MOTEZ DROPS ‘MAKE WAY’ FEATURING ELSY WAMEYO
Back on our airwaves with another excellent banger, electronic dance producer Motez has released new track ‘Make Way’ today, featuring Elsy Wameyo. We caught up with the ARIA Gold-certified artist to chat about the new song, his work with Elsy and transcending audiovisual collaborative EP, Coalesce, with artist, Dave Court.
Check out the video for ‘Make Way’ below and stream the song on your favourite music platform now.
Congratulations on the release of ‘Make Way’! You’ve previously said this song emerged from conversations about the desire to make art that’s truly yours. Tell us more about how that direction comes through in the song.
It pretty much came off the back of many chats Elsy and I have had about how cool it is that we get to do music for a living. But part of being in [the industry] is also to play “the game”, and sometimes that can be a bit of a slippery slope. The song we started sounded very different to the version we ended up releasing. It went through a few variations [and] the final version was actually the club edit I was planning on playing in my sets. Elsy loved it so much that we decided to make it the main mix.
Why did you invite Elsy to work on this song with you and how did her creativity impact the final track?
I’ve been a fan of Elsy’s work for a while, but when I heard her most recent EP, ‘Nilotic’, I saw a different side of her that I thought could work really well with what I’ve been making. She’s been working with grittier sounds and explored edgier themes in that release, which is exactly where my head was at. We have many mutual friends, including our collaborator artist Dave Court, who introduced us, and the rest is history.
As an electronic producer, how did you find using your genre as a medium of storytelling?
I grew up as a musician first and foremost, so the tropes of storytelling and expression have always been there regardless of what form or genre of music I was working on. I reckon many think dance music can be limiting, but I found that you end up using different tools for artistic expression than what you would use in pop or rock.
‘Make Way’ is part of your forthcoming EP Coalesce – which explores the ‘hypercube’. Tell us more about this concept and what we could expect to hear.
The idea of a hypercube was something that me and my collaborator on the EP, Dave Court, thought of as a vehicle for storytelling, building a world that we invite people to enter. Each side of the hypercube represents a song on the EP, with its own identity and visual signature. The idea of it being a hypercube rather than a simple cube gives each song depth, dimension and scope.
Why did you want to work with Dave on this project and how did the two of you create this world?
Dave and I have been friends for a while and I’ve always admired his work. Recently he [explored a] world where art intersects technology through various tools like AI and 3D modelling, which I absolutely love. I’ve always wanted to collaborate with a visual artist to build an audiovisual EP, especially since [working] on a bunch of immersive audiovisual installations like ORBIT, which premiered at Illuminate Festival last year, and BREATHE, which is on display at the Museum of Design (MoD).
When it came time to discuss with Dave what [we were going to] do, we chatted at length about the philosophical context of how AI is shaping art. We both loved the thought of exploring the idea of blurring the lines between digital and physical art and how cool it would be to develop the idea where both [worlds] clash and feed into each [other] in a feedback loop – [pushing it] to a point where you never know where one starts and the other ends. That’s the essence of Coalesce.
What do you hope listeners take away from the record?
The “modus operandi” behind the entire project was based on Marshall McLuhan’s book, The Medium is the Message. Sometimes lots of energy is unwisely wasted on the minutiae of storytelling and the result is something that sounds laborious and lethargic. Sometimes it’s best to leave the messaging to the art itself and let it do the talking. I would love people to take what they want from it.