D&B in Focus: Mizeyesis
Mizeyesis’ journey into D&B started in the mid-90s, when she fully immersed herself in New York’s fast-paced underground, with a music taste influenced by her Caribbean roots. Since then she’s been a staple on the US scene, dedicating her career to ensuring women get the opportunity to flourish and grow, while playing an integral role in the inclusive and supportive nature of the latest wave of D&B.
Where It All Began
Today, Mizeyesis chats from her home in Boston. Born and raised in NYC, Mizeyesis grew up listening to an eclectic range of music including reggae, punk and hip hop. Her family is from the Caribbean, and she remembers her relatives visiting from London in the ‘80s and telling her all about the clubs they went to. It was around the time that house music was becoming popular, and soon Mizeyesis started listening to it herself.
“I remember thinking to myself ‘when I’m older, I want to go to an event where everyone’s smiling and they’re playing house music,” she says. “It seemed really, really cool.”
By the late ‘80s, NYC was popping. “I started discovering lots of sounds that were coming out of the UK,” Mizeyesis says. “And I heard one track and asked what it is, and someone told me it’s Jungle.”
That was the beginning of Mizeyesis’ never-ending love affair with the genre. She graduated high school in ’96 and started going to a club called Konkrete Jungle in New York with her cousins. To Mizeyesis, Jungle felt like a well-kept secret. “I really didn’t want people to know about it,” she says. “It felt like something reserved for really, really cool people.”
Konkrete Jungle was the stateside home for Drum & Bass, which soon morphed into the legendary club NASA. Throughout the ‘90s she traveled all over the US to attend raves, and by the 2000s her thirst for the genre had become so unquenchable she started learning to DJ herself.
A Fruitful Career
Mizeyesis purchased her first pair of decks in 2002, and went on to launch a career that’s been expansive, colorful and crucial to the global sound of D&B. “It was a very, very new thing when I started DJing,” she says. “There weren’t many women at all, I was one of the few, so I started throwing my own shows and started a collective of women.” Her early gigs included Municipal Cafe in Hartford for 100% High Octane, followed by a show with THRESHOLD, a club night designed to give Connecticut’s club community a second home. She soon became its co-creator, and a member of Awake Productions and NYC’s Basscamp Recordings.
Mizeyesis never stuck to one genre, instead incorporating elements of dubstep, grime, breakbeat and bass culture into her sets. So when the jungle revival came along in the late 2000s, she was one step ahead. “In the United States, a lot of people wanted to hear a specific type of D&B again, and people like myself who came up in a certain time were well placed for that,” she says.
In 2011, she joined a chapter of Zulu Nation called Hipstep Massive LLC, spearheaded by TC Izlam, which aimed to educate mainstream music fans on the origins of electronic dance music. By 2012 Mizeyesis had her own radio show on jungletrain.net, which led to a mix for Wu Tang Radio, an East Coast tour with Senses, and a residency at Twisted Tuesdays in Hartford.
Mizeyesis started producing in 2016, with her first EP Convergence coming out on Omni Music. Since then she’s released on Yeska Beatz Unlimited, Monochrome Recordings and Junglist Manifesto, collaborating with huge names in the D&B and jungle game.
DNB Girls
Around that time, TC Izlam suggested she start following her passion of platforming other women. So she started researching, and came across a network of women in D&B in Canada. “There was one woman who now goes by Kilma, and she started a collective called DNB Girls,” Mizeyesis says. “They were doing something really innovative at that point in time: pushing women to the fore who weren’t getting fair treatment as artists.”
Soon, they expanded into the US and Mizeyesis became their US manager. That was 12 years ago and DNB girls are still going strong, describing themselves as “A North American collective of hardworking female producers, DJs, vocalists & artists devoted to drum & bass music & its culture.”
Their work is centered around women, non-binary and femme identifying persons and they’re on a mission to empower women within the DNB and jungle scene while ensuring gender equity on line-ups. They have a wildly popular podcast and stream series and their community ranges from heavyweights like Kytami and Lovelace to new, emerging talent like Athena and Distinct.
And Mizeyesis has no plans to slow down. With recent gigs at Respect DNB in LA, Elements in Boston and Regenerate in Detroit, it’s fair to say Mizeyesis continues to make a historical impact on the global sound of DNB and jungle.
