For this week’s Campus Celebrity, I sat down with The Brio Life Co-Founders, Dylan Brewer (’13) and Kyle Brown (’13).
Alexa: What is The Brio Life?
Dylan: The Brio Life is a record label and creative collective dedicated to curating more memorable musical experiences through the power of visuals.
Kyle: That’s pretty much what you need to know.
Alexa: So, how was The Brio Life born?
Dylan: The Brio Life started out as a really shitty gathering of friend’s music through Facebook groups, before pages. Then I gathered all of it onto a really awful WordPress site that turned into a blog. We found a niche in audiovisual installations, experiences, and collaborations. We were recording so many cool things that people were doing, I wanted to produce these things myself. We wanted to throw events and start a label, and have artists do really cool, creative, conceptual projects, based around the idea that visuals and music interact seamlessly.
Kyle: I wasn’t there for that.
Alexa: Where do you hope The Brio Life will be in five years?
Kyle: I think we both have different ideas and potential goals. What I’d like to see from it, and this is already kind of happening, is to have people come to us looking for a creative outlet knowing that we are the source to come to for new innovative ways to create visuals of music. Instead of us reaching out to people and us trying to foster these things and convince people to join in with us, we want people to start coming directly to us with an idea and we’ll execute it together as opposed to us generating it all ourselves.
Dylan: On a more literal level, when it comes to projects, I want to really expand a lot of experiences that cross creative expressions whether it’s music or art or architecture or culinary arts or story telling or what have you. I want more of these ideas to become live in person. I want to be throwing shows across the U.S. where people go to a concert and they leave it feeling that they just left a movie theatre, that same kind of feeling that you have when you leave a concert. Along with that, just building the record label, building our artists, having them do really cool awesome stuff and have them tour and we want to branch into any kind of audio visual platform: music videos, live projection mapping, really extending the bar and doing things people never thought of.
Kyle: And then as far as physically, we want to be in New York City.
Alexa: Not London?
Dylan: Not yet. That’s ten years.
Kyle: The next goal would be offices in Boulder, LA and, London, music hubs.
Alexa: How many artists do you currently have signed?
Dylan: We currently have six artists including: Alchem, Telescope Thieves, Robokid, Aivy Pham, Oliver Lonstrup Thorsen, and Urbindex.
Alexa: Have you worked with any artists in the UMass area?
Dylan: Robokid is a senior at UMass and in our last biggest project with Delicate Steve; we worked with Mariah Muscato and Kadyrose Druar, who are both videographers that just graduated from UMass.
Alexa: So how can people get involved with The Brio Life?
Kyle: We need bloggers. We need people who are genuinely interested.
Dylan: Now that we’re really expanded and, I’m out of school so this is kind of my number one priority, we’re just looking for anyone who really pushes the envelope every day, who constantly thinks that what is happening, shouldn’t be happening, or it should be happening way better, people who think for themselves, who don’t believe in any kind of blockade or anything that restricts them, and who are really passionate about music and art. That’s all it takes and, then they can come to me, we can have an hour long discussion, watch a few videos and they can be inspired, and from there we can figure out how exactly you can work with us.
Alexa: What are some of the bands that have inspired you?
Dylan: M83 was one of the first bands that inspired what we do now as well as Jónsi from Sigur Rós. But it’s really anyone who’s trying to transform their creative process of music through other modes of seeing things.
Kyle: I’d say for me personally people like Tyler The Creator even though he’s a bit wild and erratic and less about visuals, he’s created something so powerful within such a small group of people, people go to them when they know something wild and crazy is going to happen. It’s not always the audiovisual experience but it’s definitely that they see him as this idea and this emblem that nobody else is close to. He does whatever the f*&^ he wants and that’s inspiring.
Dylan: When it comes to a business mindset and a creative mindset I agree I think Tyler does things he wants to do and that’s not seen much. Kanye West too, even though he’s seen as pretentious, he’s a marketing genius. He does things that people don’t do period and that’s cool and that’s what we respect about him and artists like him.
Alexa: Can you talk about some of the projects you’ve done over the past year?
Dylan: Our last biggest project was the documentary with Delicate Steve, it was “music inspires art inspires music,” we had a visual local artist Edgardo Sanchez Jr. from Hadley, create three 6×4 foot murals inspired by three albums by Delicate Steve, there was a past album, an album they were currently touring on and, an album that was soon to be released. We took those murals when they were finished to Delicate Steve’s studio in Stockbridge and, before even playing they just looked at it and talked about it an analyzed it as if you were like that snobby critic in an art gallery and then, they wrote a song inspired by that music and, they didn’t originally know that the artwork was inspired by them, they thought it was kind of a one way street but its was really this cyclical thing where they were being inspired by themselves and they didn’t even know it. That became a documentary and a live concert event.
Kyle: Additionally, the label started about a year ago so we are doing a t-shirt event right now, and recently we did a photography contest with Earmilk a well known music blog where we had photographers from all around the world. We worked with this Irish beat composer Owsey and, he has 100k plays on Soundcloud and he’s really into photography so we thought it’d be really cool for his fans to get their own images seen by Owsey. The winner was chosen by Owsey and she received some thank you stuff but it was just a cool way for people to get involved with an artist in a way that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to.
Alexa: So kind of reflecting on all of those projects, what are you most proud of that you’ve done this past year?
Dylan: I’m going to say the project we’re doing right now, its called Through the Aperture; it’s our t-shirt and poster premiere, similar to what we did with Delicate Steve, except this time we have three visual artists and three musicians. Each visual artist picks three songs from the artist they are paired with and they create a poster design that’s like a combination of those three songs and then those poster designs are printed and sent to the musicians where in turn they create a song based off of what they see in the image. It’s digging deeper and trying to talk about the languages of other art…