Inspired by Memphis rap, hardcore and heavy bass, the California native talks production techniques, DIY promo and developing a unique sound.
Welcome to Sound Advice, the weekly interview series spotlighting artists’ creative process and their SoundCloud journey. We’ll get the inside knowledge straight from the source on how musicians, producers and creatives are leaning into the many facets of Next Pro to reach their audience and grow their careers.
Crafting a distinctive sound comes from looking within, identifying your unique strengths and leaning into what feels authentic to you, according to Jacob Kavet a.k.a. BOSTN. The San Carlos, California native cut his teeth playing in hardcore and emo bands as a teen before attending audio engineering school with the intention of being a recording engineer. Kavet ultimately discovered he preferred recording himself, and his focus shifted towards making instrumental hip-hop and phonk, a Memphis rap-inspired microgenre that was seeping out of Russia in the early 2010s. In 2019, the harder corners of the bass music scene started capturing his attention, and Kavet leaned into developing the BOSTN sound – a unique mix of distorted textures, mangled hardcore vocals, heavy dubstep-style bass and experimental drum programming all tinged with the purple echoes of acts like Three 6 Mafia and Lil Ugly Mane. BOSTN has captivated crowds with hybrid live sets at Emissions, Burning Man and Lightning In A Bottle festival, as well as supporting artists like Bleep Bloop, Kursa, Nitepunk and JAWNS, to name a few. Ahead of the release of his debut album ‘NSFW’ on the independent label Dome of Doom Records, we spoke with Kavet about his production techniques, using SoundCloud and building community with fellow artists and fans.
How have you grown creatively in the process of making your debut album?
I didn’t intend on writing a full length. I was trying to put together another EP when Wylie [Cable] at Dome of Doom said, ‘You should write a full-length, because that’s how you actually get your career started. Releasing EPs and singles is great but if you really want to be looked at as an artist, you should put out a full-length record and then do another one.’ I started trying really hard to make more songs that would be cohesive with the few that I had already completed. Somewhere along the way, I had this epiphany that it doesn’t have to be this huge, cohesive, storytelling piece of art – I can showcase a lot of my different influences and interests and talents by expressing different genres on one record. The second half of the album is hardcore songs where I played and recorded all of the instrumentals myself in the style of a full band. There’s a little production [on them], but primarily just guitar, drums, bass, vocals.
I also make chill ambient music that has nothing to do with this project, but whenever I’m making aggressive or extreme music, it’s all tied together by the same spirit. I feel like the bass music, the songs that are infused with scream-rapping and the hardcore songs all live happily together under the same roof. Some listeners who know me as a bass music artist might not care for some of the stuff on there, but I don’t really mind that. I’d rather zoom out, and over the course of time, feel like I was able to express many different things and not be pigeonholed.
With promoting ‘NSFW,’ what has been helpful in terms of rolling out singles on SoundCloud or sharing teasers?
I think it’s important to make videos and you definitely have to be [active] on social media. You don’t have to sit in front of your computer and sing and dance if that’s not your style. There are plenty of ways to be creative and make a short piece of content that showcases an exciting part of a song – or maybe leaves out the exciting part and builds up the anticipation. Now that I have a full-length record coming out, I’m really prepared and have been in my apartment making tons of videos. It’s going to be the biggest social media push I’ve ever done so I’m curious to see how that pans out.
One thing that’s cool about SoundCloud is you can upload a 15-second clip of your song and put a link to it on socials. If you already have a fan base, a lot of those people are going to like that and want to check that out. Other than that, just get creative. If you have a few friends or other artists that you’re close with, band together. Make a clique out of it, not an exclusive one, but make a little group of you and your other artist homies where everyone builds each other up and supports each other. People like to see that too; people like to see people having fun with their friends and building community in that way. I know a lot of artists that have launched their own careers through collaborations with their other artist friends – not even necessarily from making songs with them, but from having this group mentality.
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From a production standpoint, your songs have layers and layers of manipulated audio and vocals. Can you elaborate on how you achieve your sound? What are some of your favorite plug-ins or go-to effects?
I’ve been in Logic since 2010 and I pretty much use stock Logic stuff. There’s a distortion plug-in called Phat FX that’s really cool; it’s got a bit-crusher in there, a band-pass filter, really crazy distortion and drive stuff. I’ll use [iZotope] Trash 2 for some distortion as well. Distortion is mostly what I lean into for everything. Aside from that, it’s all pretty standard reverb, compression, EQ; all normal, native Logic stuff. I do like to record what I’m doing with this program called Audio Hijack where you can record audio from any source that you route. That allows me to experiment with audio inside of Logic and record what I’m doing, then skim and cut pieces out of it and mangle that further. I like to mess with audio a lot, so I do a lot of recording and re-sampling. As far as vocals, it’s a pretty standard vocal chain with EQ, compression, a little bit of reverb, a little bit of distortion. I try to limit my tools. It’s nice to have some restraints so that I don’t get lost in the infinite possibilities. To that point, we should all be learning new things and finding new ways to do cool things, but I have a small set of tools I use for everything and that works for me.
For sourcing sounds, I’ll do all my synthesis in Serum. When I’m looking for samples, I’ll browse on Splice or YouTube or freesound.org and I’ll also go outside and field record. I like to use factory sounds or industrial machines. I try to source real-world sounds that aren’t necessarily supposed to be used in music, and then find a way to make them sound cooler. With frequency shifters or other tools, you can make a squeaky door hinge into some evil sound. I also run a lot of sound through virtual guitar amp simulators now, which always yields really cool results. You could sample a bit of jazz from somewhere, chop it up as someone making a hip-hop beat would, and when you run it through an amp-sim, it’ll sound like this crazy, evil, guitar thing. You would never recognize the original input audio source. I try to think outside of the box regarding where I’m getting sounds from and what I’m doing with them. I find it’s more fun to try to challenge myself to use weirder sounds.
When you first started making beats, you mentioned some of your earliest SoundCloud uploads got thousands of plays. Was there anything you did back then to get the word out?
Back then, that was the era of Instagram where people were using it to upload a photo of their food with tons of filters on it, so it was not really used as a promotional tool or a branding tool. I wasn’t promoting the music at all, and that’s what shocked me about uploading to SoundCloud. It felt as though it just had organic reach, and if you put a song up there, people would find it and share it with other people. It was a really strong community with really active usership where people were engaging with things they found, and sharing and reposting. There weren’t any repost chains back then or a gatekeeper mentality. It seemed like everyone was just stoked on spreading music around – which is still true, but at the time, I couldn’t even imagine that 4,000 people were listening to a song I made in my room.
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How are you using SoundCloud now as an artist? What features do you lean into the most?
One of the biggest things for me is the organization of it and being able to have things uploaded privately and categorized in different ways. It’ll be like, these are all the beats I need to record vocals for in 2024; or this is a playlist of tracks for an EP I’m working on, let me finish these. Being able to precisely organize things and have them tucked away on SoundCloud for me to access on my phone from anywhere, whether they are released or not, is really helpful. I’ve also been able to collaborate with other artists from SoundCloud just based on a message that I sent to them straight from the SoundCloud dashboard. With all of the new features, you can really get into the nitty gritty of who’s listening to your song and how many times they’re listening to it. If you can clearly see someone has your music on repeat, you should message them and be like, ‘Yo, thank you for enjoying my music.’ You can send them something unreleased or just engage with people who like your music. That’s a really great way to strengthen the connection with your fans.
Learn more about who is listening to your music using the Fans tool.
Who are some of the people that you’ve met or collaborated with through SoundCloud?
One of my favorite producers is JESTIC, who’s also from California. He makes super loud trap music. I sent him a DM on SoundCloud, and I was like, ‘Yo, I want to play this song at a show. Can you send it to me or can I buy it? Is there a download somewhere?’ Since then, we’ve kept in touch. He messaged me one day and was like, ‘Yo, your vocals are hard. Do you want to do a verse on this beat?’ And now, we’re working on stuff and recently finished a song together. That’s happened multiple times. Not every collaboration sees the light of day, but I’ve definitely gotten to meet people and collaborate with them just through SoundCloud.
How to get the most out of the DM feature on SoundCloud.
What is some advice you have for people that are just starting out on SoundCloud, or are just beginning their artist career?
Don’t wait forever to put out music. Give yourself a little bit of time to develop your skill set and develop your sound. Look inside yourself and try to find what your unique or natural born talents are, and lean into that. Also, try to have fun with it and don’t get too caught up in comparing yourself to others. It takes a really long time. People look at other artists and think that they blew up off one thing and that it happened in a day or a week, but [in reality], that person had usually been making music for five to 10 years prior to that moment. Be patient with yourself and keep doing your thing. Don’t let other people tell you too much, because it’s your art.
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