INTroducing:MICHAËL BRUN
A CHAT WITH INTERNATIONALLY-ACCLAIMED PRODUCER AND DJ, MICHAËL BRUN
Interview BY PORTIA BRAJKOVIC
TIRADE: HI MICHAËL, HOW ARE YOU?
MICHAËL: I'm good, I'm good. I'm excited because it's starting to get warm in New York and my first arena show is getting closer.
TIRADE: FIRST ARENA! HOW DOES THAT FEEL?
MICHAËL: It's a big deal. It was a bucket list for me, something that I always wanted to accomplish. I'm so grateful that we got to this point. I’ve been working on it for years and it's gonna be amazing.
TIRADE: How does the preparation for an arena tour compare to the venues that you’ve performed in historically?
MICHAËL: It's so much more work. I've done a lot of different types of shows. I've done club shows, theaters, everything else, and I’ve opened up for some arena shows. Now, we have to build everything from scratch. We have an amazing in-house team, so it's a really cool stage setup and visuals.
TIRADE: It must be amazing to have that much creative control.
MICHAËL: It's incredible and I'm so grateful because I have the best fan base in the world.
TIRADE: You were originally studying to become a doctor and now you make music. Tell us about that journey.
MICHAËL: I'm Haitian and Guyanese, and I grew up in Port-au-Prince. I lived there until I was 16. Throughout my entire life, I wanted to be a pediatrician. It was really clear to me that that was going to be my life. I went to school for it. Music was just a hobby. It never felt like something I would legitimately pursue.
I started DJing when I was 14, just at house parties. Eventually I started producing, and then uploading music online. Up until this point, it was all a hobby.
When I was 16, I went to military school in Indiana, in hopes of eventually going to college in the US. I had two years there, and it was a great experience actually. I DJ'ed more, like at the school dances, and kept producing. Then, I went to North Carolina at Davidson College and I was pre-med in college. Same thing: ept producing, kept DJing. Around my freshman into sophomore year, I had a few songs that went viral. That was the start of, Wait, maybe this is actually a career. It was my biology advisor who asked if I wanted to do music. At that point, 25,000 plays was viral, and he was like ‘Is this normal?’ He said, “I think you should pursue this. I'll take you to the dean myself.”
You never know what you're doing when you start out making music. I had label offers, I had invitations to a lot of different events. I played Ultra that year. I toured and played all around the world: Coachella, EDC, all these festivals. Collaborated with a lot of massive artists that were inspirations to me.
After a few years, I reflected on why I had wanted to become a doctor. I wanted to make my community in Haiti better. I wanted to give back as much as possible. When I really broke it down, I was like, how can I do that with music? I could impact culture. So, I started working with Haitian artists, and here I am.
TIRADE: Let’s talk inspiration. We can either go and seek it out, or it can find us. What inspires you?
MICHAËL: Generally, inspiration finds me, whatever place I’m in or person I’m with. I don’t look for it. I need the outdoors. I make a lot of stuff outside, like voice notes.
It's been so cool for me to get to travel and meet people. That goes back to the idea of giving back to the community; I really care about people and I care about connection.
A huge inspiration for me is just experiencing the world, experiencing culture and people's perspectives. So many things that I've worked on throughout my life, I can literally think of the conversation I was having with a particular person right before we made something.
TIRADE: What did that choice between med school and music feel like? Was it scary or did it feel like the right decision?
MICHAËL: It was definitely scary. Up until that point in my life, my career path was clear, and there was always someone I could go to for advice. With DJing, there wasn’t an outline of what to do. I think the thing that saved me was ignorance, which is hilarious. I thought it was going to be simple; I didn’t see the scale of what I was embarking on. It was also amazing having people that really believed in me, even if they didn't understand what was happening, like my biology advisor and my parents.
TIRADE: You've referred to collaboration as a cultural bridge. How have you seen that cultural bridge come to life through your career and your work?
MICHAËL: My recent single ‘Touchdown’ is a really good example of everything I believe in musically, because it incorporates four or five different cultures and worlds that I’ve spent a lot of time in over the last few years.
Jay Balvin and I started working together for the World Cup in 2016 or 2018. That opened up the entire Latin market to me, because at the time I was working on this song in Haiti called ‘Bayo’, which eventually became the name of my event series. I was working on a very specific Haitian sound, which combined Rara, our Indigenous music, with popular music.
I fused those things together with friends and then made that song. Eventually, I linked with Jay, he loved it and asked to use it for the project. That made me realize that doing something that I really loved and that was very specific to me and my upbringing allowed me to link with this person from a completely different country, completely different background, different language. Everything was different, yet this became a point of connection between us. We became really good friends. We kept working on stuff and he was super open to ideas throughout the years. We had so many conversations, but we would always come back to the fact that we loved dancehall and reggaeton. As a DJ, I would play dancehall music all the time; Jamaica is Haiti’s neighbour.
We had been working on some stuff, and I just pitched him: “What if we tried to make this thing with J Balvin, and some of the legends from Jamaica?” Balvin loved it, then Tasan wrote her verse. Then we got Beenie Man and Bounty Killer on it. We got them in the studio and they cut their verse. Even though the world felt really isolated because it was during the pandemic, it actually felt connected because of the internet.
So, ‘Touchdown’ came together as a passion project because we shared the same interests and love of music. It just fit into place, to be honest.
TIRADE: Let’s talk about Bayo. Why is it important, not only to you, but also to the broader community.
MICHAËL: By 2015/2016, I had done so much stuff as an electronic music producer and DJ. I’d played all of the major festivals. I’d worked with all of the DJs and producers that I’d ever wanted to work with. It was crazy. I’d travelled the world and I'd learned so much but, at the same time, I felt like a huge part of my identity was linked to my heritage. I felt that the music I was creating was really special, but I still didn’t feel like I was fully being represented in what I was creating.
I decided to go back to Haiti, and to really create with Haiti in mind, so that I could bring all of this sound and culture and beauty to the rest of the world. Most people in the world had never even heard of Haiti, or if they had, it was always in a negative way. One of the ways that dream manifested was in this event Bayo. I was working with all these different people, from rappers to bands, to singers, to pop artists to DJs, and I was just like, What if we did something where everybody comes together and it's a block party vibe?
It started out in the streets. In the beginning, it was a couple dozen people in Jalousie, in the slums of Port-au-Prince. It’s a very famous area; there’s this massive mountain with all these houses. I collaborated with a couple artists from that area, and did a free show with them. The show was such a beautiful moment. It was all ages. It was free. It was every kind of socioeconomic class, every different type of artist was represented. It was all friends. It was really warm, and I wanted to take it to the rest of the world.
Then, I started doing it in the States. I started small, but invited artists from Haiti. Year after year, we went from like a couple hundred people, to 500 people, to a thousand people. Then we started doing the tour across six cities: Montreal, Boston, Atlanta, DC, Miami, and Orlando. It just kept expanding.
The whole time, the idea was to make sure that Haiti is represented in the way that I've always experienced it; so rich in culture and beautiful. Haiti is a really big melting pot. We have so much to share, and that's what ‘Bayo’ means: to give.
Michael’s next single, ‘Elevate’ featuring Shirazee, is out Friday 30th May.