Casey MQ on Club Quarantine, Revisiting Childhood VHS Tapes, and the Future of Boy Bands
"I just liked the idea of having a conversation with myself."
One of the pandemic’s few silver linings for me has been Club Quarantine, the queer Zoom party featuring DJ sets and drag performances from Toronto and Canada’s most talented artists. Started in March 2020, it quickly blew up in popularity, drawing thousands of global followers and heavyweight guest appearances including Alice Glass, Charli XCX (who hosted her how i’m feeling now release party on Club Q), Caroline Polachek, Danny L. Harle, 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady, Lady Gaga, Pablo Vittar, Yaeji, and more. Not only has the party provided people with a place to feel a little less lonely while separated from others, they’ve also raised a ton of money for charities and other worthwhile causes.
Besides being one of its creators, Casey MQ frequently DJs the parties, playing frenetic edits and blends alongside his own experimental pop songs (he also covered SOPHIE’s “Bipp” during Club Q’s recent celebration of the trailblazing late producer’s life). Last year, the classically-trained Toronto producer released his excellent debut album babycasey on Halocline Trance, which explores his complicated childhood obsession with boy bands and the heteronormative expectations associated with their music. If that’s not enough, he’s also an accomplished film composer (check out his score for Jasmin Mozaffari’s 2018 drama Firecrackers), and has worked with artists including French producer and vocalist Oklou, Toronto rapper Sydanie, Montreal-via-Toronto singer-songwriter TiKA, and others.
Was there a particular moment with Club Quarantine where you guys were like “Wow, this has gotten bigger than we ever imagined it could”?
Literally day two. Honestly. We were like “Huh, a thousand people followed us in one night?” Like why, what the heck? But then we’re like “Oh of course, this is a thing that needs to happen immediately.” I just feel like with the way the internet works and with online and virtual shows, that immediacy and that reactionary quality is totally what governed Club Quarantine.
Around the time the Black Lives Matter protests began happening in Canada and around the world, the party shifted to sharing resources and fundraising for different charities. Why was it important to use the platform to highlight those issues, and was there anything that surprised you about the community’s response?
When that stuff started coming up around the protests and sharing resources, it just felt like of course we’re going to speak on this, and we’re going to look to members of the community to help with these discussions. It was just an important dialogue that why would we not engage in. For people to be able to contribute what they have, it was touching to see. That’s what Club Quarantine is, it is a community, people looking towards this as somewhere I can go and sort of feel that sense of community, and people donating their money, what they have and their resources.
I’m sure this is an ongoing conversation, but how do you navigate the brand partnerships Club Quarantine does without diluting what you set out to do with the party?
It was interesting and I think it’s an ongoing thing that we’ll continue to engage with. We want artists to get paid, and artists were getting paid from the jump, that’s what was really cool and something we can’t forget. People were donating to Club Quarantine right from the jump. People had lost their jobs and were donating to our PayPal to pay the artists and help support. We got some extra bump from Red Bull in the beginning, but from the beginning, there was that sense of community already started. We knew that it made sense to engage in sponsors to make sure we can keep Club Quarantine free, but if we engage in some sort of ad space, it’s really not that big a deal so we can make sure time is appropriately compensated.
When we had conversations with sponsors, most of the time people were like “Hey we’re very into what you’re doing and don’t want to step all over it, if we can have some kind of presence in your social, if you just mention us in your Zoom, that’s plenty for us,” and that was really cool to see. Even down to the flyers, the way we were doing it was so fast, we were just running around putting flyers together four hours before they’ve gotta go up. This kind of energy and looseness around the natural feeling of being online, and being on the internet was easy to work with.
What does your archive of edits look like? I know there’s the My Chemical Romance “Helena” edit…
I would make those the day of. There’s a Lindsay Lohan “Rumors” gabber edit that I played one night, I did a Britney Spears “Till The World Ends” trance version, I ended up doing so many of these fun blends as well. It was this sense of “Okay I’m playing a lot, I want to keep it fresh every night, I don’t want to play the same tracks” and I would be searching for tracks. I wanted to engage in the pop dialogue because that’s been really exciting for me. I have a whole folder, I might just have to put them out.
Was there any point where you experienced burnout? I know at one point you started taking turns hosting.
Yeah, absolutely. It really got to a point where it was insanity. Eight parties a week for three months, and people at the time were like “What are y’all doing?” They couldn’t believe it and neither could we. We were just like “It’s what we’re doing,” but we had no real capacity to understand how much we had given over. It was 12-hour work days, I’d wake up with my phone in my face, and finish the day with my phone in my face. There were 24 artists that needed to be booked for the parties a week. There was definitely burnout, and I think when we stepped back and pivoted to doing now this weekly Friday thing, which continues to engage with community and the audience who wants to come to the club, it’s been a lot more manageable. There’s an actual sense of longevity that you can actually manage rather than this big burst that we jumped on with.
For babycasey, you drew on songs originally written when you were younger. How did you go about sorting through those archives and choosing what material to use?
I knew in the back of my head that I had a bunch of these demos as a kid. I was doing experiments maybe two years ago, where I was playing around with songs, there were songs that I had done demos of a couple of years earlier that I wasn’t a fan of. I started doing quite poppy stuff and tried to recontextualize them, and it kind of made me snap into this spiral where I was looking through these VCRs and my old childhood videos, and realizing “Oh I have so much of this music that I made as a kid that I sort of rejected.”
That was a part of me and I’ve evolved since then, I just liked the idea of having a conversation with myself. I messaged my dad, because when I was 11 or 12, we had an opportunity to do a studio session and I recorded these four demos. He cleverly remembered to get the stems and he found the little hard drive and the rest was history. I knew the ones I needed to include and the ones I could do away with. The last track [“Child’s Stadium”] I knew that I needed to include that, and I knew I needed to include it unadulterated as well, just to bring it full circle and really connect the whole theme of the album.
Compared to your previous releases, the production on this album is more maximalist, and I know you’ve been doing a lot of film scores in the last few years. Did that work make you think about sound design any differently?
This sort of grappling with music that could be considered more experimental, instrumental, more in the world of sound design, versus the pop stuff that I’d been doing since I was a kid. These two facing head-to-head all the time in this way was something that I struggled with, and I was trying to continually interrogate or address within my music, why is it so hard for me to feel like I can’t be deeply engaged in both. Going through that and coming into the film stuff was a way for me to really embrace the one side of just instrumental work and sound design. Coming into babycasey, I felt like “Let’s just find ways to be authentic in allowing for those things and those sides of myself to be in the performance of the pop stuff,” and how can I engage in that. It can still be full pop while finding these sound design elements that I love to do. It’s ongoing conversations.
One of my favourite little details is the cheering crowd noises. Were those stock effects or did you record them and manipulate it?
That was something that I wanted consistent throughout the album, whether it was childhood screams or crowd roaring or whatever. There’s different versions of samples that I collected and pieced through the album. I found it was a great way to connect things.
Because it was finished what feels like an eternity ago now, are you still able to be thinking about the album and the world or are you already working on new music?
It’s a bit of a duality. Tomorrow I’m going to do a little IG Live where I play the songs acoustic, which is kind of fun for me, because I’ve been thinking about songwriting more recently making new music. It’s kind of this interesting transition where I’m still excited about the material and can’t wait to keep doing more things with it, but of course my mind is now moving to the next step, which is new songs and trying out some collaborations. What do I want to sing about or talk about—and I’m not in a rush necessarily to find a concept of an album or whatever that might be—I want to continue the conversation I’m having with babycasey, and also see where that can go and what can come new from that. And just working with people.
You’ve produced music for artists including Sydanie and Oklou, how did you start working with those two, and what do you look for in a collaborator?
With Sydanie, we’ve known each other for quite awhile just through the Toronto music scene. I’m a huge Sydanie fan and always have been, working with Sydanie has been so special for me and a honour really to collaborate. I find that there’s certain stuff that I’m making, it just feels like work I want to do with Sydanie, you know what I mean? That’s been an ongoing evolution. I guess the same thing with Marylou [Oklou], I met Marylou at RBMA [Red Bull Music Academy]. We connected on a bunch of sensibilities right off the get-go about harmony, growing up in classical music, and wanting to continue that music. We did an EP together, and from that point on, she’s one of my best friends. I just want to make music with her all the time whenever we can.
Did you read Maria Sherman’s book Larger Than Life? One of the ideas that she discusses is what boy bands will look like in the future, and that we’re already seeing more massively popular boy bands—and girl bands—who aren’t white and cis. What do you think these groups look like in the future? Do you think they’ll be more inclusive?
No, but it’s something that I know I need to read. I remember you mentioning it and being like “It’s crazy this came out right around the same time I’ve been thinking about it” in the zeitgeist kind of vibe. In terms of the future of boy bands, BTS has got the number one song in the world right now I think and they’re literally a boy band, which is so interesting to see. I feel like back in the early days of NSYNC and stuff like that, you would have these formulated groups, but you know what, BTS was a formulated group… It’s kind of complicated in that way.
I think maybe people are wanting to engage with people that they can see nuanced sides of themselves in, can see a personality that isn’t necessarily streamlined in a certain dynamic to get something very specific out of. It’s this sense of humanity that we look for in art and in musicians, and I would hope that would be something that carries through into the future, and is continued to be engaged with. It’s going to be an ongoing struggle in the sense that these forces are always going to be like “Okay this is what seemingly will sell,” and often sometimes does, but I think there’s value to try and work against it, you know what I mean? It’s not an easy thing to just say “That’s what the future should look like,” but I anticipate and want to continue to see nuances and see artistry where people can really be themselves, and not feel stifled into what the so called quote-unquote “music industry” is looking for.
Speaking of the future of the music industry, I know you’re a TikTok connoisseur. I’m curious about your thoughts about that as a platform for discovering music and do you think it’s a model that’s sustainable?
I think it’s another model, I think it’s a new thing that can be in the conversation, and it’s 100 per cent there. We find so many of our hits from TikTok and I think it’s important to remind ourselves you can choose what you want to engage with. That might mean the outcome will be different depending on what you decide. It’s an ongoing thing and it’s an ongoing dialogue that’s just going to happen, technology is always going to be at the forefront of our musical sphere, and that’s cool to me. Sometimes people say “Hey I want to stay over here, I want to focus on this part of it, this is what I do,” it’s like by all means that’s what you want to do, that’s what you do. I like TikTok.