For 15 years, Soulection has flourished as a genre incubator, a community and an artist collective, bringing a distinct global sound to every part of the world. Through their countless events on nearly every continent, they’ve reinforced the power of unity and supplied the inherent medicine found within sweating with strangers.
CEO and founder Joe Kay is the vibrant spark that sparked the Soulection movement back in 2011, a visionary with music embedded in his DNA who felt a longing to materialise this connection into a community. What he’s since built, alongside the rest of the Soulection team, has singlehandedly changed the way we experience music.
Off the heels of their 15 year anniversary, commemorated with a 15-hour set at Miami’s legendary Club Space, CLASH sat down with Joe Kay to discuss both Soulection’s past and future.
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Who would you say are the artists you listened to that planted the seed for Soulection’s sound?
Growing up, I recall listening to Erykah Badu, Sade, Tupac, DMX and bands like Rage Against the Machine. Some reggae and house music, too. I remember hearing Janet Jackson’s record, ‘Got Til It’s Gone’ and realising J Dilla was producing a lot of records for some of my favourite artists like A Tribe Called Quest and Busta Rhymes. Hearing those kind of records on the radio at the time, we’re talking about the golden era of hip-hop. That was a big for my musical upbringing. You don’t really know the producers behind the shadows, especially back then. So as I got older, I got to learn about who’s behind the music. I think that’s like a big part of what Soulection is.
It’s very clear that you’re nonstop and all over the world always. How do you find grounding when you’re constantly moving through different time zones and places?
That’s a great question. It’s nonstop while running the businesses; it’s exhausting, and it’s not for the weak. You have to be very multifaceted with a high-functioning, multi-tasking kind of mindset. I don’t know if I have the answer, I just know that when I get home I perform my routines: just getting in the gym or getting my steps in, whether it’s a run, a walk or doing my treadmill incline walking.
Even if I have stuff to do on my phone, my whole point is having motion, some sort of physical activity to just release. Going in the sauna or steam room, or even if I don’t have access to those, taking a super hot shower and meditating in the shower for a second. It’s tough because there are many things at this point of my life and career flying at me. But you have to just find balance in it. I’ve been doing it for so long that it’s always new, but I think my bandwidth has been able to expand as I’ve gone on.
Would you almost say that you’re more comfortable in the chaos than not at this point?
Yeah, absolutely. The chaos is always different. It’s like, if I’m playing or travelling, there’s always obstacles that happen unexpectedly or just adversity and challenging moments. Whether it’s venue spaces, whether it’s crowds, whether it’s certain equipment missing. There’s a lot of moving pieces, so even while one thing is going strong, you might get side swept on the other side. You’ve got to always find your footing and get right back up and keep it moving. I think that’s why I like it, because it keeps me sharp and on my feet and it’s never the same experience.
I’ve always found Soulection to be a celebration of community and music; the medicine that comes from being enclosed, sweating, hugging and loving. I’d love if you could speak to the higher dharma of Soulection, because it feels like it’s so much more than just the music.
It’s about leaning into your purpose. Soulection is meant to inspire anyone in any field. You don’t have to be a musician or in the music business. I feel like a lot of us do listen to music in our day-to-day routine. Music is a part of everyone’s lives, whether you’re a high-level listener like me, where I have music playing all day, every day. There’s also people who don’t listen to music every day, but I still think music is used as a mood setter and as an energy, in a spiritual sense.
I feel that for people sho aren’t in music but love music, Soulection is also meant to inspire them. If you go to a show, if you listen to a radio episode, or if you find out about an artist or producer who came from Soulection or had early ties in its history, then it becomes much bigger. I think the story of how we came up serves as a motivation for someone out there to go out and create their own vision. That’s really what it’s about.
You mention always having music playing. Do you sit in silence at all?
I would say I have music playing at least like 90% of the day, but yeah, there are moments where I don’t have anything playing. Like I just hopped off a flight, so I’ll probably be in silence for at least an hour or two, just ‘cause I’ve just been overstimulated all day from the airport, people, turbulence, honking. I need to decompress sometimes, and decompressing doesn’t always relate to physical activity for me. My life is crazy, it’s not normal at all. There’s nothing normal about my lifestyle. There’s nothing normal about how much I move around and how much I juggle. So I’m aware of that and I do embrace it, but there’s times that I just need to sit still for a second and think.
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You just celebrated 15 years of Soulection in Miami, with shows planned internationally this year. Why was that the city to house this monumental moment?
We have a lot of ties to the city of Miami. It’s always been a really important place and community. It’s not the biggest city or our biggest crowds in terms of capacity and turnouts, but we’ve always had a lot of love there. My manager, Dom, who’s been with me for quite some time, we started brainstorming what we were going to do for the 15 year mark, and he was like, “Man, we should do a 15-hour set, a takeover.”
It sounded crazy because we’ve obviously never played that long, but what better place to do it than at Club Space in Miami, because it’s such a legendary place with so much respect and history; to bring the Soulection sound there with a really diverse lineup in Kokoroko, Sango, Silent Addy. A lot of those sounds are never played there, so it was really important for us to bring that energy and bend the rules to do things our way.
Has there ever been a specific city or country that really surprised you in terms of the way that they’ve reacted to Soulection?
Auckland, New Zealand went crazy. I’ve only been there once, but that one time was a great representation. They’re literally at the end of the of the world geography-wise. Everyone always skips them, they’d rather go to Australia than to New Zealand. So they came in heavy. Obviously we have a lot of love for South Africa. I haven’t been to all the regions of South Africa, but specifically Johannesburg and Cape Town, they go crazy. Their love and passion for music is next level. Sao Paulo and Rio as well. There’s obviously so many that you would expect, like London. But the countries that I named specifically, those were unexpected.
Is there one song that you feel defines the heart and pulse of Soulection?
Oh, that’s a tough one. The sound has changed so much in our 15 years. What we were putting out even five, ten years ago, versus what we put out now is completely different. Not even to be biased, but I’d put forward my project that I put out last year, ‘If Not Now, Then When?’. There’s a track called ‘Hesitation’, and it features this vocalist named Karri, and then there’s another track, ‘Moonlight’ with Isaiah Falls and Merges. Those two tracks are a representation of where Soulection is at now. ‘Hesitation’ is this R&B kind of Timbaland-style production, but it has a switch up where it goes into a more dance tempo and that’s classic Soulection energy right there. And then ‘Moonlight’ is very dub and reggae heavy. We all know that I have a lot of love for Jamaica and the Caribbean as a whole. It has those elements of Jamaican culture mixed with R&B, that is kind of the essence of what Soulection is about. It’s about fusing these different sounds together.
What would you say is the highlight over these last 15 years, and what is your vision for the next 15 years?
We hit so many milestones, but we move so fast onto the next thing that we don’t even get a chance to celebrate. We’re already on another meeting, call, or flight. It’s always the next thing. A lot of times we aren’t even able to absorb and feel everything because there’s so much, which is a blessing simultaneously. There’s so much that we’ve achieved that I sometimes forget. There’s definitely a handful of moments that I can name that were extremely important, like our first Europe tour – our first time ever taking Soulection overseas. It was a huge deal for us because that sound had never been brought into Europe or overseas yet. It was so fresh and new.
To do a 10-city tour back in 2014, that was a huge thing. And then the following year, we got picked up by Beats 1 and chosen by Zane Lowe. That was a huge moment. Even just making it to 15 years and doing what we’re doing right now, I think is a huge moment. In terms of the next 15, we’re looking to create some consistency in doing these annual bigger Soulection experiences. There’s an abundance of festivals and things like that, but I don’t feel anyone quite does it like Soulection in terms of curation.
We’ve been talking about that and expanding all the platforms. On the radio side, we’re talking about how can we grow it bigger. Obviously we had Swizz Beats who is a good friend of mine. I definitely want to get Black Coffee and Kaytranada to do a takeover. And then we have a Soulection album that we’re working on and that’s going to have heavy hitters. Ultimately, I just want to keep growing the team. I want to keep expanding and putting more people on, and give more women the opportunity to be in the industry. We try to champion women as much as we can over here on this side.
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Soulection have announced a special 15th anniversary UK show, taking place this summer at Magazine Open–Air on the Greenwich Peninsula. Click here for more info
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Words: Jazmin Kylene
Photo Credit: Ruben Acevedo