Introducing the electro-pop world of Makaw and her new single, This Is Our City

As you'll discover below, Makaw is a Sydney-based artist dabbling in the electro-pop world, and her latest single This Is Our City has captured our attention immensely. Replete with a just-released feel good new video clip, we flicked her a few questions to find out some more about the project, and what's on the horizon.

Tell us about about yourself?

I am a songwriter from Sydney and Makaw is a collaborative project that I built with producers Mikah Freeman, Ross McGrath and Chris Moro. It started by chance when I did some toplining work with Mikah and we hit it off musically straight away. Without planning it we started sharing musical ideas and before we knew it we had this catalogue of songs. The thing that I love the most about Makaw is that it’s like a little family. This extends to the art that is all done by Ruby Scanlon and the videos that are all directed by Lincoln Hall.

What kinda music are we talking?

At the moment I feel like the sound world of Makaw is changing. It started somewhere between the sound worlds of Lykki Li, Portishead, and Feist, but this track is definitely a bit of a different sound. The cool thing is I am not really sure where it will go next. I am leaving that open to the creative process to decide.

Production/writing process:

It changes for each song. I feel like our writing process is pretty fluid and flexible. I am a songwriter who plays the piano so often ideas start acoustically for me, but for the others in the group it’s definitely beats and track first. So it really depends on who has the initial idea and we just go from there.

Can you tell us about your new single, This Is Our City and its video clip?

This is our city started from a vocal idea that I wrote at the piano and then recorded into logic. I then sent it to the guys in Canberra and they got together and came up with the main beat that now underlies the song. Then over time we just worked and worked on it until we brought Jordan Burns in to mix the track.

Once the track was mastered I sent it to Lincoln who created all the previous Makaw videos and he bought together this amazing group of people in particular our cameraman Simon Koloadin and the featured female Maria Karmaniolos. It was shot over three nights in Sydney and the party you see three quarters of the way through the video was so fun. It was a room full of 15 actors who largely hadn’t met and it ended up being super rowdy with lots of pizza and dancing. It’s moments like that when everyone’s having an great time while creating art together that reinforce why I love being an artist.

What’s the rest of the year have in store?

For Makaw definitely more releases. We are sitting on some tracks that I really want to get out into the world. I am also hoping to go deep into some more toplining. I love working with producers so I am looking to do more of this over the next year.

Where can we hear more of your music?

You can find this is our city everywhere through this FANLINK, you can also keep up to date with everything on my FACEBOOK.