The Magic of BOOMscat
If Asha is right, the cosmos were responsible for it all. The cosmos introduced her to patience and Patience, and led her to break her leg and stay in her bed for two months. They were responsible for the timely ‘don’t give up’ texts from fans, and they shaped her queer black female identity. If Asha is right, it was a mix of chance and the cosmos that created BOOMscat, the R&B duo building in and out of their D.C. roots.
All of this became clear in June of 2011. Asha Santee finished school at Howard University in 2008, graduating as MVP of the women’s basketball team. And despite her audio production degree, she saw herself playing basketball professionally. That’s when the cosmos happened. Asha broke her leg training to play in a professional league in Europe, leaving her bedridden for two months. It was in these months that a hobby became a career.
“All I could do while I was in bed was play on my piano and make beats. And then a few months after that I kind of reflected on the music that I did. I was listening to it and I was like ‘Oh snap, this is some of my best work.’ And I did it lying on my back, so I was like ‘Okay I hear you, God.’”
So she dove in. Now almost five years later, Asha and Jennifer Patience Rowe, the other half of BOOMscat, are prepping to release their first full album Kinetic on January 6th.
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She’s been running on E for so long that she thinks she’s empty.
She’s been running on E for so long that she thinks she’s empty.
But she’s full of life
Full of life, full of grace, full of joy.
She’s so full of life, full of grace, full of joy.
“Runningone” by BOOMscat
And the cosmos part of this story is not yet finished. Asha was laid off from her job in admissions at Howard just months prior to her basketball career ending injury, yet another painful sign from a higher power.
“I was like okay, so it’s either apply for another real job or bust my ass doing this,” Asha says, motioning to the sound equipment behind her.
In some ways, Asha fills the archetypal starving artist role perfectly: a woman doing what she loves despite the lack of money. And in some ways, she doesn’t: she is merely a result of a string of beautiful faithful wrongs in her life.
As of now, she’s sitting in a computer chair tucked in the basement of a home, tucked in the back lot of a townhouse complex, tucked in a suburb 20 minutes away and across the bridge from Washington D.C. This is Asha’s bedroom and workspace.
It was the unconventional career path that led her here, to a close friend’s basement, which has been made into a makeshift apartment. After the job loss, Asha skipped from temporary living space to temporary living space. On a budget strung by welfare checks, Asha’s former apartment lost its right to lights and water, forcing her to sleep on different friend’s couches. Eventually Asha found the right couch and the right friend willing to let her move in. An aunt in California funded her first year of rent, and now Asha makes it herself. A music royalties check hangs from the ceiling, an acknowledgement of the role of money in her life, a creative life.
“If you do it right, you get one of those,” she laughs when she acknowledges the check. A check from Sounds good enough that they could pay rent.
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Kinetic is the third full project, but technical first album, from Asha and Patience. The two met in 2012 at a local D.C. venue. Asha (“the boom” aka the beat maker of BOOMscat) was asked to play the drums behind a poetry set from Patience (“the scat” aka the vocals of BOOMscat.)
“It was like ‘this is Patience. Patience, this is a drummer. Figure it out,’” Asha says mimicking the deep bark that had presumably been the voice of a promoter or manager. Now at the pair’s listening party, it’s fairly clear the two figured it out.
After the initial cosmos-led meeting, the two started to have jam sessions, and the their fortune became more crystal.
“Folks haven’t really been able to sing over my stuff. It’s really cinematic, spacey, ambient. Folks mostly just wanna listen to it. So nobody’s been able to figure out, like okay how would I sing to this, especially when I try to pitch it to other folks. It was just like natural for her. So I was like maybe this should be something,” Asha says. Patience nods and goes on.
“I really love her production work. She mixes a lot of different genres. We both love cartoons a lot (she laughs). It’s just very cartooney and fun. And that’s just what I felt when it started playing, so I just had fun and enjoyed myself. Usually when I start singing over her production it’s me just making noises and sounds and scatting. And then words come later. ”
By the end of the year that they met, they had decided to commit to making music, going by the full name of The Peace & Body Roll Duo BOOMscat. (The name is exactly what it sounds like, two nouns to describe what the girls are about: making peace and making people move.) And now the two are presenting their third album at a listening party at Songbyrd Café in D.C.
As complex as the duo it was hosting, the venue is a mix between a coffee store and a record shop. Half of the walls are brick, half of the walls are covered in floral wallpaper. There is a bar, but there are also diner-style booths and sit down restaurant tables. It is a deliberate chaos. And it pulls diverse patrons. There is a lawyer at the bar, a table of post-college bros at a lower table, and a middle-aged couple sharing a booth. In some ways, this weird conglomerate seems like the exact type of people who would be listening to BOOMscat, even if they weren’t attending the separate listening party downstairs.
The whole thing gave a type of intentionally offbeat feeling that you would expect from girls making the only neo-soul mixed with scat spacey-beat cartoon-inspired music in D.C.
And down the stairs, behind a curtained off section, is that aforementioned separate listening party, a historically awkward concept of an artist presenting their work to journalists, friends, family, and “tastemakers” (whatever that means) prior to the album’s actual release. If you’re Kanye West, this happens on a Monday night at a closed club with bottle service in New York City. If you’re BOOMscat, it’s Saturday morning at 11 with an open buffet and bar in one of the few neighborhoods in Northeast D.C. clutching to music culture.
The two girls face the audience, a crowd composed of about twenty or so people, paired off into twos and threes at small tables. And the girls weren’t technically performing. Listening party just means that the the two sit while their album plays on a speaker, facing their audience as if they were performing, but simply just nodding their heads along with everyone else. But even if there were no stage, it seems clear they were who to pay attention to. They knew when to nod, how to nod. Their voices pick up and join in smoothly on certain notes. Asha leans down and hits the drum occasionally thoughtfully, timely. The two were in sync, authentic, and natural.
Asha is donning her routine androgynous get up: a yellow and brown patterned hair wrap with her prominent dark puff of hair coming out of the top, thick rimmed glasses, a black blazer, a black graphic t-shirt, black slacks, and black sneakers. Patience is a contrast. She stands in a hot pink dress, draped with a floral cardigan. Her hair is separated into two high buns on either side of her head.
Patience is giggly when she spells the word “Kinetic” incorrectly, making the first official verbal announcement of the new album a technical misquote. I took the giggles as a slight nervousness. Patience is about to play in full an album about sex and relaxation and understanding in realionships. On No Life Jacket, the 2014 EP that landed as #18 on the R&B ITunes charts, she crooned over Asha’s beat:
You can take it all because I want you.
Baby I don’t wanna talk. Touch you in your favorite spot.
I can make it good for you
Because I’m good for it.
“Private Show” by BOOMscat
And here she was letting all of her closest friends and family members and not so close journalists and “tastemakers” in on her secrets, at 11a.m. while they ate their free buffet food. The giggles felt warranted.
Off stage Patience is Sweet and Soft-spoken. Thoughtful and Honest. On stage she is Sweet and Sexy. Thoughtful and Sultry.
However Patience’s spirit has taken a hit as of late. Patience’s mother has been battling cancer, her diagnosis coming after the album’s listening party, leaving her absent, or rescheduling a lot of the subsequent practice sessions.
“I don’t know how to approach that situation with any mindset other than sensitivity. It’s not like ‘when can you be at the studio?’ It’s like ‘I’m here. What can I do to help,’” Asha says.
Asha is confident enough in the upcoming release of the neo-soul mixed with scat spacey-beat cartoon-inspired music on their upcoming album. And how could she not be? Asha was an expert in cosmo-led tragedies. And BOOMscat was the only group making those types of Sounds anyway.
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And to think a majority of those Sounds were created in the basement of a friend’s house. Asha’s living space is as loud and passionate as the music.
In an Alice-Wonderland style ode to her penchant for a good creative venture, every surface inch of the basement is covered with something. Coming down the stairs there’s a photo of her and Patience that has been stretched and printed onto a canvas, its corners touching the frames of the neighboring pieces. And this is the only actual photograph in a sea of paintings and prints and handwritten letters adorning the walls, piling up in stacks in corners of the room, and crawling up the sides of the room onto the ceiling space. Asha painted, or created, every piece of art in this space, aside from three. (One a gift, the other simply a beloved print, and lastly that aforementioned photo of her and Patience.) There’s a reoccurring muted Brady Bunch-esque color scheme: reds and yellows and blues and browns and greens and the occasional purple. As for content, there’s a lot of Keith Haring style geometry and maze work.
But the room’s most conspicuous motif is the female body. The distinct mirrored s-curves of a woman’s arc are marked in thick brush strokes on every wall, and more than once on every wall. And it it’s not just the curves that are reoccurring. In almost every depiction, there was something covering the private areas of the female form. On one, it was an envelope with a “send back” stamp on it. On another, there was a plastic red broken heart, still connected by a red cord, but with one half on the heart and with one half covering the woman’s genitals.
It was the sort of outwardly sexual thoughtful art you may expect from a woman making what one fan described on Twitter as “lesbian baby-making music.” Yet Asha remains reluctant in fully embracing herself as a queer icon, or just a queer icon.
“Yes, we’re female, yes we’re queer. We have our lane, but if I think about it too much it would drive me crazy,” she said. “I want people who don’t see it as a super huge thing or I want people who will celebrate it more than question us and point it out. I’d rather hang out with those people because that’s gonna keep me sane.”
Her own room is nestled at the bottom of the stairs, but it seems as though she spends more time in the multi-purpose room at the other end of the connecting corridor. It’s here that she’s giving a drum lesson to a two-year-old, who has as much focus as a two-year-old receiving a drum lesson. Asha patiently breaks down each part of the drum kit to him: the snare, the high hat, the bass, and the cajon.
“Can you spell this one?” Asha leaned in closer.
“C-a-j-o-n-e,” the boy spoke each word slowly. There was no way he truly was grasping what he was saying, but at some surface level, the retention was impressive.
And while he may not understand it yet, what he was spelling was on of the three factors of “the essence of Boomscat.” 1) Cajon. 2) Keys. 3) Voice.
As the boy’s patience fills to maximum capacity, she lifts him up like a toy in one of those claw machines, and displaces him to the top of the cajon, which is a rectangular box that’s used like a drum. The little boy sits on top of it, and reaches down between his legs, which only fill about 1/3rd of the instrument’s height. He taps on it intermittently. It makes some sounds, but it’s not until Asha reaches over and starts to play that the instrument’s function really makes sense.
“You can hit it a little harder, buddy. You got to it hit it a little harder actually,” Asha laughs. The two-year-old’s dexterity can’t keep up, and it’s hard to imagine many adults who would be able to play the cajon in a way similar to Asha.
The way she moves her wrist seems almost unnatural. It rotates between bent back and bent sideways, all while hitting alternate target spots on the wood, each landing creating a different vibrating sound. Asha has begun to make a beat with her hands. And not just the core of a beat, but something that could be laid underneath vocals without added pings or loops or horns. Asha has the same job as a Metro Boomin or a Timbaland or a Dr. Dre. But she was using a rectangular wooden box in the basement of her friend’s house in Maryland.
It’s hard to put her ability into context without realizing that there aren’t really any artists to compare her to right now. But that seems to be exactly what BOOmscat would want: their own lane.
“As a group I see us selling out large, but intimate shows. I feel like our vibe is a large theater type sell out, more so than it is a Madison Square Garden. If it happens, that’d be super dope. But it’s more about the vibe and the comfort. Winning awards, Grammys, being on award shows, travelling, helping communities, uplifting girls and women, queer and not.”
Expanding, while staying in their niche. Growing out of being homegrown. Queer black female icons, who are not just define by being queer black or female. However they do it and wherever they end up isn’t up to them anyway.
“I’ll just see where the galaxy takes this.”
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