Save the date: January 17, 11 PM — Kyle Hall at Honeycomb Hi-Fi. A Detroit-born music producer and DJ, he began making music at age 11 and has since become one of the most distinctive voices in modern electronic music. Rooted in Detroit’s musical history yet never bound by it, his sound bridges house and techno with jazz, funk, soul, and hip-hop, drawing naturally from a deep family lineage in jazz and gospel. With releases on Hyperdub, Apron, and his own imprints Wild Oats and Forget The Clock, Kyle Hall approaches electronic music not as a genre or formula, but as a living creative outlet shaped by feeling, rhythm, and time.

Right before his performance at Honeycomb Hi-Fi, we sat down with Kyle to talk about how it all started, hear the story behind Zug Island, explore the difference between the two labels he created, and discuss his approach to live performance. And of course, we couldn’t help but ask about the boat on the cover of his debut album — finally finding out where it came from.

— Kyle, so you have been into music for more than 20 years now, and you started at the age of… 11? That is crazy!

— Yeah, I was in middle school when I first started getting my equipment and learning how to DJ. Shout out to Raybone Jones, who taught me how to play vinyl.

And back then, nobody was really into electronic music. It would have seemed kind of weird for a young Black person in Detroit to be making something that wasn’t rap or hip-hop, or even to be interested in it. For a long time, it felt like I was pretty much the only person under 18 trying to make electronic music in the world — not just in Detroit.

— I am curious about how everything has changed since then. What kind of sound did you start with back then, and how has it evolved over time? How did that early environment and those first influences lead you to where you are now? I mean, it is a timeline of more than 20 years.

— I probably started by just getting records and going to local record shops. There was a famous one called Record Time. Another spot I spent a lot of time at was Vibes New and Rare Music, which was owned by Rick Wilhite. I was constantly collecting records and practising.

At the time, the DMC scene was really big. This was the early internet video era, when you could catch glimpses of people DJing and doing other things. That was probably my first real introduction to DJing: watching it, then learning how to beatmatch.

I was really into the West Coast beat scene (like Flying Lotus and Mr Dibiase), so I was immersed in experimental electronic music, house music, and underground hip-hop. We also had exposure through cable TV channels that played independent music late at night. A lot of this music suddenly became very accessible.

Having early access to both new and old technology made a huge difference: cheap mixers, Casio keyboards, cassette tapes, and secondhand gear. Everything was more affordable and easy to pick up.

All of that came together and created the perfect moment to work independently and do my own thing. You didn’t need as much as you did in earlier years. It just felt like the right time.

And, by the way, I don’t really feel like my taste has changed much since I was a kid, and that is interesting to think about. And it is also interesting because of the time period we are living in now. There is this idea of exponential growth in this era. It is not like the past, where there was a clear difference between 1960 and 1970, or 1970 and 1980.

— Sometimes we create things — whether it is music, artwork, or anything else — during specific periods of our lives. I am wondering if there is a track or a piece you made during a particular time that you still remember clearly, something that still stands out for you.

— Yeah, definitely. One example is a collaboration I did with my friend Kero — Zug Island. That was an early period for me, in my early adulthood, around 18 or 19. I started going to Canada a lot because the border is right there in Windsor, just across from downtown Detroit.

That is where I got introduced to Kero. He had been making electronic music for a long time, more on the IDM, glitchy electronic side. He is kind of an OG, very left-field, kind of weird in the best way, always on the cutting edge of technology.

We became friends, and I would go over there to collaborate. It was really peaceful to get out of the States and be somewhere so close, yet different. For the first time, it felt like creating freely from a different mindset. It was also just dope to make electronic music live with someone, to jam on machines in real time and build ideas together.

And Zug Island itself played a big role in the inspiration. It is this wild industrial island that sits between Detroit and Canada, full of metallic sounds, smoke, and fire shooting out of it. I didn’t even know it existed at first. That whole environment fed into the lore of the music we were creating.

That period probably plays a big role in who I am now.

— Now you have two labels: Wild Oats and Forget the Clock. What is the difference between them, and why did you choose to have two separate names?

— They come from very different time periods of my life. The first one, Wild Oats, started in 2008 when I was still in high school. I decided to release my own music because, at the time, the way things worked was frustrating. You would license tracks to labels and then just wait without knowing when anything would come out. I had tracks I gave away when I was 14 or 15 that were still unreleased years later.

I knew it didn’t actually take that long to put music out, but there was all this stuff around power and leverage — people wanting to drop their own records first, delaying everything else. I got tired of that and decided to start my own thing. So in 2008, while I was still in high school and making music with friends, I released my first record. It was just my own tracks.

The second Wild Oats release came from a group I put together called Bsmnt City Anymle Kontrol. It was me, Dorian Fiddler, Edward Mathews, a famous keyboard player, plus a couple of my friends. We recorded live drums in my basement, I played keys, and we built everything from there.

At that point, everything I was doing came from passion. Even when I was making house music, I was already approaching it experimentally. I was into J Dilla, jazz, John Cage, and the idea of letting music create itself rather than forcing it into a structure. I was listening to people like Timothy Leary and thinking in a more psychedelic, philosophical way, even before I really understood what that meant.

The name Wild Oats came from the idea of "sowing seeds". It was about planting ideas in different places, putting music out into the world, and being young. We were the seeds, initiating something new. The label was a way for me to release my own music and support my friends at the same time.

Over time, though, I started to feel a split between what I was doing for the community and what I needed for myself artistically. As I got older, I thought more about time and how fluid it really is. Being able to turn off my phone, not being beholden to anyone, not having kids — those things allow me to step into my own space, forget the clock, and create freely. That is how Forget the Clock label was born. I just needed something that could feed my own artistic drive.

— Your first album, Boat Party, was released 13 years ago. I would love to ask you about the cover: what is that boat, and where did you find it?

— We have the Detroit River, which sits between downtown Detroit and Canada. A lot of people in the city have owned boats for recreation, just to relax and get away.

But Detroit also has a lot of urban decay and a culture of discarding things that have been used up. That is part of living in the U.S. — it is very consumption-driven. Unlike in places like Europe, where people tend to maintain or repair older things, here, a lot of objects just get thrown away.

You would see boats that people had dumped in empty fields or abandoned areas. When I saw one of those, I thought it would make a great album cover. It really fit the time period, especially with the trend that was happening then, around European boat parties — dance music events on luxury boats.

The image captured a dissonance between where the music comes from and how it is celebrated in spaces of luxury and access. It became a form of social commentary — almost like saying, take this.

— Your second album is From Joy. As I understand it, the album was named after the street your father used to live on, Joy Rd. I believe that wasn’t just a coincidence?

— Yeah, definitely. A lot of that music was actually created when I was still in high school, even though it came out much later. The music on From Joy is older than Boat Party, even though it was released afterwards. All of it was created over a long period of time, in a place of innocence, when you have fewer things to worry about, and the way you create reflects that.

I was still pretty young when it finally came out. From Joy was released in 2016, so I was about 25 then. By that point, I had more technical skills and facility to really put things together, but the spirit of the music felt like a return to teenage youthfulness in a way.

Those tracks were made on Joy Road, and even the artwork reflects that feeling. My friend James, a really great painter, did the cover as an oil painting.

We wanted to create this existential concept visually — the suit representing Western society, and the head detaching and floating away. It is about navigating the West while still maintaining your mental and spiritual autonomy. That was the visual dialogue with the music.

— You also mentioned once that audiences often come to your music with certain expectations before really listening. What kind of expectations were those?

— People tend to project a lot onto what you do based on where you are from — especially if you are from Detroit. They often map what past artists have done onto you.

And if you look a certain way, or fit a certain image physically, that projection gets even stronger. If I were a white guy, people might have assumed I was going to make Richie Hawtin–type tracks back then. But because I am Black, younger, from Detroit, and a bit left-field, they immediately bring up Carl Craig, Moodymann, and everyone else.

People racially and culturally group others and form expectations based on that. We are conditioned to do that globally. But I have always existed a little outside of those boxes. I have always been more focused on ideas, on philosophy, thinking about what I do rather than approaching it in a linear way.

And as a Black person in America, you become very aware of how much race shapes perception in everyday life. With electronic music, especially, it is an escape from all of that. But for me, it is a creative outlet. It is how I express myself through life.

— Recently, you talked about how performing live for the first time really impressed you, and that time seemed to move differently. Could you take me back to that first live performance?

— My first actual live set was at the New Tech Festival in August 2025. Preparing music on your own is very different from performing it live. When you take the same material you have been practising at home and present it to an audience, the way you approach it changes.

Time stretches differently in a live setting. You let things marinate longer because you are responding to the feeling of the room. It becomes more personal, more of a conversation between what is happening on stage and what is happening in the audience. Moments can be extended or drawn out in ways you wouldn’t think to do when you are practising alone.

When you are at home, you are the only spectator, so certain things might feel monotonous or boring. But live, you are considering the music through someone else’s experience: their mood, the environment, whether they are standing, drinking, surrounded by sound in a dark room. You start playing into the space, and the space starts shaping your perception of time and your state of mind.

On stage, I was creating different combinations from the material I had prepared, working with around sixteen sequences and recombining them in new ways. Every time felt different, even compared to my practice sessions. I kept discovering new ways to connect the elements, inspired by the moment itself.

— You have been involved in music for more than two decades, but your first live performance only happened last year. Why did it take so long?

— With dance music and DJing, especially, a lot of it is about weaving together a fabric from material that already exists. When you are not playing live, you have much more control over the sound. DJing is easier in that sense, but it also takes a lot of preparation, listening, and knowledge.

I may have had access to similar tools and equipment early on, but I didn’t yet have the technical facility or experience to apply them to a live performance that lasts over an hour. Live electronic performance is still relatively uncommon compared to DJing because it requires a deeper understanding not just of the machines, but of crowd dynamics, gain staging, and how sound translates in a room. A lot of that knowledge comes directly from DJing.

DJing is a great foundation because you are working with finished material — tracks that are already mixed and mastered. You can consistently measure how they hit, how people respond energetically, and refine your instincts over time. That experience shapes your understanding of what works.

Live electronic performance is more complicated. It is different from playing an instrument you have practised for years. Even now, with laptops and Ableton, it is still challenging to create a convincing live set. And that wasn’t even what I was doing.

I was working with two sequencers from around the year 2000 and MPC 1000s with very limited memory — 128 megabytes of RAM. That means you can only load a small amount of material at once. So the question becomes: how do you get the most out of that limitation? How do you decide which elements actually make people move? What is convincing?

Most people wouldn’t even try to build a live set under those constraints. But those compromises also open up possibilities. There are things you can do with those machines that you can’t do with modern setups.

Even today, people are still figuring out how to perform live convincingly with new tools. There isn’t really a handbook — especially not for doing it the way I was. And beyond composition, there is the output stage. Live material isn’t mastered like pre-recorded tracks. You are working with raw components and trying to translate them in real time into something that works in a club environment.

— You have a gig at Honeycomb Hi-Fi on January 17. What is the plan?

— I bring records with me, and I know I am going to play some of them, but how they get played depends entirely on how I am sensing the environment. All the music I bring is music I enjoy, but that doesn’t mean I know exactly how it will be used.

It is kind of like a hand of cards. You choose cards based on their attributes and how they work together. That is how DJs operate in electronic music when they buy vinyl. The records aren’t all the same, but they communicate with each other. Your ear shapes the aesthetic and the collection's overall language.

I bring what aligns with where my ear is at in that moment. It is usually house music, deep and soulful — that part is predictable. But which specific tracks get played, and how they are played, you never really know.