Issue #37 🌊 Making Waves

HIGH FREQUENCY Vol. 1: "YOUR LOVE" by Karma.wav

This week in HIGH FREQUENCY we are riding good vibes thanks to Karma.wav’s new track “YOUR LOVE.” Talk about high frequencies, Miami-based artist, producer, and community builder Karma.wav embodies good energy. A member of NOISE and founder of experimental laboratory wavWRLD, Karma.wav lives and breathes community, innovation, and music.

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Miami-based multi-hyphenate artist, producer, and community builder Karma.wav lives up to his name with his new track “YOUR LOVE.” Transcending to a new dimension, “YOUR LOVE” ebbs and flows with the rejuvenating wash of cool water as if its audio waves are a karmic gift received on account of love. “I started writing about love from a general perspective,” says Karma.wav. “The feeling of when you're with someone, and you feel that love from a very primal point of view.” 

After being introduced by a glitchy, synth-laden instrumental evoking a yearning for connection like an alien trying to make human contact, “YOUR LOVE” opens up into a shimmering brilliance as Karma.wav sings, “When we’re together your love gets me high.” Karma.wav’s fiancé, Violetta, who is also his creative partner in their music duo KarmaVioletta, sings harmonies adding a subtle infusion of romance. As the song builds with the bass, Karma.wav skillfully utilizes the push and pull of silence and energy in a massage of euphoric frequencies creating an immediate mood boost. “I played around with the synths to really have this element of a lot of energy, then silence, then energy again.” The result is a rush of delight.

For Karma.wav, music has always been constant in his life. “I was exposed to music from a very young age,” says Karma.wav. “My parents were hippies, that's why my actual birth name is Karma. They moved to Vancouver from Mexico City, and took me to a lot of concerts from the time I was one.”

His parents, both descendants of Eastern European Jewish refugees who immigrated to Mexico City during WWII after their boats were rerouted from Ellis Island, ran a hemp clothing company in Vancouver, Canada before relocating again to Kauai, Hawaii where Karma.wav spent most of his childhood. When they took him to see bassist Jaco Pastorius at the age of three, he asked for a bass. When they got him a miniature guitar as a more age appropriate stand-in, he wasn’t fooled. “My mom’s like, ‘You never let us live that down. You were like, ‘this is not a bass.’”

Soon after, his grandmother gave him a drum set, fueling his love for music. “My grandma came to town, and I begged her for this little white drum set. That was one of my first instruments that I really started to dive into.” When the family moved a final time to Miami, Karma.wav had begun exploring other instruments and took an interest in the Warped Tour scene. 

Playing in bands throughout middle school and high school, he eventually discovered electronic music and started to learn how to produce in Ableton. “Music has always been the main practice in my life. And it’s the thing that made me love learning. When I was in high school I'm like, ‘Oh, high school is boring, because I don't enjoy what I'm learning.’ Then once I started learning how to produce I got this love for learning that passed on to other disciplines and other practices. I'm like, ‘Oh, this class is actually interesting now, because I understand what it's like to learn.’” 

Honing his personal style over the years, Karma.wav’s music is as intuitive as it is soulful. “I make a lot of alternative r&b music with a lot of electronic influence. I like music that has a happy, sad quality to it. Sadder chord progressions, or what we perceive to be sad or more melancholic, kind of create a feeling of happiness or nostalgia–that's the music I most gravitate towards. It's kind of introspective. It's music that maybe you'd listen to on a car ride alone at night.”

After transitioning from playing in bands, one of which was signed to a label, to launching his solo project Karma.wav, he faced a new learning curve. “I took all this time to learn how to make music and now there's this whole other side of things: How do I figure out marketing rollouts? How do I figure out where I want to play my music? Who do I put on my team to help me with these things?”

He looked to web3 as a resource in this process where he found the Songcamp community. After participating in Camp Elektra and Camp Chaos, he was inspired to start his own experimental laboratory–wavWRLD. “I really like this idea of the metalabel, which is not a label, but a group of people focused on a series of releases and experiments. I look at it as a startup for culture. At wavWRLD, we've really been focused on creating unique, intimate experiences that connect artists with true fans.”

Interested in the relationship between sound and its environment and how that relates to the correlation between technology and music, Karma.wav and wavWRLD are on the frontlines as culture evolves. “I think music has a direct correlation between the environment it's made in. From an evolutionary perspective, when birds do mating calls, the frequency of the sound waves are based on the density of the forest. You look at Mozart and the music was made for a specific type of room. You look at hip hop and subs in car speakers,” says Karma.wav. “I think we're in the early innings of figuring out what the next evolution is, with onchain being a new way of experiencing music. I think the previous era led music to become abundant and somewhat disposable. We kind of lost that deeper connection to music that maybe people had when they were buying a vinyl or their first 100 songs on an iPod and keeping their own collection. I think we're kind of coming full circle back to that. I think we're headed to a deeper level of connection with music. And probably also a new medium of music given AI and collaborative experiments where large groups of people make one piece of art that contains music.”

wavWRLD has been experimenting in various formats with the goal of deepening the connection between the collector and the artist. They have just launched a new project called wavGame–an interactive “Collect to Connect” gamified model–where collectors can win a one-on-one live concert with their chosen artist. Part of a larger experiment called wavROOM–“Tiny Desk meets MTV Unplugged” intimate performances that are recorded and minted–wavGame involves eight artists from the wavWRLD collective in the spirit of creating a closed loop between the digital world and IRL.

The overarching goal for Karma.wav is to keep making music and building connections. “I created wavWRLD as a place for myself to be able to create more music, talk about creating music, and play that music live with other people who have similar interests or have a diverse point of view that want to contribute,” says Karma.wav. “I make music almost every day–that's always something I try to come back to like, ‘how can I maintain this practice and then use different technologies and different tools to enhance it.’” Leading with his desire to learn, Karma.wav is forging new pathways for artists and collectors while staying true to his first love, making music.

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Collect Music NFTs from HIGH FREQUENCY Volume 1. “YOUR LOVE” is the fifteenth track to be released from NOISE, for HIGH FREQUENCY Volume 1. “YOUR LOVE” is dropping via Sound Swap at 2pm PST on June 15.

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