A Conversation With Colliding With Mars

The 20 year old multi-instrumentalist talks the fundamentals of music, playing Spectrum Online, meeting Savage Ga$p and much more.

Under The Rug: Just for a sense of who you are, what was it like for you growing up?

Colliding With Mars: Growing up I’d say I had a pretty sheltered, safe life. I grew up in Long Island, New York and I was born to a Filipino mother and an Italian father so my home life was always very different from the kids around me. I had the influence of East Asia in my house at all times and whenever someone would come over to my house we’d have Filipino food. I would always be very perplexed as to why other people didn’t have they’d always be in love with my mother’s cooking and I’d be like “I have this every Friday, I don’t know what’s happening here.” I don’t wanna get too political but I feel like race has always been a theme in my life that has always been very strange because I am half Asian. I can never really go in full on white or full on the other side either so my life has been a shift back and forth because of the way I was born. Elementary school was fuckin lit, everyone was playing Pokemon and I’m still playing Pokemon to this day. My grades were good, I was a pretty attentive student, but my whole life I’ve been on the spectrum but it has been pretty much undiagnosed so as I developed throughout my years as an adolescent it would start to get worse and I started to get tendencies of aspergers and ADD and I would have trouble paying attention. It would get really bad in subjects I didn’t really care about like math whereI was never really tuned in so I would be in my own head the entire time. Middle school came around and I got bullied a lot because I was the only half Asian kid and that wasn’t fun, but at the same time throughout my youth I was very nurtured in a creative household which was good because my father was a songwriter in the 80s and was in a power pop band from the 70s to the 80s and was very much rooted in my music. He collects guitars and we have like 60 guitars between the two of us. Music has always been a mantra throughout my life as well, my dad was really into Britpop from the 60s and he nurtured me on classic rock and whatnot which is why my music now has a lot of rock tendencies that I can’t seem to shake no matter what I do, just cause I love the sound of an acoustic snare drum.

When was your first exposure to music production?

I attended this program called school of rock where kids could go and learn what it was like to be in a band and have that group dynamic of performing music live and just learning songs and being able to play music with other people and that’s something that really sparked my interest in music as an adolescent. It was really cool because before that I was never really interested in music. Before that I wasn’t super into music but as I got older and involved with the program, I got really into it. I would go to middle school and it would suck and then I’d go to school of rock in the afternoon and I’d be with the people I really wanted to be with who all pretty much had the same interest in me. I got to learn about all different styles of rock music throughout the years which became a Catalyst in my life to learn as much about music as I could because my father was basically only interested in classic rock and the genres that surrounded it while a lot of my friends who went to school of rock were interested in other genres. That made me want to be interested in other genres, and now I try actively to listen to as much music as I can from all over. Through different performances and versions of bands that were started throughout school of rock I made a bunch of friends and because of how I was treated in school I hated living in New York which I now regret taking for granted. I wanted to move to Florida as soon as possible because of how people treated me so I moved to Florida and started some bands, one of which was called Colliding With Mars. Everyone left and I started it as an internet project and now I do everything by myself and it’s fun. I’m very indictive of what I want in my own music so it’s good that I don’t have to boss people around.

That’s awesome. How did you decide music was something you wanted to pursue full time? Was it inherent or did something help cement your decision?

In school of rock I learned how much fun it was to play music live and play with other people. Before that I was a visual artist for a very long time, throughout middle school and I had always had the plan to go into automobile design. I didn’t really think about it too hard because there wasn’t really anything else that stuck out to me at the time. I had an obsession with cars when I was little and was always a visual artist so I figured I would blend the two together and probably get some strange engineering degree to become a car designer but once I had gone to school of rock I learned how fun it was just to be in music. At the time my brain was still developing and I learned what it was to have early music anhedonia where you can’t really get any dopaminic reactions from music but thenthat started to happen to me. I was like “this thing called music is fun to make, makes me feel good and I think I want to make it for the rest of my life.” I was obsessed with listening to new kinds of music because I just got really bored really fast of certain genres. Especially rock music because I listened to it so much growing up and rock is the one genre that’s so unwilling to move. The reason it’s fucking dead is because no one is willing to push the boundaries. I learned every instrument that would be in a traditional rock band but never really learned how to sing, though I’m starting to learn now. I learned the basics of what it meant to be in a rock and roll band and I learned the fundamentals of each core instrument and how they functioned with each other. In high school, I took up the upright bass and learned how to compose romantic, classical and baroque music just from being in a symphonic setting. I loved and to this day love studying new styles of music so I would find myself being stuck in types of music I really loved while trying to replicate it.

I know you’ve been studying the late Brazilian jazz legend João Gilberto, are there any other musicians that heavily influence your approach to music?

I very much have phases of just entire genres. Six months ago I was very, very into black metal and would learn the way that the drum patterns move into each other and the way parts of the song would go into one another. For a while Behemoth was a big influence on me and at the same time Bjork was a big influence on me which made my music incredibly dark, twisted and strange as I was also into Xiu Xiu. That was at the beginning of Colliding With Mars where I just made experimental music and didn’t really know what I was doing because I didn’t have access to a functioning DAW so I just programmed everything on audacity which was a pain in the ass and I would just try to make experimental music because I enjoyed making music I hadn’t heard before. That sucked, but then I had a phase where I was like “maybe I should stop making this strange experimental music and make music that I want to hear.” The beginning of my discography that I have up right now was very influenced by Phoenix and Two Door Cinema Club. It’s very indie, happy major chord stuff which is pretty cool. As I expanded upon that throughout 2019 I started to implement a lot of influence from Aries and Roy Blair and take a more “anti-pop” style with harsh 808s and non-velocity shifted hi-hats to make it sound very electronic. I started to incorporate strings at one point because I told myself “I wanna make a waltz today.” Currently Joao is really influencing me because I love the way that he builds chords that don’t really go anywhere. I’ve always been strangely influenced by bossa nova without even listening to bossa nova because I would always enjoy the chord progressions. I’m super into this band Incubus, that I was into when I was younger and I’m starting to dig back into their discography and learn the way they transition from a shitty nu metal band into real artists in the way that they did things. If you listen to parts of their discography they sound like completely different bands which is something I’m really interested in right now. I’m getting really into making trap beats because it’s something I’ve never done before but I don’t really listen to trap music too much. I just kind of make the beats that sound like trap beats. I feel like it just inherently allows me to be more of myself because I know the fundamentals of trap music and I know it’s a very straightforward genre to produce. I like to take what I know and what a few of my friends have taught me and put my own spin on it. For it not to sound like an Uzi Vert beat but something that Caribou would get on or maybe Cashmere Cat where it’s very off the wall but clearly a trap beat.

I was like “maybe I should stop making this strange experimental music and make music that I want to hear.”

How did you choose the name Colliding With Mars?

Before I made music I loved the idea of making music so I would always write down song titles all the time that I thought were really fucking cool at 13 or 14. Looking back on it they were really ambitious song titles that made no sense but at the same time I was getting into the Midwest 2013 poetic sense of song titles so it wasn’t based in reality. I was thinking about naming an album one day while walking to the bus stop and my friend Ty was with me who was super into classic rock and doing acid so I figured he was the perfect dude to ask about an album name. I asked what he thought between the names Vault and Colliding with Mars and he said he thought Colliding with Mars was a great name. I sat on it for a couple years and then a band formed in high school and I called it Colliding With Mars. Everyone left, but I stuck with it and there was no one in Southwest Florida that made music and I didn’t have a community so I just went on Soundcloud and named myself Colliding With Mars. I fell into the traps of the lofi and emo rap communities years later and I’m still the only one that sounds like a band, whereas everyone else sounds like a solo artist.

Having been listening to a lot of your songs on repeat, I’ve noticed that you’re not bound to the sort of emo-inflected r&b you’re often lumped into, how did you get involved with all the guys in that social scene?

It happened pretty recently, actually. For a long time I was pretty involved with the lofi community because I was in this one very old discord server called Sleepy Squad and they had a community of lofi artists and that’s where I met the former lofi producer who now goes by hyperpop artist Polerarm, who’s my roommate and one of my best friends. I met a lot of those guys because we moved to LA together, and a bunch of other people also live in LA. One of those people is Savage Ga$p who we met and we went to hang out with him a couple times. He’s a super nice dude and I love the guy, I’m super happy to have him in my life and he’s a very genuinely good guy who has done a lot for me that I can’t repay him for yet. We had met him right as he was blowing up off of Pumpkins Scream in the Dead of Night. Polearm showed him my music and Gaspare seemed to enjoy it quite a bit which I’m very fortunate for. One day out of the blue, 3 days after I dropped my EP, Gaspare calls me and is like “hey, do you wanna come to New York to work on my album with me?” He flew me and 93feetofsmoke out and we just sorta all became friends. Me and Polearm sorta found ourselves in that group with Fats’e, 93, Gaspare, Supachefm, Shinigami and a couple other people which was super cool because they’re all very great people and very knowledgeable on the subjects they’re passionate about. That’s why I think I’m sorta lumped with everybody because I’m just hanging out with those guys a lot. It sucks, but every time I go to a label meeting and they’ve done their research and listened to my music they’re like “so are you a fan of 2000s emo?” and I’m like “not really… that’s just how I sing. I just sound like Brendon Urie.” So I guess that’s how I got categorized there.

I know you’ve become really close with those dudes like Polearm and Gaspare, are there any collaborations in the future you’re excited for?

There’s this one that I’ve got called Heirloom remix that’s a big fucking mess and comes out this month and I’m looking forward to that. It’s a remix of the song Heirloom which is the second song on my EP and that song has me, Shinigami, Supachefm, Gaspare, Polearm, 93 and Fats’e. It’s something that I’m very hyped for, I’ve been waiting more than six months now for that song to come out and it has just been a long, gruesome, disgusting, horrible mess trying to get that song out but it will come out eventually and I’m very hyped for that. I don’t really make other music with them. I love working with 93 and fats’e a lot because I think those are the two guys that make music most similar to me because we all grew up listening to the same stuff and the three of us all have guitar-based music in a sense.The collaborations I have coming up don’t really have anything to do with those guys. Recently I’ve gotten really into an artist named Brakence a lot, who I got into through Overcast. On Brakence’s album there’s a guy named Login and during one of the sessions that we had flying between California and New York when I was super busy, Login hit me up and I was like “sorry man I can’t work on anything right now, I’m super busy, I’m not a home and we’re in New York working on big boy things so I don’t have the time right now.” After I put that on hold for a couple months, Login showed up on Brakence’s album and I was like “holy shit, Login.” “That guy hit me up a couple months ago.” I hit him up and it turns out he lives like two minutes away from me and we made about 100 songs together which I’m very very happy about. The songs I have with Login are pretty fucking crazy and I’m happy that those are coming out. I don’t usually have features, but when I do I’m really happy about the way they come out.

Do you have a favorite collaboration?

I’d say my favorite right now would be the song I put out with Gaspare, I hope you’re doing well. That instrumental I created I had sitting in the bank for a long time and was very special to me because it was a song I had created with another producer who I can’t legally mention in any capacity and as I was creating the song everything you hear in the beat sort of just came out of me and in about thirty minutes the entire song was finished. It was a very strange experience which has only happened a couple times with my songs but I feel like those are some of my best songs and those are definitely one of them. That was a song I had planned to release by myself for a while but I just couldn’t find the perfect person to get on the second verse because it was gonna be told from the perspective of a person in a relationship who lost their significant other and their significant other was like a ghost talking to them. I was trying to dial in who would be on the song for the longest time and then Gaspare and I found ourselves in a writing session for an artist named Bryce Hayes and I had pulled up a bunch of my old beats and that was one of them. Gaspare was like “give me that” and I was like “okay” even though it was gonna be my song and then Gaspare did the top line melody over it and it’s drastically better than what I would have released so I’m very happy that that instrumental found a home that’s fitting for it. That song has done a lot for me and Gaspare has done a lot for me. I don’t think I would be sitting here if it weren’t for that.

Similarly, is there anyone you particularly hope to work with in the future?

I would absolutely love to make a song with Bjork. I would love to make a song with the progressive jazz fusion band Thank You Scientist. I would love to make a song with Fats’e actually. We haven’t made a song together that wasn’t the original version of heirloom. The names that come to me are really the names of artists that don’t make music that sounds like mine at all. I really wanna make a song with Aesop Rock or so many people I’ve dreamed of collaborating with that would never really happen. I would love to make a song with Deftones, Incubus, Roy Blair or Sufjan Stevens. I’d love to make a track with Run the Jewels cause they’re always pulling artists that are very small and putting them onto their records.

Are there any styles you’re particularly interested in pursuing that maybe you haven’t been able to as of late?

In the period of time I lived in Florida, hurricane Irma came through and fucked everything up and my parents are very devout Catholics so no matter what we had to go to church. Because of the hurricane we had to evacuate our house but we had gone up north and the only church that was available was a Hispanic church that only did their ceremony in Spanish. The music that was played in that church was so fucking immaculate and perfect and ever since then I’ve just been in love with traditional Mexican/Spanish Christian music. I would love to make music in the style of traditional Mexican music. I’m also getting into two step, deep house and proto dubstep and trying to expand that into my music in a more electronic sense and get a better understanding of what a lot of Europeans are listening to. At the time of classic rock, Eurodance and other genres would start to expand, especially in the Netherlands where electronic music is very popular. I’d love to make my music more electronic but to the point where it still sounds like my music. I’d love to integrate sensibilities of traditional Japanese music and Filipino music as well and I’m getting more into rap music now. There’s a song that I have that’s unreleased at the time of this interview called “Violence” and I kind of rap on that song. It’s fun to not always be singing on your tracks and I just want to expand what I can do with my voice as an instrument. I want to make vocal lines where it’s like “this guy knows how to sing.”

I want to make vocal lines where it’s like “this guy knows how to sing.”

Is there anything you’d like to hear more of in the, and I use this term loosely, genre?

I think there should be all sorts of genre blending. In particular, I’m a big fan of ITSOKTOCRY. The way Cry uses his voice in his music where he makes it sound like a dying rat in a sense but keeps the musicality of it makes me think “this guy really knows what he’s doing.”

I know you have an upcoming remix of Liplock with the instrumental math rock band Sawce. How did that come about?

That came about when I was on our first trip to New York and I went to a Guardin show and Sawce was opening up but we arrived late and I didn’t even get to see the band play. Adam, who’s the band leader and lead guitarist saw me and I saw him and we didn’t say anything but then I saw him playing guitar covers of underground songs like Bladee and Gecs songs and was just like “this dude is really good at guitar!” I could tell he was very deeply rooted in the math rock scene because I was very into that when I was 16 or 17 and super into Chon and stuff. I followed him and somehow we ended up talking a lot and he came out to LA for a fiscal music conference called NAMM and I was like “we should hang.” Then we made a couple songs together, one of which I just finished the other day and I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day because I don’t know if I can do a good enough vocal line on it and I’m still reworking the demos but we made a couple of songs together. My original plan for this year was to do a rerelease of my EP “Everything Sparkles in Heaven” where every song would be remixed. I would have the Heirloom remix start it and then have the Sawce remix of Liplock but the other two remixes still haven’t happened. I don’t know if it’s gonna happen at the time of this interview. I feel like a lot of people who saw the Liplock remix were like “what the fuck” cause I feel like a lot of people don’t know that I play guitar or that I’ve been very invested in math rock the way that Sawce have as a band. For me it’s not weird because I’ve finally made a song where it sounds like I’m the vocalist for a math rock band.

You just did a set at ITSOKTOCRY’s digital music festival Spectrum Online. How was that experience and the virtual concert concept in general?

It was cool. Because of events that are out of my hands I haven’t been able to release music in a very long time so I wanted to make sure people knew I’ve been alive this whole time. I complain about it sometimes that I can’t release music but due to actions that are out of my grasp I haven’t been able to. I really wanted to take this opportunity at Spectrum to put like half of unreleased music out into the world and let the people who like my music know I have music still. I really wanted to impress people and show people that I’m really working and have been working this whole time since the EP came out. I put together the set and was really proud of it. Playing the set was really fun, I livestreamed on Instagram at the same time and played seven new songs for 15 minutes and the people in the discord chat we’re pretty supportive of it. There was some trolling in the discord server which kind of irked me but there was one person in particular who said “vocals need a little bit work” about a song called Bad Dreams. That stuck with me more than I think they ever knew it would because I am very open to critiques and would love to improve in any way I can and I was like “you know what, they kinda do need a little bit of work. Thanks man.” I was very happy that Cry let me be a part of that and it was overall a good time.

You also just released a second song with the music collective again&again, which you are a part of. How has it been working on something independent of your solo work?

When it comes to my own personal work it’s a lot different because it’s about my intention and what I want to do. When I start a song and I have a vision for it I don’t want to deviate from it at all but working in a group dynamic it’s different. Everyone in again&again is a really great person and I don’t have the same mentality going into it as I do on my own songs because with my solo music I’m myself 100% of the time but in again&again I play a version of myself and I’m one cog in a great machine. It’s really nice because I get to lend my abilities to the song itself. It’s not my song, but it’s a song we’re all working towards together. It’s a very healthy group and we can come together to make something greater than the sum of its parts. It’s an amazing experience and I get to nerd out with those guys about theory. I’ll make a crazy idea and then they’ll be like “hey that’s not a bad idea.” Everything is on the table, the group dynamic is great. A lot of the newer music I haven’t been able to put my hand in unfortunately, but in working with them we’ve been able to workshop ideas and bring everything together.

Similarly, is there anything you can tell us about what to expect from you in the coming months?

I can’t release a lot of my music due to reasons out of my control and the issues with the label but I really want to put out music and it’s driving me kind of crazy. I have to talk this over with my manager but I have about 10–14 songs that I have and I want to do a single run with at some point this year, a lot of which was featured in my spectrum set. Once the Heirloom remix is out which is like the big hurdle that I have to get over, I have so much music that I’m gonna put out consistently. It’s gonna be a shit show of music. I’m very much excited but I don’t have a set date for each one because it’s all dependent upon the factors that go into Heriloom remix which is a big fucking pain in my ass. After that, I’ve got track after track of new music and I work on new music every day. I’m making more music during this quarantine than I have ever before in my life and I’m really satisfied because I feel like the music I’m making is consistently good.

Is there anything you’d say to those just getting into the sometimes daunting world of music production?

The way I go about music production is a lot more strenuous than the average person which is something that I feel like is definitely gonna give people a necessary headache but it’s something that people aren’t gonna want to do. If you’re getting into music production right now, the most important thing to do is to listen to music that you love and make music that you love. Sometimes in order to make music that you love, you have to learn music theory, which is something people hate doing because at least learning the fundamentals of music theory and what makes music music is something that’s very, very important and something that will help set you apart from everybody else. It will help you express yourself in ways as an artist that you wouldn’t have been able to without that prior knowledge.

Any parting words for the listeners and readers?

Support your local restaurants during this time of covid, but do it within reason that’s appropriate for your budget. Also, learn how to cook. Learning to cook will save you so much money. Please learn how to cook.

Listen to Colliding With Mars on any Streaming Service Today.