a very nice chat with Nancy-Bleu and Maggie, two artists making their way
In 2024, I went to an event thrown by Sunday Brunch Collective and sat at a table—could you call it a 'kiosk'? might be stealing Kiosk Valor to do so—with a sign in front of me, asking to talk about music. It was a great success. I spoke with many individuals, both musicians and music enjoyers: a bassist about to do a tour in Japan, a folk artist wrapping up a west coast tour, a guy who made rave visuals for his DJ friends...
Molly Mary O’Brien
Going out and speaking to people in person does not necessarily come naturally for me. I was pretty introverted for a long time, and there's always a moment before any event, gathering or interview where I am filled with regret and wish I could stay at home on the couch, scrolling and zoning out. But IRL connections are so important, and they always end up being extra-rewarding. For example, posting about the Sunday Brunch Collective event then linked me to Rashad Rastam, host of the Wear Many Hats podcast, who had me on the pod; he participated in a blog feature, and then I linked him to the print music magazine ANTICS, which I occasionally write for, because they were looking for advertisers, and then he went to an ANTICS show and took a bunch of great photos...
...aaaanyway, you can imagine how thrilled I was when a few months ago, I heard from someone I chatted with at the SBC thing, Nancy-Bleu Hwang! She and her friend Maggie McKelvey were CalArts seniors when I spoke to them.
They have since graduated and are navigating the post-grad world as creative souls in a capitalist society. We met up at a Lebanese restaurant in my neighborhood and caught up on how life had been going since graduation.
They talked about finishing their thesis projects last year—they both studied experimental animation in a small program, only 14 people by Maggie's estimation—and it turns out stop-motion animation in particular is a little tricky to schedule when everyone in your class needs to do it at the same time. "It was such a headache trying to figure out the scheduling for everything," Maggie said. "There's only four or five stop motion stages, and some of them are tiny closets, basically. I started fabricating in my third year and then didn't finish fabricating until like halfway through my four year. So then everyone's shooting in that spring semester...it's crazy."
Nancy-Bleu and Maggie had also worked together on Reliable News?, a multimedia variety show put on by CalArts students from multiple departments, whose episodes burst with music, puppets, crazy costumes and silly sketches, emanating the beautiful, unmistakable energy of artists doing whatever the hell they feel like doing.
"That proved to be much harder to continue once we graduated, because it's just so different trying to figure how to coordinate. I was rewatching some of the episodes and stuff last night, and I'm really glad that we did it," Maggie said. "It felt like journalism, in a way, where it was really capturing the moment of something."
Post-graduation, they were adjusting to a new world, one in which figuring out how to pay the rent would probably have to take precedence over passion projects. "Making money is now the main focus. How do I live, survive?" said Maggie. "I wish it wasn't that way."
This past April, Nancy-Bleu released an album called mubla yppah, a warm and charming collection of songs about the pleasures and complications of love. "I love you like a greedy man loves his land/I love you in the foolest way," she sings on "Fossil Fuel"; on the softly zany "special species," which uses percussion ranging from the dholak, a hand drum of South Asian origin, to "trash can with plastic fork," she sings "If we can't be soulmates, then can we at least form a band?" My favorite song on it is "prime time," which blows up the intimacy of the rest of the songs into an epic apex, a gorgeous burst of guitar drums both soft and hard, atmospheric and sharp, at the same time.
Bandcamp New & Notable Jun 5, 2021
"They're both about this one guy," she says of mubla yppah and her 2025 album TV Series. "I guess it's a timeline of my feelings towards this one person...but it's basically about me. Everything's about me." When I last talked to her, she had described her music as "diary music" and her songwriting process sounded like it was pretty self-contained. Since then, she's been branching out. She recorded with a CalArts music student named Anant Shah (with whom she first started collaborating when she was making music for her second year film), who founded a music production studio called Saffron Sound. TV Series was co-produced with MUCO (a musician who also reinterprets medieval folk songs, cool), and mubla yppah was co-produced with yoshi morimoto (who just released a wonderful vibey jazz album called A Hui Hou); both musicians played on both records, as did folks like Alexander Grant and Maddison Flóra.
I asked if she wants to keep collaborating with other people on music. "How did you know?" she asks wryly. "That's exactly what I want to do. There's this one Erykah Badu album, I think it's Mama's Gun. I don't know the facts, but it feels very much like they were just in the same room and they kept recording it. And two songs on my album"—"special species" and "you land, you city, you planet, your arms"—"was also just all of us being in the same room, playing, recording, maybe adding some stuff later. It's just more fun that way."
Nancy-Bleu played a couple of shows earlier this year, with mixed results. "Playing live, I kind of realized that I might not like performing....I just like being in front of my friends. So one time there was a show where...I guess some of my friends were there. But you weren't there," she says to Maggie. "Gupi [Parani, founder of Reliable News?] wasn't there. I was like, this is not fun." They both laugh.
Our food arrives, and then we start talking a bit about animation, and whether either artist thinks about the audience for their work, i.e. who they might be entertaining at the end point of creating animations. The answer is a resounding no. "I don't think about anyone—just me," Nancy-Bleu says. Maggie agrees: "I have a really hard time totally showing up as myself when I want to explain what I'm feeling to people, so filmmaking is that for me. I feel like it's a really effective communication tool for me. And it has definitely brought me closer to the people in my life, for sure."
Maggie's senior thesis project was a beautiful, thoughtful film called I Am Not My Body—"it's about queerness, and transness, and not really feeling understood by the people around you"—where they turned interviews with peers, including their grandfather, into stop-motion conversations between animal-like figures (or in Maggie's case, a sort of reptilian/alien-like creature) that took place in a lovingly crafted bedroom set.
stills from I Am Not My Body
The film ends with an abstract, mixed-media sequence involving galloping horses. "Something that I integrated into the film was this feeling of being stuck, and knowing there is a more embodied and freer version of myself that exists, but for whatever reason, I don't feel like I can live as that," they said. "My grandpa loves horses, but his father had a lot of issues with gambling and betting on horse racing. That's followed my family for a long time, that gambling addiction. So [the end of the film] was sort of reclaiming the symbol of a horse, generationally—this is not going to mean this anymore, and what does this mean for me? I want this to be a symbol of freedom, and not being bogged down in terrible decisions, trapping yourself in your own hang-ups and addictions." Maggie's own words close out the film: "I used to tell myself I'd keep my secrets forever. Like the horse, I need to be released."
The end sequence was scored by Maggie's friend Sean Antongiorgi, a swirling composition of cello, piano and saxophone. (Sean put out a great album last year called Canned, under the name Glue.) We talked about how music relates to Maggie and Nancy-Bleu's animation work—Nancy-Bleu has also contributed music to other friends' films, which she likes because "when you have a restriction, sometimes it's more freeing." This leads us to one of my favorite subjects, which is, broadly, What It's Like To Do Open-Ended Collaborations With People. I experienced this phenomenon last year when I commissioned some remixes for the blog—it's truly unreal to give someone a super broad prompt and then receive some special art that has never existed before, that came from someone's divine spark, a unique work that came about because you and someone else wanted it to.
But sometimes that kind of collaboration is fraught. Nancy-Bleu described finishing demos of songs, then hearing them after her co-producers did more work on them while she was traveling. "There's a song called 'Fossil Fuel' on the album. I was on the plane listening to it. And then I got so mad...because it was so beautiful. But it's not supposed to be beautiful! It's not this beautiful thing that I'm trying to make. I'm trying to make it raw. And I was like, you're not understanding anything I'm doing. And I listened to it a few times...and I fell in love with it. And I knew I was going to, so I didn't say I was mad. It's on the album now and I love it. "
Maggie related to this collaboration difficulty in animation as well. "It's such a frustrating process when someone sends you something and you're like, fuck, this isn't working, and I'm so sad that this isn't working, because I know it could exist. And then you have to keep doing it, and rehashing it out, until it gets there. And then you're like, yeah, this is everything I want."
"It takes a lot of trust," Nancy-Bleu said.
"So much trust," said Maggie. "Especially to let other people's perspective in on such a private thought and private feeling. But I think that's true of all art. Once you make it, it doesn't belong to you anymore, in a way. It belongs to the perspective of the people who view it. I've always thought that the best way to watch a film is to just make it—you're really going to understand it if you're the one making it."
"That's basically why I make music," Nancy-Bleu said. "Sometimes I want to listen to songs I can relate to, and I kind of run out of them. So I have to make 'em."
Getting to talk to artists about why they make their art is my favorite thing ever. It gives me life. I keep thinking about about treating my blog as an ongoing art project, rather than a Content Machine. The posts I care about most are the ones that seem to have the least 'viral potential.' Every day I look at the internet and am bombarded with what seems to be the most sharable, relatable, eye-grabbing content. But if I'm doing this blog for me, as Nancy-Bleu and Maggie are making their art for themselves, who cares about any of that? Also, I feel like an audience can tell when you're making stuff just because you want an audience, as opposed to making stuff because you want to make it. As is the case with Maggie's film and Nancy-Bleu's music, a labor of love really does vibrate at a different frequency than a labor of obligation. I gotta do this for me, and hopefully other people come around to it—to the I Enjoy Music Lifestyle?—naturally.
We wrapped up lunch. Nancy-Bleu and Maggie were on their way to this year's CalArts graduation. They told me that for the commencement ceremony, you can send them some kind of signature sound, like a snippet of music or some sound effects, to play when your name is called. But usually it's hard to hear it, because everyone is cheering so loud.
Thank you Nancy-Bleu and Maggie! Follow them on social media to see all the great stuff they will inevitably get up to.
And thanks for reading I Enjoy Music. If you like it, tell a friend.
