The infectious sound of Twin Cities musician Miloe has brought the singer-songwriter from college house party basements to some of this year’s largest music celebrations—Afropunk: Minneapolis and the MLS All Star concert included. Bob Kabeya, the 21-year-old face behind the musical alias, took a moment away from his current tour supporting the indie-pop band Coin to talk musical inspirations, artistic growth, and all of the ins-and-outs forging his newest EP release, Gaps.
From playing Afropunk: Minneapolis to performing at the MLS All Star concert and touring with indie stars Coin, how does it feel to transition from a local Twin Cities musician to a bigger setting?
It’s been pretty crazy. Just because it’s hard to have perspective of the scale of things I’ve been doing, and it all sort of conceptualizes over what I’ve done before. Every time I look back and reflect on what I’ve done this year, it’s crazy to think about. I’ve done a lot this year, and I’ve been really, really lucky to have support from the musical infrastructures in Minneapolis. I’ve gotten so many cool opportunities and I’ve met so many people. It’s hard to get perspective as I’m doing it, but when I look back, it’s hard not to be astounded.
When you compare yourself as an artist to where you were when you dropped your Greenhouse EP in 2020 to Gaps this year, how have you grown?
Gaps was really the first time that I sought to try to build a whole world with my music. That’s the kind of artist I want to be, at least right now, to bring people a visual auditory experience, and this was my first crack at that. To have a lot of different ideas in my head and be able to work with people to bring that to fruition. It’s been a more intense workload and coordinating and being a leader who can communicate his ideas to the people he’s working with. As a person, I really had to develop those leadership skills and make sure that the things we were creating were really things that I truly wanted them to be. With the Greenhouse EP, it was a lot more DIY and just me and my bandmates creating. But Gaps had a lot more resources and I was able to work with a lot more people to really be able to do this thing. So, coordination was truly key.
That being said, would you say there was more of a palpable outline while you were working on Gaps versus more of an anything-goes music creating technique?
Yeah, I think so. Once we had the music, then came the plan of how we wanted to release it. Because of the way that music works now, we went with releasing a few of the songs around two months apart, and allowing the songs to have their moments and their own little worlds. In the way that I wrote the EP, it was less of a whole body of work and more of these individual pieces coming together. I really wanted to give each song its own identity and moment.
Circling back to how you mentioned you wanted to make Gaps more of a full-world experience compared to earlier music you’ve released—what did you do to achieve that?
As I make music, I start to get certain feelings and visuals from the textures and different sounds that are coming out of the songs. And with this EP, I started to figure out how to translate the acoustic-y, kind of rustic textures of the songs. They made me think of stars and green and glitter. And from that, I started to work out what kind of visuals I could do for the different songs. Whereas in the past, I would have a song and then I would look through a bunch of images and find one that felt like it fit the song the most. This time, I was very intentional about the crafting specific pieces of art. A lot of the EP art is collages and Photoshopped images. Things that didn’t exist before the songs.
What was the creation process like with your new EP? Did the songs come to you spontaneously at 2 a.m. or did you have a firmer outline of what you wanted the EP to look like from the very beginning?
Normally, my creative process is really sporadic. I’ve been working on trying to make it a more regulated and consistent process, but with this EP, I was going through a lot of things that played into the end result. My family was moving for the first time, I experienced living alone for the first time, a long-term relationship ended, and I had a lot of changes in my interpersonal friendships. I was going through a lot of intense change and I found myself spending time in Garageband, because I found that the limitations made it easier to focus on the song structure rather than getting lost in the sounds that I wanted to convey. I really wanted to sit with these songs for a long time and just work on the way that they flowed. The songs have a lot of different versions.And it was all done in the middle of the night, just listening to the same sections over and over and making minor tweaks as I went on.
I didn’t really write a ton of songs for this EP, I just zoned in on the ideas that I felt connected to and that really gave me a specific kind of feeling. I feel like it’s easy to write songs, but it’s hard to find song ideas that really feel like they’re sitting with you and that can transport you to another place. And as I was working on the music, I found myself really zoning in on the songs. That’s why I called the EP Gaps. It’s kind of a celebration of how through making music, I could enter an almost meditative state that was helpful with processing the change that I was experiencing. The pandemic gave me a lot of time to sit with the music and sit with my instruments and develop a musical language that felt unique to me and that felt unique to Gaps.
All of your music has such an overall happy, upbeat, dance-able sound on Gaps and on your earlier releases. What are some of your musical inspirations that help you create such a specific kind of feeling in your music?
At the end of the day, I’m attracted to songs that give me a lot of warmth. I think I can naturally be pretty emo, so I like music that can bring me out of that darkness. Feelings of nostalgia and love. That warmth is really something I try to put into my music. But on the song “Floating” on Gaps, I tried to go for the opposite of that feeling.
Oh, really? What feeling were you trying to create with that song?
I think instrumentally, especially, I feel like it sounds like a dystopian afro-pop song or something. I feel like it has a darkness to it that’s interesting and kind of weird to me. And it almost feels like the opposite vibe of some of the happier songs, like “Rewind” or “Make Your Way.”
With this being such a personal album and something that helped you through a pretty large time of change in your life, what were some of the major themes you were trying to convey in Gaps?
I definitely wanted to make people dance. Thinking thematically, I’m talking about my breakup and trying to lift myself out of that sort of darkness. I feel like the lyrics aren’t super confessional and I feel like I’m not super open and vulnerable in it. But I feel like I say the right amount that I need to in the way that feels the most comfortable, and I really poured the rest of that energy into making the songs flow in a way that felt really satisfying. On the Greenhouse EP, that was a lot more of a collaborative process. On this EP, I played pretty much every instrument on it, so, physically, it was really satisfying for my brain to hear all of the different choices that I made on the key instruments all played back to me. It was a really cool experience to listen to a song and be able to know that every single little thing is something that my brain would do. I really want people to dance and to hopefully feel some lighter energy in the songs.
If you were talking to someone about listening to Gaps, and they were asking you why they should listen to the new EP, what would you tell them?
I would say the songs feel familiar, but they’ll bring a new vibe that you haven’t experienced before. It’ll be like listening to something familiar but new.
So, being a Minnesota-based artist that’s starting to really gain traction in the music world, do you think you’re going to stay in the Twin Cities in the future? Or is a new destination, like LA or New York, on the horizon for you?
I’ll always be in the Twin Cities bouncing around. I’ve thought about spending some time in New York and maybe even going to school out there for a bit, but my family is in Minnesota and I grew up there. So, it’s always going to be my home base. I love bouncing around and I love seeing as much of the Earth as I can, but I’ll always come back to the Twin Cities.
Interested in seeing Miloe live? He’s coming to the Fine Line in downtown Minneapolis on Oct. 27 for his Gaps EP release show. Tickets are available here.