I dropped out of high school at sixteen. Not because I was stupid, but because I was tired. Tired of being the kid with the wrong shoes, the wrong haircut, the wrong answers. I spent my days in the public library, haunting the CD section like a ghost. I discovered DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing..... and suddenly understood that you could build entire cathedrals out of other people’s discarded records. That was my first patch: sampling. Taking broken, forgotten sounds and weaving them into a new shelter.
By seventeen, I was couch-surfing. I had a cracked laptop, a $40 MIDI keyboard, and a folder on my desktop labeled “EARLY LIFE – DO NOT DELETE.” Inside that folder were voice memos: rain against a bus stop, my mother’s vacuum cleaner, the screech of the L train, a recording of my own heartbeat after a panic attack. I didn’t know it yet, but I was already assembling the source material for an EP that would take three years to finish. I met Maya (aka “Velvet Static”) at an open mic night in a laundromat. Not a metaphor. An actual laundromat in Queens. She was playing a thereapy-core set through a blown speaker, and between songs, she was hand-stitching patches onto a denim jacket. One patch read: “CELAVIE GROUP – NO SOLO ACTS.” my early life ep celavie group patched
When you are into Celavie Group, you are not given a title. You are given a task. You are asked to identify one broken thing in your past that you have been trying to hide. Then, you are asked to make that broken thing the loudest part of your art. I dropped out of high school at sixteen
We are just five people who decided that broken sound is still sound. I spent my days in the public library,
And when you finish your own My Early Life EP , send it to me. I will listen. Because I know now that there is no such thing as a solo act. Every life is a group project. Every wound is a sample waiting for a stitch.
Today, I live in a small apartment with a real studio interface and a pair of monitors that don’t crackle. But I still keep the cracked laptop. I still listen to the original, unpatched voice memos sometimes. They are ugly. They are raw. They are the truth before the bandage.