Life & Work with Mikinzie Stuart of Los Angeles

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mikinzie Stuart.

Hi Mikinzie, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Looking back, I’ve always had a profound emotional connection to music, and dance music specifically, even as a child: I got super into disco when I was throwing a 70’s themed birthday party in 5th grade, I was obsessed with the rollerskating rink in my hometown because of the music and lights, and I still remember singing along with the 90s club hits I’d hear on the radio when I was getting driven to school. I also had a wide variety of tastes throughout my childhood: I grew up listening to a lot of rap/hip hop like Aaliyah and Ludacris and mainstream eurodance like Aqua and Vengaboys. I think that’s where a lot of my sound as a DJ and Producer comes from today. It’s a specific type of neo rave/ bounce that has the grit of the warehouse but fused with deliberate pop sensibilities, such as hip hop/R&B vocals and eurodance-inspired synth melodies.

Despite with being obsessed with music my entire life, surprisingly I’ve never played an instrument and never had even touched music equipment up until I bought my first DJ controller at the beginning of 2019. It’s not that I never wanted to, it’s more so because I just thought I never could: my grade school didn’t have a music program and by the time I got to high school I was already fully committed to athletics and too far behind other students who had taken music classes. But music was even part of my athletics: I’d spend hours making playlists to train or warm up to, and yes Sandstorm was ALWAYS on that list haha. I started getting into more modern day dance music when I went to college in rural Michigan, even though DJing wasn’t really a popular thing with students the way it got a few years after I graduated (I’m a millenial), and the only “club” was a dive bar with a dance floor, With the help of Napster, I started discovering to a lot of indie dance, electro, and IDM artists that I still love to this day like Tiga and Vitalic. I ran cross country and track in college, so music always played a pivotal role: from listening to it on my ipod while I did 13 mile runs, to getting myself psyched up before a race.

I started my DJ career in Chicago, where I DJed for 3 years before moving to LA in 2022. Someone had taught one of my good girlfriends and she had just started playing out at bars, so I’d go out to support her and be her hype girl. We had similar music tastes, she’d even let me choose the next song to play during her sets, and after watching her a few times I thought to myself “I bet I could do that.” Thankfully Chicago winters are brutally cold, so that year, I bought my first DJ controller and basically stayed in all winter and taught myself how to DJ, and actually started as a house and techno DJ since those genres are wildly popular in the Midwest for obvious reasons if you know dance music’s origins.

Coming up with a DJ name was really hard! And most people don’t know that my artist name, Desa Deca, isn’t actually my real name, but rather, it’s inspired by my birthday (December 10th). It’s become kind of an IKYKY fun fact amongst fans and peers in the scene.

Shortly thereafter, I was at a work holiday party at a popular rooftop bar in Lincoln Park, and was chatting up the DJ, and he asked if I wanted to hop on. While I was playing, the GM came up to me, said he loved my music, and asked me if I wanted to continue playing for them regularly, so that’s how I scored my first residency. However, I dreamed of playing the raves and clubs that I attended as a patron/fan, but no one in the local Chicago scene knew who I was. So I started throwing my own parties at popular dance bars around Chicago and booking local talent as a means to network and build relationships, and for one of my shows I even got Lady D to headline. Later that year, I played a rave opening for John Summit when he was up and coming.

My first year in LA, I wasn’t DJing all that much because I hadn’t really discovered the community within the scene here yet. So I decided to try to learn how to produce music as a way to stay connected with my artist project, which was a huge mental hurdle because I had zero experience with actually making music, only as using my intuition and taste as a selector for my DJ sets. The first person to ever teach me anything about production was another female artist in LA I had met pretty early on when I moved here named Ava Lake. With her encouragement, I produced my first unreleased song.

Moving to LA was actually a pivotal moment for me as an artist because I was exposed to SO MANY new styles of dance music in LA, which was hugely inspiring. Chicago is very much a house and techno city, so when I came to LA, it was a culture shock in the best way to be able to go to a trance show and a Jungle show in the same weekend. LA is also where I fell in love with faster bpms; the whole city in general interestingly gravitates towards faster bpms compared to other major cities in the US.

LA has very much formed me as an artist: I started listening to genres outside of house and techno, and discovered Marlon Hoffstadt when he was still up-and-coming in the global scene, so I was very much an early adopter of the neo rave/ bounce genres in the US markets. That’s when I started connecting the dots from the music I loved in childhood to who I became as an artist today, and it all just made sense in retrospect and felt right.

My DJ career here picked up after discovering a local party in LA called Club Evil. I DMed them on Instagram to see if they would let me play one of their nights. The set went really well, and I became friends with the promoter, who started introducing me and talking me up to other promoters here. Then I started getting booked by a lot of the raves here, scored a residency with After Midnight, played Exchange nightclub and Echoplex/The Echo, and this past September, I played my first festival at Teletech X Boiler Room LA to the largest crowd I’ve ever played for. And I’ll be playing Insomniac’s Escape Psycho Circus festival this Halloween.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Not at all! Haha. I’ve basically had to reboot my DJ career 3 times. After about a year of DJing in Chicago, I was booked to play a boat party at Movement festival in Detroit, but tore my achilles one week before the party, and had to take time off of DJing because I couldn’t walk. Shortly after I recovered and I started playing out again, the pandemic happened, and the DJ landscape changed entirely. Once things opened up again, I started getting booked at clubs in Chicago, and felt like I had my momentum back…. then I got a job offer for my day job (at the time) and had to move to Los Angeles, where I literally knew NO ONE. So it was back to square one, because who you know, and who knows you, matters a lot in this industry.

When I became a producer, things got even bumpier, but more from within myself and my self confidence. I had never experienced imposter syndrome before until then. I was so intimated and had a lot of self-doubt given I had zero experience or knowledge of music because my grade school didn’t have a music program.

It also takes a little while to find your sound! I started off making more trance and hard house, which then evolved into a harder sound that I’m known for today. A lot of the first few years of producing requires a lot of exploration and just seeing where the muses of inspiration take you, on top of learning all the ins and outs of how a DAW works, ON TOP of learning music theory and different effects and instruments if you’re like me and started without much of a music background aside from being an aficionado. So it can be challenging mentally when you have so much ambition but have to slow down to learn the technical skills and discover who you really want to be sonically.

One of the most important things I’ve learned in my career is that it requires an extraordinary amount of mental strength and resilience. You are faced with rejection constantly, and the industry isn’t fair and doesn’t always reward talent over other things like the number of instagram followers you have, or how you look. And despite how many times I’ve wanted to give up during these setbacks, I just simply can’t: I love it too much, I truly don’t know what my life would look like if I wasn’t doing music. So I let spite from all of that frustration drive me as a motivator haha. You just really have to put determination above everything else and aim to become unstoppable.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’ve been DJing for 7.5 years and producing music for 3 years. My sound as both a DJ and music producer is in the high-bpm neo rave/ neo bounce genres.

My sound lives where underground edge meets sharp pop instinct: the euphoric highs of bounce and 90s eurodance fused with the raw grit of rave, trance, and techno. It’s a specific flavor of neo rave/ neo bounce that has the grit of the warehouse fused with deliberate pop sensibilities, such as powerful hooks, prevalent vocals (usually hip hop or pop) and eurodance-inspired synth melodies. Since I started my career as a house DJ, I also like to pay some tribute to my beginnings by playing some songs that have strong house elements, like a strong female house vocal or house type chords, but still have that gritty, rave-inspired edge to them.

As a DJ, I’ve played most of the raves and some of the clubs and festivals in LA, along with some in Chicago, San Francisco, and Tampa. My sets are very high-energy, bouncy, and fun; I like to let tracks breathe and be a hype girl for the music to really let it have the spotlight. I get very into the songs myself, dancing like a maniac during the drop and singing along with the lyrics and I think that kind of energy catches on with the crowd and gets them excited.

A “good” set to me is when everyone’s hands are in the air, the crowd is whoop whooping, and the room is just absolutely losing their minds because they’re so engrossed in the music and energy. I hate the “too cool to have fun” stigma that some harder genres get, so my goal during my sets is to get everyone so hyped on the music that they forget that anyone else is in the room and just lose control until they’re a endorphin-fueled sweaty mess. I think my background as an athlete is kind of like why faster bpms; it’s very much like when I heart rate zone training as a runner. For example, most of my music is around 150-160bpm, which is somewhere between moderate to high intensity. I think it makes for the perfect release of energy before going back to the tedious routine of normal daily life.

In the last 3 years, I’ve released songs with labels like Rawsome Rave, qp Germany, Never B Alone, and had my first EP with Aftertraxx. I also have some new releases coming out later this year and early next year.

I’ve opened for headlining acts such as Hannah Laing recently at Teletech X Boiler Room LA this past September, along with artists such as Andata, Justin Jay, Noise Mafia, MADGRRL, Neon Graveyard, and Eargasm God. I’ve had my tracks supported by some of my favorite artists such as VTSS, Ollie Lishman, Justin Jay, and Arman John.

Throughout my time as an artist in LA, I’ve really connected with an amazing community of incredible and talented women in the scene. So I wanted to give back to the community that helped me really find myself as an artist and supported me along the way. So this past summer, myself and another artist named Ashley Anngora hosted a women’s meet up for women-identifying DJs, producers, promoters, managers, agents, etc, that was a big hit and had a great turn out. After getting so much great feedback, we’re hoping to do more in the future.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
Note to the editors/writers: Please only use my real name to establish context at the beginning of the interview, and would prefer it if you used my artist name Desa Deca throughout the rest of the interview. Also feel free to crop the personal photo as you see fit, there weren’t any dimensions specified so wasn’t sure what will work best for your layout, but obviously want to cut out the other people in the frame and crop in closer on me.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/desadeca/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DesaDeca
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/desadeca
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5p2xCEgvFtYKmLZabv99pW?si=Ipv9Q_42RFWNR8AQmV8uPQ

Image Credits
Juan Ramirez