Karma Rhythm is an LA based 20 year old producer who has recently become well-known within the Soundcloud community. Karma provides the listener with a broad musical spectrum as his production varies between electronic, trap, and lo-fi, but he has been focusing more and more on the ‘cute and emo’ lo-fi genre. “It’s just how I feel right now in my early 20s and it is easier to say I make cute music, or emo music. I guess the whole idea was that no one was paying attention when I was just dropping a bunch of different songs so I kind off built my own lane with that cute and emo wave.” He has worked with some big names in the community such as Mark Arkinson, 9TAILS, Steezy Prime, Goosetaf, Oatmello and Oxela. Karma’s emotional lo-fi EP “fruit salad” dropped last month on his 20th birthday as a way of expressing his desire and struggle “to be a teenager forever.”
Karma’s real name is in fact “Karma Rhythem” which marks an odd and rather distressing beginning of his musical journey. “The name really works with the music though, right? I’d probably be yung or lil something if I didn’t have that name already lol.” Growing up in a split family in the San Fernando Valley, he got into music at a very young age since it was the one thing that enabled some sort of escapism for him. “I was like 6 I think when I got my first bass guitar. When I was growing up it was a lot of NOFX, Nirvana, Blink 182, My Chem. I just liked rock, mainly punk and folk rock. I guess it was because I played guitar and bass. After I started making beats at 14, I really got into hip-hop. I remember I found A$AP Mob and OF all around the same time. My dad had always played underground rap but he was into MF Doom and Rhymesayers, the real old head stuff. It was dope.”
The first song on Karma’s soundcloud page is called “i wish i was happy” featuring Steezy Prime and although it’s not the first song he made, it was at this moment when Karma started to find his niche. When asked if he is now happy, two years after the release of that song, he responded: “I don’t think I’m happy now. I’ve been dealing with issues related to my anxiety and depression since I was about 13 when my grandmother passed. I had issues before that but when I lost her it was really tragic, that’s when I first attempted suicide. She raised me so I just felt the ground slipping out from under me after that. I’m still trying to feel grounded and music helps a lot with that, with just being able to express myself. I started really getting into music a year or so after that because it was the only thing that helped.”
It was around the time Karma published “i wish i was happy” when he joined the University of California, Santa Barbara, moving there to take on environmental studies. It turned out that Mark Arkinson, a producer whom Karma admired in high school, was in fact his neighbor and the two hit it off straight away. “Mark pretty much taught me everything I know about sound design; I just sampled and used presets before I met him.” Since then, they have made quite a few glossy, glamorous and eccentric tracks together such as ‘’accents’’. On this song we can hear an actual recording of Karma’s ex-girlfriend breaking up with him, which he used as a sample.
“Each song is like an episode, like some of them are so emotional for me. The song ‘mango’ on my ‘fruit salad’’ EP and ‘accents’, that is really me getting dumped on those songs. Two separate times I was getting dumped and I took my phone out and recorded it because I knew I was going to make a song later. It’s a part of the recovery process I guess. The song nineteen, it was my birthday week and I got cheated on and dumped, a lot of my favourite tunes I made are break up tunes.”
Karma’s last song is a Juice Wrld remix and it is another chill synth-hop lo-fi track. The instrumental version of it is going to be on his new upcoming “snuggle music” EP, which serves as a follow up to fruit salad. Karma is also working with some vocalists for the new “sad chill” album, for which we might see him working with 9TAILS again.