Manila Killa Drops Dusk: I Saw A Shooting Star Go Over The SkyI Wanted To Share That Feeling – Forbes

Manila Killa.

Chris Gavino, known best as his Manila Killa moniker, fuses emotional music and melodic dance to create his signature sound. Today, July 21, the artist does it again with the release of Dusk.

The 12-track body of work is sonically diverse, featuring everything from melodic dance to drum and bass, uplifting melodies and progressive sounds. The first song, Soul, brings listeners into a sonic trance, one that emanates the feeling of being in outer space amongst the stars, while closing out the LP is The End, an emotion-filled yet wordless record. The albums title track boasts catchy lyrics, enchanting vocals and elated melodies. Dusk is indeed an impressive album by the Philippine-born producer.

Here, Gavino shares with Forbes the inspiration behind Dusk, what its like living in a house with other deejays, the biggest inspiration on the music he makes today and more.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Lisa Kocay: Can you describe your sound in three words?

Chris Gavino: The three words that come to mind are tension, liminal and introspective. Tension, because I feel like I'm really honing into dance music for this album, and dance music is all about tension and release. So that's something that I really focused on. Liminalthe traditional meaning is in between, and I touch on that a lot in the album, tookind of in between the night and day. So that's something I really wanted to convey in my sound more recently. And introspective is mainly because I did a lot of reflection, especially over the quarantine, about how I wanted to craft my sound with the album. Youre going to hear a lot of my own reflection throughout the album.

Kocay: What was the inspiration behind Dusk?

Gavino: There's one moment in my life that I kept coming back to when I was working on the album. I took a trip to Joshua Tree right before quarantine happened. There was one moment in time where I was sitting outside during the nighttime and the stars were just all out and it was really beautiful. I was listening to Andrew Bayer, a prominent trance artist who's released a lot of stuff on Anjunabig fan of his. I was also listening to The 1975, more so their ambient works. There was one moment in time where I saw a shooting star go over the sky. I found that feeling so beautiful, and that was something that felt like a feeling I wanted to share with the world. I wanted people to feel what I was feeling. So that was the main inspiration behind the entire album. [It] was trying to get people to understand that specific feeling. And with the music side, I wanted to make the music feel organic, but still sound like electronic music. I think with electronic music, EDM kind of lives in the dusk time of day where there's like one foot in the daytime and one foot in the nighttime. I wanted to convey that feeling.

Kocay: I know you said you wanted to convey the feeling of when you saw the shooting star. What exactly was that feeling?

Gavino: I felt at peace for one of the first times in my life. I felt like everything was okay in the world because it felt like I was kind of in outer space but on earth at the same time. It was kind of a feeling I never really felt before. I just wanted to share that with everybody.

Kocay: Can you share any stories behind some of the tracks and how they were made?

Gavino: Theres a song that I put out, a single called Take Me Higher (feat. fknsyd), which is a new style of electronic music for me. Its a drum and bass song. It was the first time I ever tried making drum and bass. The story behind that stems from during the quarantine, I used to live in a house with other producers and one of those producers was Robbie from Louis the Child. He told us all one night that we should watch this documentary called Drum & Bass: The Movement. I started to learn about the history of drum and bass, where it came from and why it is the way it is now. Later on in the year, after listening to drum and bass a little bit, I saw that Brownies & Lemonade. They throw a bunch of parties in [Los Angeles]. They put on a drum and bass event in [Los Angeles] with a secret lineup, and I wasn't able to go but I saw a bunch of Instagram stories.

They had this one artist named Dimension from the UK play, and I just instantly fell in love with his sound. I got super inspired by his sound. So a couple days before my New Year's show this past year, I decided to make a drum and bass song just to throw into the middle of my set. I wasn't expecting much at all, but I played it out, and that was the craziest reaction I had ever gotten from a crowd. So at that point I was like, All right, I got to finish this song. I got to make it crazier. I had this singer from Texasshe goes by fknsyd. She's done a lot of work with Rezz and stuff. She was perfect for something more dark.

I think one of the coolest, serendipitous moments [with] how one of the tracks were made ... [+] wasDusk, featuring the singer Lights from Canada, Manila Killa says. I had been such a fan of hers for years and years. I was listening to her back in high school, and she was actually one of the first people I saw in concert. She was always a bucket list collaborator for me.

Kocay: You mentioned you were living in a house with a number of other deejays. What was that like? Was it nice to be able to bounce off ideas with each other?

Gavino: I'd say yes and no. I think there are definitely positives and negatives to living in a house with other producers. The positives are definitely being able to bounce around ideas. If you get stuck, you can hit someone up in the other room and try and work on it. But I think for me, personally, I think I work best when I'm on my own and I have my own space to think. The funny thing about living with other producers is that it's never quiet. It's always loud. People are blasting music all the time. We lived in a house with pretty thin walls. So it was sometimes hard to just have a little space to myself, so that was the negative side of it. But [it] was still a really great experience.

Kocay: Who has been the biggest influence on the music that you make today?

Gavino: Honestly, especially throughout the album, I think it was like my girlfriend because she's a visual artist, but I think she has such a great taste in music. I think she was a blessing in disguise throughout the creation of this album because there came a lot of points where I was working on this over the quarantine where I felt like I was getting stuck. I felt like I was boxed in, quite literally as well because we weren't going anywhere. There were a lot of times where I felt stuck, and I think she was able to help push me out of those boundaries. I'd be working on a song for like two days and then she'd be like, Hey, why don't you try this? Then all of a sudden ideas started to flow out. So I found that super helpful and I really appreciated her for all of that. She was a big influence on the album.

Kocay: Do you remember the first electronic music song you heard that made you fall in love with the genre?

Gavino: I was actually in first grade. I had no idea what was happening. I was living in the Philippines at the time and I was watching a lot of TV. I was always interested in watching music videos and music video channels, because those are really big in the Philippines. There was one time where I heard Daft Punks One More Time, and what I found so compelling about that song in particular was that it was so unconventional compared to all the other music videos that I had seen as a kid. It was an animated music video. So it was all animation and I couldn't really put a human face to the voice that I was hearing. I just remember loving that song.

Unfortunately, I got disconnected from electronic music after that because my parents weren't into electronic music. No one I knew was into electronic music. I kind of grew up with the radio, and then eventually in high school was when I found a group of friends who were listening to electronic music. Then they showed me artists like Justice and Daft Punk. This was like in ninth grade. It was sort of a rediscovery for me, and from that point on, I kind of lost interest in all other genres of music and I just dove really deep into electronic music. I never looked back after that.

Kocay: If you could give yourself one piece of advice for when you first started making music, what would it be?

Gavino: I would say take the time to learn music theory. I don't know that much about it now, but I started to learn a little piano during quarantine, and I started to realize that understanding music theory is such an important tool because it'll help you find resolve in core progressions and it'll help you kind of extend your songwriting abilities. This advice would go to anybody who's starting out and producing music, toolearn the tools of the trade. You don't have to understand everything, but understanding music theory, at least the base of it, is really helpful in any type of music that you make.

Kocay: If you didn't go into making music, where would you be today?

Gavino: I would be in an office nine-to-five job. I believe that for sure, because l actually studied business management in college. I got my degree and I had a job lined up for me after college, but obviously that didn't happen because somehow my music got known by other people around me. But more recently, I started learning how to [make] pottery. I kind of feel like it gives me the same feeling that I felt when I started music in the sense that you're creating something out of nothing. I think that if I had found pottery earlier in my life, that could have been something that I would've done aside from music.

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Manila Killa Drops Dusk: I Saw A Shooting Star Go Over The SkyI Wanted To Share That Feeling - Forbes