Tone Glow 201: The Sidepeices (heavensouls & stickerbush)

An interview with the American producer duo about breaking barriers in Black experimental music, how their albums are a reflection of their friendship, and the distinctly Southern flavor of their work

The Sidepeices (heavensouls & stickerbush)

heavensouls (left) & stickerbush (right). Photo courtesy of the artists.

The Sidepeices is the American duo of heavensouls (b. 2006; real name Chidi Obialo) and stickerbush (b. 2002; real name Micah Kowalsky), two producers currently based in Houston and Atlanta, respectively. While both artists have been making their own glitch-hop, IDM, and experimental electronic music for years, the two met on a Discord server and started making songs together in 2024. They’re best known for a trilogy of albums that includes Lightskin N*ggas With Darkskin Problems (2024), Darkskin N*ggas With Lightskin Problems (2025), and DARKLIGHT (2026).

Inspired by a wide range of artists, The Sidepeices’ intention is to continually evolve, something clear from their eclectic mixture of styles—plunderphonics-informed sound collage to Southern rap to ambient—in a way that is simultaneously playful and serious. Their music, their album art, and even their artist name are inside jokes to some degree, and the humor they see in their work is partly meant to break down barriers in Black experimental music. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with The Sidepeices on January 10th, 2026 to discuss how they linked up, their approach to sampling, and the process behind making their new album, DARKLIGHT.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: What are the earliest memories you have of engaging with the arts?

stickerbush: The very first memory I can think of is that Michael Jackson song (starts singing “I Wanna Be Where You Are”). I remember my grandma playing that shit and listening to it. I used to live with her when I was really young.

heavensouls: When I was still in Nigeria, my dad had this mp3 player that he gave to me and there was a bunch of Janet Jackson, SWV, TLC, and a ton of R&B shit that I’d bump a lot. That’s my earliest memory. I’d have some earphones and listen to that constantly, even when I was really young. Back then I really wanted a phone and he just gave me this mp3 player instead. I think I still have it, too.

How long were you in Nigeria?

heavensouls: Until I was 7, and then I came to America. I lived in Biafra, and the last year that I stayed in Nigeria, I was with my aunt in Lagos. When I came to America I came to Texas. I think it’s because I came straight from the village, but as soon as I came here, I saw that everything was straight-up highways. Even when it comes to Lagos, which is the big city in Nigeria, it’s still small and tight-knit and walkable. A lot of the streets in Lagos are more around the city; the inner city is for people to walk through and see the markets. That was a big culture shock.

When I was young, I was really into dictionaries. It’s not even because of what was in the dictionaries, but the packaging. My dad took me to this museum in Nigeria and there was one dictionary that had this crazy cover. I was begging him to get it for me but he wouldn’t, so he took a picture of me holding it and framed it and showed it to his friends—to show them that I was smart or something (laughter). He was flexing me to his friends!

You just liked the binding?

heavensouls: Yeah, I liked how the covers looked. That was a big hyperfixation for me when I was younger.

Did you collect dictionaries?

heavensouls: I genuinely did collect dictionaries (laughter). I actually did read through some of the words, but whenever I was talking with my mom or dad, I would teach them new words but they would specifically be words from the As, like the first letter (laughter).

Did you have any hyperfixations yourself growing up Micah?

stickerbush: It was mostly video games and music. I had this old-ass radio from Goodwill. Maroon 5 was like the only thing that would play on that bitch (laughter). I’m not gonna lie, I would just sit there and go between stations because I liked the way it sounded. So if I heard Maroon 5, I would go to some random-ass country station. I would always do this before I went to bed, and I always had trouble sleeping so I would stay up mad late doing this.

The way you’re talking about this reminds me of the music you guys make. Sometimes it’s hard to know when a song ends when I’m not looking at the media player because you’re always quickly moving between different styles. When did you both start making music? And for context, how old are you guys, when were you born?

stickerbush: I’m 23, I was born in 2002.

heavensouls: I’m 19, I was born in 2006. I started making music when I was around 14. I had a keyboard when I came to America. It’s this Casio keyboard, and I still use it. It would play backing tracks and I would play piano to it, and that’s the only instrument I classically knew how to play. What got me into producing is that, when I figured out you could just put your music on Spotify, I hopped onto GarageBand, made a beat, and put it on Spotify. I just thought it was cool to have my music on there. As I started producing and learning new shit, it just progressed. Something that I noticed about my old music, looking back, is that I always did the collage-y shit. It was just something I naturally did. I like the concept of making scrapbook music—it’s really comforting for me.

Were there certain artists that made you realize it was something you could do?

heavensouls: Later, it was JPEGMAFIA. Early on, it was definitely Janet Jackson, specifically The Velvet Rope (1997). Even The Life of Pablo (2016). There are certain albums out there where every single song doesn’t make sense and it just feels like a collection of vignettes or ideas—the albums end up feeling like a collage. And there’s even a lot of songs that I fuck with when it comes to that shit. What I specifically love about a lot of metal is that their song structures is them changing time signatures and tempos constantly in the span of a single song, and it just works because it’s the basis of the genre, you know?

How about you Micah?

stickerbush: I didn’t have a computer until I was 16 or 17, and that was only because I had a job at McDonald’s. During the later years of my schooling, I was doing online school but I had a Chromebook, and you can’t make shit with those. Those shits are garbage, they’re actually trash. I eventually got a computer for myself, an HP, and I got on FL [Studio] and started making shit. It’s kind of what PK [aka heavensouls] was talking about. I was making sound collage-y shit but I didn’t know what it was. I would make a beat but it’d be like 10 different beats inside the beat. I didn’t know there was a scene for it. Rate Your Music—I didn’t know that shit existed. I already had a lot of influences, but later on I heard Satanicpornocultshop, that album Arkhaiomelisidonophunikheratos (2010). That’s when it hit me, like this is an actual thing you can do. I do not play about that album.

So it was more so that I racked up enough money to get my own shit. When I was around 18, I got my first actual job at this machine operation plant and that’s when I got MIDI keyboards. I was making a good amount of money so I was getting a bunch of stuff I didn’t need for real; I got an OP–1, and I didn’t know how to use it, so I just ended up selling it a month later. Now that I actually know how to make music, I wish that I kept it. So when I got that job, that’s when I got the MIDI keyboard, the microphones, the interfaces, and all that.

How did you two link up? I know some of the early 2024 stuff because you guys have the “Baby Anthem” and the “Goose Song” with Hayflick. I feel like both of those songs are really emblematic of what you guys do. It can sound like a shitpost but there’s a seriousness to the way you approach the music.

stickerbush: You’re deadass the first person to bring up the “Baby Anthem” (laughter).

That song is so good!

stickerbush: Nobody’s brought that up. That’s crazy actually.

heavensouls: The only reason we made that song is because people kept saying that stickerbush makes baby music, so we were like, fuck it (laughter).

stickerbush: I had moved out of my mom’s place because she moved to Vegas. I moved in with this girl that I knew and she had a boyfriend, and me and her boyfriend became mad tight. He was chill and cool, and he and PK knew each other from some [Discord] server. I would go into the server and make beats in the stream and PK would come in and start trolling. I would make a beat and he’d be like, “Yeah bro, we about to make it out the hood with this shit. I’m about to bust this shit down.” And that shit pissed me off (laughter). I’d get mad as fuck.

He sent his Last.fm profile and it was just mad shit that I fucked with and that my family grew up listening to. I was like, alright, I see what type of n*gga this is. He’s trolling but he’s actually got good taste. So we started talking and were ranting about shit in the scene and dickriding stuff that we do love.

What artists did you see on his Last.fm?

stickerbush: I’m pretty sure he had Janet Jackson on there. I know he had All My Heroes Are Cornballs (2019). I think he had death’s dynamic shroud on there too but I think he just wanted to see what they were about. I know that he also had My tek lintowe (2022). I thought that shit looked interesting, so I peeped it and I ended up loving that record. He listened to shit that I didn’t know about that I fucked with heavy, so he was really putting me onto music. That n*gga knows every song on the planet, whether he hate it or like it. Like, feed me bro.

heavensouls: I think that’s what’s funny about our place in the scene. I’ve been in a music community for a long time. I was the Rate Your Music n*gga. I was the guy in a lot of the circles discussing music. Stickers wasn’t really in that scene, but we just found out about each other and I put him on. I genuinely think that experience was hilarious to me.

stickerbush: I didn’t know how these n*ggas was rockin’! I didn’t even know there was a scene. For the longest time I thought that JPEG, Death Grips, Cities Aviv, and all these n*ggas was random n*ggas who started making shit. And maybe some of them were, but I didn’t know there was a community around these n*ggas that also made music—I thought n*ggas was just fans. That shit was like goin’ beyond the ice wall, I was mad confused.

What was the first song you two made together?

stickerbush: The very first one that we made was one that was never actually released. It was this weird IDM track that we made that he posted a video of. The first actual released song that we had was “By the Minute” [off 2024’s Stickers!].

It’s interesting because there’s a synchronicity between what you two are doing solo, and you can hear it with the collage stuff but also the way stickers might have an album like Mundane (2024) and heavensouls might have bliss (2023), both of which are similarly chilled-out and mellow but in your own way. How did the process of collaborating start and how has it changed over time?

stickerbush: With “By the Minute,” he said he wanted to do something clubby and I was doing IDM-y shit. I sent him that one and he was like, “Yeah, absolutely.” The thing about PK is that he works mad fast. That made me wanna fuck with him. When you’ve got like three monthly listeners, you’re used to n*ggas egoing you a lot, but I think we just fucked with each other a lot and he sent his verses back mad fast. And that’s when I was like, we might as well do the “Baby Anthem.” We would just joke about some shit and get on it.

If I’m being real, I don’t think the process has really evolved because we’re not in the same place. I think we’ve gotten more comfortable with certain things, though. We use different software, and I think it’s good because there are juxtapositions and you can hear that, but they meld together pretty well.

heavensouls: Before, it was way more trolly—we genuinely didn’t care. Our philosophy with music before Darkskin N*ggas With Lightskin Problems (2025) was that nobody was listening to us so we might as well do whatever we want. That’s what Lightskin N*ggas With Darkskin Problems (2024) was about. Like, we were listening to R. Kelly and all these over-the-top R&B albums and we decided to make our own. That’s why we named it The Sidepeices. Darkskins was also us still having fun even if we were more serious. We decided to make a sound collage album and that was mostly for our friend group and we just put it out. A lot of the shit we do is just from the concept of, “If it’s not fun, we’re just not gonna do it.”

You guys are talking about being part of this scene—what is the scene?

stickerbush: They had this whole collective at the time when I joined called Caperflower, and it’s still around. I wanted to join it real bad because I didn’t know anybody in music; I was doing all that shit by myself. I was like, hold on, there’s a group of n*ggas who all do shit together, so I was fiendin’ to get in but they were like, “Absolutely not, you be wilin’” (laughter). I had to wait a bit and I became tight with them and they saw that I was a normal n*gga who grew up in the projects for real and didn’t know what any of this shit was. The whole collective we were in, we were just doing shit for fun.

How do you two approach sampling? And of course this will relate to how you two think about making collage-based music. Sometimes you’re sampling really popular music like Usher’s “Climax” or Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” but then there’s lesser known stuff like Mel V’s “Seeing 20.” heavensouls, in 2024 you sampled Los Thuthanaka’s “Q’iwanakax-Q’iwsanakax Utjxiwa,” which was only available on the FACT Magazine mix at the time.

heavensouls: Shout out Chuquimamani-Condori, they were mad nice about it. I heard that mix and I wanted to do a mash-up and they were just cool with it. I remember when I put the album out, they put the song on their IG story to promote one of their shows, and I thought that shit was hilarious. Love them.

stickerbush: With samples, I feel like I mostly just throw in shit. I realized this recently, actually: if I go into a song with a clear intention, which I usually don’t, I’ll usually sample something that I like and do something different to it. Usually, I’ll prefer to find a song that I don’t know the structure to so that I don’t have an attachment to it; whenever I sample something I grew up with or that I love, there’s an underlying anxiety that I’ll fuck it up. Most of the time, I’ll sample something that I love but only just heard so that I won’t have any real context for it. I’ll do my thing with it, and then I’ll listen to the original song a lot and really appreciate it. The context is then divided.

Have you ever sampled a song with the intention that in working with it, you’ll better appreciate it? Is that ever part of the goal?

stickerbush: I think it happens instinctively. I’ll stem split things and I’ll have just the vocals and I can hear things that I’ve never heard before because the beat would otherwise drown it out. Or I’ll solo out the drums and I’ll be like, damn, I didn’t know that n*gga was goin’ crazy on that clash. I really like that clash and I wanna OD on it and bring it in 10 more times. Or I don’t like the clash and I’ll take it out because I think it’s a little bit more ugly than I thought. But it’s ugly for me, not in the context of the song. That’s how I go about it. When it comes to sampling the more underground things, I feel like we can get away with it because people are usually really nice. With the bigger shit we sample, I think we just be smilin’ and wavin’, just hopin’ and prayin’ that n*ggas don’t be like, “That’s gotta go.”

heavensouls: At first, when I made pykworld! (2021) and my earlier shit, I just wanted to throw shit in there. There would be times when I’d be flippin’ through YouTube videos hard and I’d just rerecord it. I feel like in a way that I can’t explain, whenever Debut (2023) happened, when I was doing my microsound sampling shit, how I came about doin’ samples changed. Usually, I would do it in the context of just… having it there. A lot of it would be a lot more rhythmic and about atmosphere. I genuinely think it’s fun recontextualizing samples. There was a song in Darkskins where I sampled Usher’s “Climax” and I thought it would be crazy if I could make that song overly dramatic. I think that shit is funny.

stickerbush: I don’t mean to interject or anything, but I’m telling you right now—the same way that n*ggas be listening to our shit like, “What be wrong with these n*ggas?” is the same way he’ll send me the “Climax” shit and I’ll be like, “What are we doing?” (laughter). That shit threw me off. And I’ll send him shit like that and he’ll have the exact same reaction.

heavensouls: Fuck it we ball. There’d be some shit he’d send me and it’d genuinely piss me off (laughter).

Is this a sort of game for you guys? Like, trying to send each other stuff that’ll elicit a specific reaction?

heavensouls: Oh, yeah.

stickerbush: Sometimes. I think the funny thing is we’ll do some shit naturally and we’ll get the most wild reaction. I’ll come to him like a dog with a bone, like hey look what I got, and he’ll be like… n*gga… (laughter).

How important is humor in music to you guys? Is that something that you two value and want your audience to appreciate in your work?

stickerbush: Sidepeices is weird because… you ever play Resident Evil? You know how the save rooms have pretty music and the monsters can’t come in? That’s how we treat The Sidepeices. As anybody does in life, we go through shit and we treat music as a release. But with Sidepeices, this is when we can be silly and just have fun. I don’t know how PK feels about this, but the way I feel about it in my own music, there’s a level of insecurity where I like having PK there. I don’t wanna be too jokey, but with Sidepeices, it feels like I’m in the save room and can actually be myself. I just feel like we two funny n*ggas for real so it just be comin’ out in the music naturally. And we just joke around a lot. The fact we were able to acquire a fan base off of just bein’ ourselves—that’s what I love about The Sidepeices. It’s probably weirder for n*ggas to go back to our individual shit and be like, damn they mad serious, these n*ggas cryin’ on the beat (laughter).

I feel like I just hate pretentious humor in music. A lot of the shit that me and PK laugh at in music isn’t meant to be funny. Remember that R. Kelly song PK? The song starts and he’s like, “Girl, shut up, I don’t ever wanna hear you say that again,” and he goes on a monologue about how she need to value herself. N*ggas be deadass serious and that shit be so funny to me (laughter). The humor in music that I find funny usually comes intrinsically.

heavensouls: That’s why whenever we came out with Darkskins, the whole album was an inside joke, and as soon as it started poppin’ off we were like, okay we gotta get in an interview and explain some stuff (laughs).

stickerbush: When it came to the “Gross Beat on the master n*gga” song [“ankh necklace grand rising music”], we be pickin’ on FL regardless, and the reason we pick on it is because for three years, we had an inside joke in our friend group about Gross Beat. We saw a n*gga went on stream and was producin’ and he was like, “Yeah, I’m about to make some experimental shit,” and he just threw Gross Beat on the master. We thought about it later. I was like, let me just go on text-to-speech and have her goin’ off on n*ggas on Gross Beat. Everything on the album seems random but it’s just stuff we be jokin’ about.

heavensouls: And that’s why I value Darkskin N*ggas so much. Later, it’s gonna hit way harder and be more nostalgic because it’s literally just a scrapbook of our friendship leading up to that point.

What’s the significance of the album titles? Is there a parallel between Lightskin and Darkskin and how you thought about both sonically? Or is it just a funny joke?

stickerbush: Imma be real.

heavensouls: We’re gonna give the real answer and also the pretentious real answer.

stickerbush: With Lightskins, we just thought that shit was funny because I’m a lightskin n*gga and he a darkskin n*gga. That’s really just it. With DARKLIGHT (2026), specifically, that’s when we played on it more because there was this semi-satirical shits. But with Lightskins, we had it and then with Darkskins, before we had the name I was like, maybe we should name it something different, but then I was like… hold on, we got Lightskin N*ggas With Darkskin Problems, I’m not tryin’ to have people hittin’ us with colorism allegations and shit (laughter).

heavensouls: I remember when we were making Darkskins, this n*gga’s worst fear is if [YouTuber] F.D Signifier made a video on us (laughter).

stickerbush: And I fuck with F.D Signifier heavy, but my biggest fear is I’m just chillin’ and he’s like, “Alright, we’re gon’ talk about this new album, Darkskin N*ggas.” That shit would break me down.

heavensouls: And you see the video timestamp and it’s 40 minutes long (laughter).

stickerbush: I’m out here chillin’, I’m probably at Chipotle eatin’ a bowl and this n*gga’s callin’ me a shitlib and shit. I can’t go out like that bro (laughter). Throw the whole career away!

Can you guys talk about the album art? Is there a significance behind them?

stickerbush: Before me and PK started making music together, he had told me that he wanted an album cover that’s sort of like what we have, like a n*gga with a Hood By Air shirt on, and wanted to make it seem like it’s just gonna be a mixtape and then you listen to it and it’s crazy. We did that with Lightskins and then we just kept doing it.

heavensouls: It just became our aesthetic and we didn’t realize it (laughter). That’s why it’ll be funny if we actually try with our album art going forward because it’s not gonna feel right.

stickerbush: It’ll feel weird. Like, n*ggas don’t be havin’ no money, n*ggas be broke, and I’m n*ggas. But n*ggas be broke and spend money on shit around the album. We knew that we didn’t have it like that so we just wanted to try and get people to be interested in this thing with minimal finances (laughs). All the effort goes into the music, and it’s not like we have 25 microKORGs and all types of DJ racks and shit. I got that Four Tet setup—a laptop, a MIDI, and call it a day. And I know he got a whole ass modular grid and shit on the right side of his room, but we really try to make the most of what little we have.

Does that happen a lot, that people think they’re gonna hear a rap mixtape and then are surprised?

stickerbush: All the time. I’ll see reviews where people are thinking it’ll be another underground record, which is… that shit be funny to me. I think it was even worse with DARKLIGHT. We were using random pictures we found with the other ones, but with DARKLIGHT we were like, okay we just gonna wear two ugly-ass fits (laughter).

Do you mind talking about the rapping and singing in your music? When I was listening to your earliest stuff, I was wondering if the vocals were quiet because you didn’t wanna be too loud because you had family in the house, but even on a song like “bomb mix” on the new one, the singing is still really quiet.

heavensouls: I think it’s because we didn’t know how to mix during that time (laughter). Imma keep it a buck fifty, we are not good rappers (laughter). One thing I realized about our music is that we just really like the concept of n*ggas rappin’ on certain parts of our shit, but nobody would rap on our shit so we would just do it. But I do like singing a lot. I said it before, but my biggest dream when it comes to the music shit is lowkey just bein’ a producer on some Sweet Trip shit. I wanna have a girl who knows how to sing hard and I can just make some IDM, glitch-pop songs for her.

stickerbush: We have different intentions. He wants to do that, but I wanna get more into the electronic field. I wanna be where Nicolas Jaar and OPN is, you know what I mean? That’s the type of shit I wanna do. But I don’t think we were using rap as a way to get in; we were doin’ shit that we liked seeing in our childhood, reminiscing on that and doing this as a side project, but then it obviously became the main project. I feel like every time we rap, we make a beat that’s hard and we just say what the fuck ever. PK, to my knowledge, don’t be writin’ and I don’t be writin’—we some punch-in demons (laughter).

heavensouls: The only time I wrote was in that one section on Darkskins where I’m talking about being with a girl but instead of actually forming a stable relationship, she just wants to talk about Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon (laughter).

stickerbush: Yeah, even when we do write it’s some dumb shit. We more so rap for comedic value. We definitely have influences though. We listen to a lot of DOOM, one of my favorite rappers is Mos Def, and we love shit like that and we’ll never not take it serious, but I just feel like I care more about the music aspect. I see words as another thing on the frequency spectrum—it’s another thing that can add rhythm or warmth. A lot of my favorite music, I just don’t really care about the words. If the words are good and they hit me, they will, but it’s kind of rare. I love Fiona Apple, but I don’t ever know what she talkin’ about, but I love her music (laughter).

heavensouls: I think that’s why we like flippin’ a lot of shit, too. I flip a lot because I’ll hear something really hard and really emotionally hitting and I’ll want to match that. I think it’s the producer in me, and this is why I wanna be a producer for other people. There’ll be people goin’ hard on these Detroit NCIS-ass beats and I just wanna match that energy with something, so I would do some maximalist, hard-hitting shit. I think that’s what I did with “Southern Style Lemon Peppers.” I love recontextualizing music.

On “able 2 like” on the new album, you guys are talking about sampling your own music. It’s funny because it relates to what you guys were saying earlier about not being able to have money for the cover art or for getting people to rap on your songs, and this feels at least partly related to that. But it’s also about the recontextualizing.

stickerbush: I’m really big on that because my favorite artist ever is OPN—he made R Plus Seven (2013)! He made Age Of (2018)! You can tell he resamples a lot of shit, and a lot of his music is very plunderphonics-heavy. I didn’t know you could do the things you could do with samples until I heard OPN, so that shit really stuck with me. Every song that I make, I’ll try to resample it as many times as possible and try to get a different outcome. “able 2 like” is funny because it’s literally just us arguing. It’s PK being like, “I think n*ggas need to be sampling themselves more” and I’m like, “Why, you already made it.” I was deadass just ragebaiting—I do the same shit. I just wanted to argue for the love of the game (laughter). Music is like a Rubik’s Cube, there’s a trillion different things you can do on one song and that shit can get really overwhelming, so I do it a bunch of times and see what I like and then bam.

heavensouls: How I get a lot of my sounds is that I’ll go on Max/MSP or make a bunch of sound-design bits and just play around and tweak knobs. And then for a song, I’ll just piece the bits together—I love that shit a lot. So I do resample my shit, and I think I brought it up to him because back then, when I watched him make beats I’d say, “What if we just sampled ourselves?”

How do you guys know how long a song will be? You have a song like “improv” that’s less than a minute, and then you’ll have the closing track, “its about that time,” and it’s 11 minutes.

stickerbush: I think it’s instinctual but I also think it’s more so just things that PK does. PK is a lot better at arranging than me. I’ll send this n*gga seven beats across the span of a year and outta nowhere he’ll be like, “Let’s compile the album, it’s ready,” and all seven beats is in one track! What the fuck is goin’ on? (laughter). For me, time in music doesn’t really matter as long as it’s engaging enough to justify it. Sometimes, with a track like “improv,” that’s PK’s track and I thought that we didn’t need anything else on there, and that song was good as is and we thought it’d be good as a transition track on the album. N*ggas need a break after “understand me” for real.

heavensouls: A majority of the shit I was doing when it comes to arranging, especially on Darkskin N*ggas, was way more instinctual. I’ll catch a feel, I’ll catch a sound, and just play around with shit. One idea I had for Darkskins that just didn’t happen was that in the middle of the album, we’d get into an argument and then we’d have diss songs of each other and then we’d have separate songs, and then we’d come together on the last song and do a longer collage piece. We never ended up doin’ that, but it’s like that—I just come up with shit as I go.

With Darkskins blowing up, how did you two approach making DARKLIGHT? Were you two feeling pressure to take things more seriously? Did you feel like you had to step up your game now that you had more of an audience?

stickerbush: If I remember correctly, I think we were a good way done with DARKLIGHT before Darkskins started blowing up and hittin’ it’s peak.

heavensouls: I think we were halfway done. How DARKLIGHT came to be was that I made a few songs. I made “run up freestyle” and the first part of “everyday fishing” and he was just like, I love the playful shit, we might as well make DARKLIGHT.

stickerbush: I was tweakin’. I remember I was at work, and this was when I was workin’ 12-hour shifts at the machine plant, and this n*gga sent me “run up freestyle” and I was like… what the fuck. I wanted to wait until we moved in together before we made DARKLIGHT, but then he sent me that shit and I was like, oh I love this playful shit, let’s make the record. We knew even before we got traction from Darkskins that this next one was going to be the last one. We knew we wanted it to be a bit more serious and a reflection of us. We still wanted portions to be funny, but we also wanted this to be it for the trilogy.

So the next step is to make music in person together?

stickerbush: Don’t get me wrong, we built our friendship in a musical partnership online, and it’s great and it’s very beautiful and we’ve made some crazy shit with it, but I just think it’s time. We wanna make this shit a career because we love it. It’s fun, and you get your own novelties and quirks from working online, but sometimes it’s like I’ll be tryin’ to do something and I’ll be showin’ him my screen and he’ll be like, “Okay, move this thing here” and then he’ll say, “I just wish I was there to show you what I’m talkin’ about.” So for speed and efficiency, it’d be a lot easier. Our attention spans be wilin’. We two n*ggas where we want to do the things in our head immediately, and I think it’d be easier if we were together. There’s a lot of plans for music videos and shows that we can’t necessarily do individually, and we’re actually gettin’ somewhere now so it’s time to actually lock this shit in.

heavensouls: We just wanna start branchin’ out and doin’ more things. Our biggest dream when it comes to our music shit is doin’ a NTS mix or a Boiler Room set.

stickerbush: We used to just sit there and watch Boiler Rooms together. We were just two kids like, “Damn, I would do this if I was on there. There’s this perfect song I’d put on there.” We were fantasizing about shit like that. We wanna make it to a point where it’s not as unrealistic as possible.

With the titles of your albums, and I’m thinking of stuff like Afro-Surrealism (2024), too, I’m wondering if you could talk to me about what it’s like being Black musicians making experimental music and the sort of things you’ve thought about with race and identity in this scene.

stickerbush: I feel like this is the [question] we have the most to talk about. For one, the Afro-Surrealism shit is that we love [the television show] Atlanta. This YouTube recommendation came up and it was like, “Why Atlanta is Afro-Surrealism” and… it’s a white n*gga (laughter). We was mad confused so we were like, okay let’s just call the album Afro-Surrealism. Everything you do that’s weird or seen as strange or eclectic by white people, they’re gonna find a way to make it bigger than it is or they’re gonna find some stupid-ass term to apply to it. That shit’s annoying. We kinda knew that there was this huge experimental rap scene, and we value it, but at the same time… there’s not a lot of Blackness in the IDM scene. You got Flying Lotus and Yves Tumor, but we wanted to implement Black culture—our humor, the way we grew up, the foods that we ate, and just livin’ in the South—in the IDM scene. A lot of that shit comes out of Europe, out of Germany. So that was the number one mission statement: intelligent dance music, but make it Black. And that’s really what Darkskins is, it’s really just an IDM record.

heavensouls: One thing that we talked about extensively when we were making Darkskins is that there are a lot of people in the experimental scene who are Black, but we felt they were restricted to being a specific archetype of person in the experimental scene. We just wanted to break away from that. Back in the day, you’d have n*ggas like Frank Zappa and The Residents—these n*ggas had a level of satire and irony and having fun while being experimental and respected in their respective genres and fields. It feels like we don’t really have that in the experimental hip-hop scene, at least. Like, everything has to be serious and we have to talk about certain things, but if you dare be satirical you’re just making YouTube Poop music. We wanted to break that barrier because satire is its own form of art, like anything else.

How do you find a balance then so it doesn’t just read as YouTube Poop? Is that something you guys are thinking about when making your music?

stickerbush: In the most authentic way possible, we just put so much of ourselves in the music and people will hear it. When I read reviews, people say, “This is very unserious but there’s also a level of passion that you can clearly hear in it.” Nobody’s making music Southern-style to just troll, you know what I mean? There is satire in the music but we’ll have something like that and then we’ll have a 10-minute ambient song. N*ggas can see that there’s a lot of time put into this. I mean, we’re always gonna joke around, but in the experimental scene, especially when it’s two Black men… when you go too far in either direction, it gives people an easy way to discredit you as an artist. If you go too far in the political space, it’s like “Okay, this n*gga’s bein’ too silly on a song, and what I wanted to hear is my own takes being spoken by a Black man. I don’t like that.”

This isn’t shade or anything, but I feel like a n*gga like Quadeca can lowkey do whatever he wants, you know what I mean? But if JPEGMAFIA makes a song about bein’ at the club, people would be complaining. It’s easy to get typecast as a Black man. When I say that people can feel the authenticity of who we are in the music, that’s my opinion but also my hopes. That can change at any moment. We saw it with DARKLIGHT. I’m not gonna say that n*ggas are invalid for any of their critiques on DARKLIGHT, but there were a lot of people who were like, “Damn, we wanted Darkskins again.” And it’s like, we can do it again, but we don’t want to. We don’t wanna be the type of artists who just do one thing. People change all the time, and we constantly go through different phases and listen to different music, and we wanna have the opportunity to be able to expand and not be typecasted just because we’re two n*ggas pickin’ on FL Studio. With DARKLIGHT, we just kept learning how to mix better, we learned how to make more concrete songs, and it just built up naturally all the time.

heavensouls: We kept saying this when we were making DARKLIGHT, that if people can take us seriously whenever we’re making that shit and still fuck with us when we’re jokin’ around, then we’ve found our audience. And I’m just glad that we can thrive in both right now. It feels like people fuck with what we’re doin’ and not just a particular style or sound.

stickerbush: When we get together and have more money, we want to make a baroque pop album. There’s just so much different shit that we wanna do and dabble into. I’m not really a big fan of like, let’s just do a completely different genre, but I wanna implement the IDM shit into different genres and we kind of did that with DARKLIGHT. There might be people who only fuck with Darkskins and are gonna be like, “Oh, they haven’t done anything else like that.” But that’s the point. We’re not just two n*ggas who are gonna stay in one place with music. And I’m not sayin’ n*ggas who critiqued DARKLIGHT aren’t valid for their critiques—you’re allowed to like or dislike anything you want, but I really didn’t want it to be like, “Oh, these are the two new n*ggas who are gonna make this bombastic sound collage every year.” We have too many ideas, and we learn too much.

What do you think is Southern about your music? Like, what about your music do you feel makes it sound like it’s coming from the South instead of from New York or California or Chicago?

stickerbush: That’s a really good question. We bonded over the fact that we moved around a lot. I used to live in New York, I’ve lived in Colorado, I’ve lived all around the country at this point, and there are definitely influences from different places, but I feel like the Southern in the music is the vibe and energy. Anyone can make a Dirty South-type beat. You just go on YouTube and the n*gga Busy Works Beats probably made a tutorial about it (laughter). It’s easy to do, but there’s a certain energy to the South. It’s the shit that Outkast was comin’ with. The South is always gonna be behind, that’s just how the South is if I’m being real, so n*ggas don’t know what’s goin’ on over here. There’s this one interviewer I like a lot where they were talkin’ about the South and they were like, New York is so up and the South is mad behind and not hip to anything, but I feel like that’s an advantage. You come out with some crazy shit in the South and it’s gonna be something you’ve never heard before. It’s a different environment than the rest of the world.

Yeah, like in New York there are specific trends that are solidifying and then in the South, it’s maybe not as defined so things can be more adventurous.

stickerbush: Exactly. I’m from North Carolina and there’s not shit outta here. We got three celebrities: John Coltrane, DaBaby, and the n*gga from The Hangover (2009), Zach Galifianakis or whatever the n*gga’s name is. It’s really not anything here that’s a crazy scene—there’s stuff out here for rock, but there’s no IDM scene. When you come out of it, you have that experience of growing up in the South but then you also have the experience of doing shit that’s pioneered all across the world. It’s gonna be a different energy. I don’t think there’s anything we do that is specifically Southern, but that’s what music is—it’s a reflection of your person.

heavensouls: I think it comes down to how we incorporate rhythms. A lot of the shit that we do, like if we sample something like Sexyy Red, we like to use a lot of texture, but we also like to do it in a rhythmic way. And I think because of our backgrounds, a lot of Southern music and styles naturally come out. It’s just where we grew up. We’ll do the IDM shit, but we’ll always do it in a specific flavor that works the best for us, and I think a lot of the Dirty South shit just works for us. I think why some parts of DARKLIGHT feel more Southern, when we have the chopped-and-screwed shit, is because we realized this during that time.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to both of you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

stickerbush: I’m a really spontaneous person, and I like that I was able to pour that into music. Before music, there was never something I could really get into. I tried a bunch of hobbies, I got into basketball, but even that got boring over time. I realized that I’ve always been very individualistic, so I liked that I was able to do something by myself that I could do concretely over and over. Being passionate about something is rare. People don’t just get gifted passion, you either have one or don’t, so I’m just grateful that I—or some being out there—gave it to me for so long and so consistently.

heavensouls: The main thing that I like about myself is how spontaneous a lot of the shit I do is while still having intent. I think that the reason that I make music or do any sort of specific endeavor, like when I was doing fashion designing, is because I would hyperfixate on certain shit and do it. And I think that shit—of me not overthinking and just doing shit—caused my life to have a specific trajectory that I really fuck with.

stickerbush: We both have a “get shit done” mentality. You can tell that certain n*ggas are making shit but dread the process, but we both love getting shit done and watching the process. It’s like building a house—we like watching the first brick get put down as much as we like everything else coming together.

The Sidepeices’ new album, DARKLIGHT, is out now on Bandcamp and all streaming services.

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Thank you for reading the 201st issue of Tone Glow. Brick by brick. Goo goo ga ga.

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