About Us

MUKMUK FOR MASCOT is an electronic/vocal duo project that mixes musical influence from jungle, UK garage, techno and hyperpop with the improvisational aspects of jazz into a live performance setting. Our project is to record a 10-track debut album to be released on CD’s and digital streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) Most of the songs for this album have already been written, produced, and performed to some degree, but being able to rent studio time to record and master the tracks is something we are seeking financial assistance for, along with other costs outlined in our budget.

Our intended audiences/communities are people of neurodiverse, disabled, genderdiverse, and diasporic experiences who feel excitement towards the radical act of saying what they mean in true/hard words, and finding a way to speak honestly with love and kindness in our hearts. To quote Mia Mingus (a writer with all the aforementioned identities and a major influence to our project), “in a cruel and oppressive world, the work of love is never done.” MUKMUK FOR MASCOT is a project committed to the work of emboldening each other to speak, so we can make each other’s lives more possible– so we can not just survive, but indeed thrive in this life.

Our art captures and articulates the strange, in-between complexities of queer/trans culture in simple words and melodies. For example, the chorus of our song ‘O Alpenglow’, “don’t tell me your name, I won’t tell you mine, we’ll keep it a secret tucked away for life” is a simple invitation into the simultaneous wonder and secrecy around having a transgender identity. Another one of our songs ‘Lullaby for Nour’ follows the story of our friend Nourabelle, a trans woman who loves to do roleplay and write fan-fiction online, and who currently has to hide her identity in-person as she is being mandated to do military service in the UAE.

Many of our songs are about the real lived experience of being raised in online communities, which is an important experience to acknowledge and nurture in a cultural socialization that often considers the opposite of online to be “in real life (IRL)”, implying that experiences in online communities are somehow less (or not) real. Several of our songs are about the emotions, life lessons and people of the NES Tetris community, which carries a profound history of fostering deep gratitude and sportsmanship among young queer Asians through sharing the experience of a game about navigating and organizing the random, inherently neutral occurrences of the universe that we may interpret as “good” or “bad” at a given time, depending on how able we are to handle and accommodate for such events.

We cannot ever avoid the occurrences we consider to be “bad”. To avoid painful experiences means to avoid truly living, to avoid being immersed in the moment of now. The Noble Truth in Buddhism of “pain is inevitable, suffering is a choice” is another central theme of our songs like ‘Say More Words’ and ‘2020’, which holds important intersections to the experiences of physically disabled people. In our violent political landscape, we must not obscure pain, disaster and death. When we truly meet disaster and truly meet death, only then can we truly live and be immersed in the ocean of unspeakable gratitude toward the people who have made our lives possible at this time. Across all our communities and displacements, we must honour each other not in opposition to, but in harmony and solidarity with the reality of death and pain.

We hope that through the wider distribution of our music, we can begin to reach a wider audience than just our local community of East Vancouver – to start creating connections across the globe we did not imagine to be previously possible. We hope when this happens, our music will encourage people to act on the ongoing, casual everyday responsibility that we share of liberating one another to speak our personal languages, to lovingly take accountability for our actions, and to say more communicative words to each other, all facilitated through the recording and distribution of our album project.