I think can ultimately just be boring.

I don’t have a totally clear understanding of my own feelings of appropriated music, to be honest, because I think most of the music that I’m involved in is in ways the product of appropriation and re-appropriation, but still – I think it’s important to be conscious of where one’s work as an artist exists in history – and at the least push the act of appropriation somewhere new.

Courtesy

It‘s a funny twist. You’re sampling privileged white people, which is much different thing than the usual white European artist sampling Black Americans. Very few people here think about stuff like that, especially because we have a very small black community here. I never understood before I actually started studying Black American history.

Boody

Some sounds are so ubiquitous in certain styles of music – like the ever-present “Hey” sample in almost every hip hop song on the radio, or the Masters at Work/Eddie Murphy “Ha” sample in post vogue dance music. The thing now becomes about re-sampling. It’s like you’re taking the same thing over and over again. It’s like the context is not just lost, but it’s re-contextualized and then lost and then re-contextualized and then lost again. It’s just not as simple as the early days of sampling.

On the flip side, though, I also like to use really big recognizable vocals bits and change them enough and use them with enough care that they’re unidentifiable, but still bear some of their original essence. I did that recently in a pretty popular song I produced that came out this year – I used like a whole verse from a popular rap acapella from 10 years ago – and while rhythmically the vocal was basically unchanged – nobody (I think) noticed anything because it was totally re-contextualized and came across as an instrumental element, not a vocal at all. I think I managed to maintain the essence of the original in a way, while completely disguising it. That’s really fun, and can be effective when you can make it work.

Header illustration: Stathis Kalatzis