Three writhing Second Life women with balloon-sized chests get down on a beach. From 2011 this continued, anonymous duo 18+ leaking their skeletal, hyper-sexualised hip-hop to the web through a regular series of YouTube videos. Sickly smooth collages of virtual fantasy, from dream homes to dream bodies, each as disturbingly flawless as the next.
As the videos and views toppled seamlessly into praise for mixtapes ‘MIXTA2E’ and ‘MIXTAP3’, the pair were forced to come to terms with their popularity, revealing their identities as LA-based Chicago Art Institute graduates Samia Mirza and Justin Swinburne and admitting that a file-sharing art-experiment had now morphed into a music project driven by the way we live our lives online.
“Doing this thing we’d never done before, sound stuff, music, whatever, we were surprised when things turned out well,” says Justin. “Our first two videos ‘Drawl’ and ‘Forgiven’ informed the next two years of what we were doing. From them we extrapolated the idea of the avatar, of superficial sexuality, of our intimate voices displaced into this purely digital situation and how all that relates to pop music.”
Sex abounds. Sleazy beat steps slide under intimate and explicit accounts of human contact delivered by them both. What’s unusual is the scrutiny placed on this relationship. As debut album ‘Trust’ swaggers through the half-light, Mirza and Swinburne refuse to settle, toying with sexual dominance as it shifts from one to the other.
“The two of us have really learned a way to play with the tensions between our roles as male and female,” Samia confirms. “It feels good to me as a female to be able to represent a role that addresses sex without overtly being a sexualised object. In some of my other lyrics I play the role of a ‘quintessential’ male; more forward, cocky and direct. It’s character investigation. I don’t ever think the way we represent sex is explicitly sexy; we’re not trying to seduce. I’m not saying you need to think like this. It’s open-ended and conversational. We’re playing up to roles we still see in music today.”
Words: Kim Hillyard
WHAT: Sparse beats, skin-on-skin tales
WHERE: Los Angeles
GET 3 SONGS: ‘Drawl’, ‘Crow’, ‘Midnight Lucy’
FACT: A truly digital partnership, 18+ have never recorded a song in the same studio.
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