Mahawam: 'Hot Pressed'

The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.

“I want people to hear this song and have a conversation with themselves about the idea of allowing people to be mad,” Oakland-based musician Mahawam said about their song “Hot Pressed”. 

The songwriter, DJ, and community organizer says that they have been a “pretty angry person” for most of their life, but lately have been thinking about how they can trust their anger instead of being afraid of it.

“I started thinking about this during the pandemic.  I had a lot of time to think about how I felt, and I felt angry…about lots of things.” Mahawam said, “I’ve done a lot of thinking about anger, and anger tells you what you care about, anger tells you what matters to you, and it’s useful in that way,”

Mahawam describes their music as an “XY grid” with four points: hip hop, indie electronic music, indie rock, and R& B. They say they were basically a “scene kid” growing up,  attending concerts every weekend and listening to indie rock bands like Bloc Party and The National. 

Nowadays Mahawam serves on the Board of Directors for the Oakland-based non-profit Oaklash, which is gearing up for its annual festival of drag and other queer performance. Oaklash also runs a program that helps queer people gain skills in events production.

The sounds you hear in “Hot Pressed” are a collaboration with Bay Area musician Derek Barber, who played guitar on the track.

“He actually lives down the street from me. So it’s been really convenient to have him come over and we just work in my garage. He’ll plug his guitar directly into my interface and I’ll search for tones while he’s playing,” Mahawam said. “When we land on something that feels fresh and exciting, we will build a song from there.”

Mahawam finds that audiences in the Bay Area crave that sort of sound.

“They want to see you’re weird,” Mahawam said. That’s part of what they love about the Bay Area: “It encourages exploration in ways that other cities probably don’t foster.”

The song features guitar by Derek Barber and was mixed and co-produced by Akiyoshi Ehara. The song is off of Mahawam’s upcoming EP, also called Hot Pressed, out on April 19th. If you’d like to hear Mahawam live, they’ll be performing at El Rio in San Francisco on March 30th at a showcase produced by White Crate and curated by 7000Coils.