This past November, we caught up with Miyuki, the “The Doctor DJ,” who left her career in science to pursue her lifelong passion of music. This was clearly the right choice, as there we sat, shortly after her premier Dreamstate performance; one she’d swiftly follow up with her second Dreamstate installment in San Francisco on December 30th.
We talked about how she built a dedicated fan base through her weekly DJ live streams on Twitch, attracting 600-1000 viewers per week and ranking her in the top 0.1% of most-watched channels on the platform. Of her fans, she says,
“ I just have fun with them, I care about them as people, and I just think of them as friends, it’s my community. ”
But what led her to streaming? She explains that once she started producing in 2018, “I knew that in order to get my music out there, I need to perform, I need to get in front of people, and that’s why I just started streaming. I never expected to end up liking it so much!” Miyuki is known for playing the flute on her live streams, but we learned that she’s been playing instruments since she was four years old, starting with keyboard, she then went onto flute in middle school band, and then Chinese guzheng and Chinese bamboo flute. She would love to eventually “bring her flute to live performances.”
Once she decided to take her musical background into in her producing endeavor, she had an idea with “chillstep/melodic dubstep, but then found the trance stage at EDC in 2018 and said ‘nope this is it!’” Her love of multiple genres influences not only the music she makes, but the way she curates her sets as well. She will play anything from “techno, house, trance, dubstep, trap, hardstyle, hardcore…I find something in every genre that I love, and I want to make a variety of things.” She also hinted at a new song she has coming out this month, Heartless, that she describes as “melodic trap with hardstyle.”
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The conversation of her music production led us to discussing the importance of investing in yourself as a producer. She prefers to find
“ people whose music I like, and I ask them if they do mentoring…sometimes they are good producers but not necessarily good mentors so you have to kind of try different people…I think it’s important to learn from different mentors, and not just stick with one, because there are different things you can learn from everyone and you can take away different things and incorporate into your own style. ”
With her rising career as an artist, we were curious to know how she stays grounded. She “reminds herself that she’s a normal person, cooks dinner everyday, and that’s very grounding.” She also goes to the gym, where she “lifts three times a week, and does kickboxing and sometimes a HIIT class as well.” She feels like “working towards long-term fitness goals is the same kind of spirit that drives me to continuously try to get better and get into the studio every day.”
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Her biggest accomplishment has been working through a perfectionist mindset, to which she provided great insight and advice.
“ The hardest aspect of doing music for me has been a battle against my own inner critic. Getting into the studio is so hard…my mind goes ‘this sucks, you suck!’ ”
Her advice to battle against that negative headspace is a gradual shift from ‘having to make something perfect, to just make A thing.” She elaborates “it’s really hard to talk myself out of the perfectionism, but it’s an ongoing internal negotiation. Now it’s at a point where I can go ‘hey I know you want this to be perfect, but let me create, put less restrictions on it and less pressure on me and let me make a thing, and when I have the freedom to do that, it actually turns out better.”
We always like to find out some fun and interesting facts during interviews, and Miyuki definitely gave that to us! We discovered that her dream collabs would be Haliene, Plumb, and Paul Denton. Her last meal would be Spicy Hot Pot, or Chili Oil Boiled fish since she loves Chinese food, but she would also pick Kimchi stew since she loves Korean food. And of course, she’d have to end with dessert, so she made sure to add that she’d finish off with lava cake and ice cream! Her favorite color is pink, and if she was an animal she surprisingly said she would be a rat! When not listening to EDM, she loves “video game music…like Final Fantasy, where it’s orchestral.”
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For our last question, we asked her what she was most grateful for in this moment. This final question caused her to pause, and the fact that she just played Dreamstate sunk in. She expressed that she was
“ grateful for everyone and everything that has come together to make this happen. ”
We can’t wait to see what things 2024 has in store for Miyuki!
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