biig piig
Biig Piig’s latest single ‘FUN’ is an exhilarating drum and bass backed story of how intimacy brings out the good and the bad in a relationship. Much like her nomadic life her music shifts around timelines and places, utilising different genres to shape the feeling of each track.
Flying across the world to Australia for the first time to perform at Splendour In The Grass and capital city solo sideshows doesn’t seem to phase her at all. Amongst the big outfits and big energy there is a really switched on artist taking in the current state of the world and feeding it back into her art.
On discussing how context shapes art Biig Piig says with her recent work she wants to get back to the feeling of cathartic rage, dancing until 5am, and feeling free in a world that is fast becoming not. She recognises that her solo career might not have been born without the safe space of her collective Nine8, and how important different stories are in shaping music that reflects the diversity of the world.
How is the sudden reanimation of life post pandemic connecting into how you're feeling and what you're doing?
It plays a part in everything to be honest. Like, with coming back to life, a lot of the tracks that I find myself making now are influenced by wanting to recapture the feeling of being in a room and sweating your tits off and just being immersed in that. In the shows I did last year, as well as like these ones. I love my intimate songs as well, the sounds are softer and slower and they really have a place in my heart, but I just feel this real need to capture the energy of we haven't been able to do for so long. Like just rage.
Recently, we've been looking at a really big resurgence of politicizing people's bodies. Women, trans and non-binary people especially. You've been living in LA for a year now, with the recent overturning of the Roe v. Wade abortion rights law, what was the general feeling of people around you?
I was actually in London during that, but even listening to what was going on over there it's just fucking scary. It feels like a medieval time. I feel like when things start to pass like that you wonder “what's next? How much is it going to snowball?”. I remember when I moved to LA, I don't know how it came up but I was talking to someone and I was wearing a shear top. I had someone notice and talk to me about it and be like, “oh yeah, you know, that's illegal to do that here”. I was like “What?!” and apparently there was a law and the way they put it, even the way they've written it makes me feel sick. It was like a person's girlfriend ‘making her breasts known’ in a bar wasn’t ok. It was so hard to find it the quote of it, but I did and I read it and I was like, this can't be real. I feel like things are really backwards.
Well at least “making her breasts known in a bar” is a great phrase. Is any of it starting to make you feel at all like you have to tone down or negate sexuality in your personal style at all?
Oh no it really pushes me the opposite way. It just makes me want to fucking… the rage is real. It just makes you want to take ownership of it and be like, you know what, there's no chance that you're going to take this away from me and weaponise it against me. That's not happening.
In the music industry, especially in the last few years, we've had a really strong movement of calling out there sort of sexually aggressive backwards behaviour and toxic bullying dynamics. What's your experience been like in regards to being a young woman whose music career is growing so fast? Have you noticed a change?
I feel like it has felt a bit like a fever dream the whole way through. I feel like I've been lucky to work with people that I love, and be in a safe environment throughout. I think that's probably a big part of being in a collective as well, that if anything does feel weird we’ll talk to each other and be like, “is this a weird situation has happened?”. I haven't had many of those experiences, just like one or two. It's like any industry I guess, where it's like, as a woman you sometimes have to prove yourself a little bit more than you do as a man in some situations. In saying that I work with loads of really great men as well.
“the rage is real. It just makes you want to take ownership of it and be like, you know what, there's no chance that you're going to take this away from me and weaponise it against me. That's not happening.”
What is the Nine8 collective for you? It seems like you guys are a group of really good friends as well as collaborators, like a chosen family. Is that a great support for you?
It’s everything. Especially Ava (Lava La Rue). I don’t feel like I would be able to do anything without them, without that support network. They really mean a lot. Everything from creatively to just having each other's backs we are exactly like a chosen family. It's kind of how we started too. I feel like with a lot of music collectives the way it starts out is when you're younger, things are going on at home and it becomes like a safe space. You can go and you can just be vulnerable through music and create that home outside of home.
Does it make your music a lot more vulnerable because it came from that safe space?
I used to be so much more shy on stage. It used to feel like I was reading a diary out in front of a bunch of people I don't know. But the more I've done live shows recently, the more I'm actually taking the enjoyment of and it doesn't always have to be painful. Every time you relive that experience through singing about it, it brings it back up. It doesn't always have to be sore the same way that it was when you wrote it. I think especially when you see it light up someone else and you see the fact that pain has brought you together, it’s kind of mad, and then you just have to feel and take that spin on it when you play as well. It becomes more of an hour where the world stops and you can just enjoy yourself rather than an hour where you’re like “please don’t look at me”.
Does the diversity of people and talent in Nine8 have a role in changing audience's minds about who to listen to or how to make music?
I haven’t really thought of it like that, we do it because it feels good, and it feels fun, and we do our own projects as well. Sometimes it can be a bit more experimental with the stuff that we do together compared to what we're doing individually, because that's super focused, our individual stuff. The representation in our collective is sick as well. So I feel like it's cool that there's more than one person, more than one story.
Your Twitter the other day, you said, “meditation will change your life” How are you dealing with the chaos of everything?
I think meditation has been a massive thing. Also, I’m trying to not go hard anymore. Give it a little break. Because everything's so fast moving and things are just a bit unfathomable, like what's going on with the world? I think sometimes it can be a lot to digest. I don't know. I've been talking to someone about this for ages; what is it that makes me feel like I'm not going to lose my mind? I can't be doing studio 12pm to 12am every single day in my life, but to be fair, I love it. I’ve got to find other ways to cope with things and to work things out. Meditation has been a huge one where you can just be and not have to be something for someone else. You don’t have to be something that someone can judge or something that someone can take ownership of. Just be a person and chill out. That’s really helped a lot.
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