Welcome to the DKTM Series. The DKTM Collective, short for “DON’T. KILL. THE. MOVEMENT.”, is a collective of artists, producers, and overall creatives that have come together in order to pursue their artistic endeavors. They have bolstered an impressive fanbase within the DMV area and are reaching for even further heights with every project they release.

Every episode, we will focus on one of the collective’s artists, until we reach the end of the roster.

Below, we get into our fifth member, Mouse.

Enjoy 😈

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So Mouse, I saw that you recently graduated Towson University. If you could have chosen any song to walk into that arena to, what song would you have chosen to enter as a graduate into?

Probably like "I'm God" by Lil B.

Oh, wow. Do you feel like that would be a powerful thing to walk into?

Yeah, make me feel like I'm bigger than all of y'all niggas forreal.

Have you ever found it hard for you to express yourself? Or are you naturally an open book?

I feel like for the most part I kind of feel it’s hard for me to express myself and have my expression come back like and be accurate, or like produce a true understanding.

Like that's honestly what I channel into a lot of my music and really why I started making music. It doesn't have to always be literal. So, you know, you could always make a metaphor is something that expresses it in a way. Okay.

So what do you hope your guys’ work contributes to the community either musically or just the community around you?

As we get bigger and have bigger ideas, it just inspires more people to kind of follow suit and do their own thing for real.

So it's like a ripple effect kind of?

Exactly, for sure.

Because there's a lot of similarity in the industry today. So to see people just kind of branch off into their own thing is pretty cool. That's also really why I got into underground shit, particularly from here, because it's like damn.

I really don't even listen to like a lot of mainstream stuff anymore.

Do you have a musical guilty pleasure? Like a Miley Cyrus or a Justin Bieber or someone like that, or do you specificially hate someone that's like really popular?

Nah, like I feel like guilty pleasures for me. It's just kind of like I like what I like.

I bump whatever I’m feeling at the time forreal and I'll be like this shit cranks. I was like bumpin like AFI and shit this morning, yeah, whatever I'm into at the moment is what I'm into.

If there was a lesson you could teach her younger self. What would it be?

I would probably say something like “You don't fail until you stop trying” because it's like I feel as though I learned from my family a lot of impactful lessons that were taught when I was too young to comprehend it and now talking to them again it’s like “Ah, I see.”

I don’t know, it's like if I could meet my younger self, I feel like the one person that'd be able to get through to that stubborn ass nigga is myself from the future.

I read this book about the value of science a few years ago and I'd probably like that drop that off to him as well, not even say anything, just "Read this." you know?

So, I will ask you this. You just recently graduated from Towson. Was it hard? Have you been making music for a while or did you just really get into it since graduating?

I've been making music for like 12 years, like I played in a punk band called Null Void. They, like me, and also like a bunch of people in the house right nowstarted when we were in high school and like we started doing shit live and really came into our sound.

Started touring a little bit, but we were young and we fucking lost our name, so that really like put a splinter in shit, but it's like that's what I've been doing like for the longest, and then DKTM kind of happened like as we all became separate from that, like when our separate ways.

So just like now we can do all this stuff independently and then bring it together like this.

So how did you find your way into DKTM?

So I was one of the original members.

Like I said like when I went to college and like I couldn't practice with them every week and Pope would be like working and like Aghori would also be in a different school and our drummer would just be working as well.

We all just like naturally got into producing because it's like the way to express ourselves when we couldn't, like, link up, and then when we would link up we would then bring that energy back into producing as a group, but at that time it was like this is probably going to be a little bit long.

One of the original members, Lucy Mourn, he got me into like producing forreal, like he gave me like a controller that he wasn't using and I started producing off of that and like 2014-ish.

He then introduced us to Eric, or Lex, and like we all just started linking, like 95 as well. It was just us five. We would, like, send each other little ciphers through text message, and then it's like when niggas finally started getting their own places like away from their parents, that's when shit really started taking off. We would link up and record shit and like it just went up.

Odd question here, but are you a person of the universe, like someone that believes in Universe? Or are you more like a religious person?

Definitely not a religious person.

What do you believe in?

I kind of just believe in like energy in cycles as concepts.

It's like when it comes to life and death, I kind of feel like if you look at anything on Earth, it happens in a cycle. Like a year is just a cycle of four seasons, a cycle 12 months, so it is constantly running in circles.

So it's like, if everything here is running in circles, then like why wouldn't death also be a cycle?

I feel like when people die, the energy doesn't really leave per se, whether that be like it comes back as like a cat or like another person or even an ideology, like where it's like somebody rubbed up on somebody so much that that energy just kept transferring onward.

So did you find it hard while you were studying to balance music or was it like “This is what I really want to do at the end of the day, so I'm gonna make time for it.”?

Um it's definitely hard.

Like I'm an impulsive person so it's like I'll study for a little bit and be like "Alright that's enough of that." But no it's definitely hard and I commend people who do it while they're studying because that shit is truly a challenge.

But yeah, no, I was not easy.

So to kind of ish like grapple questions number one. Is there anything in the future either solo or with the collective that we should be looking out for?

I'm working on something.

I'm working on something, but put the word, something in "bold" and "italics".

Actually, just in "italics" haha.

So the last question for you, Mouse, DKTM stands for Don't Kill The Movement. So, okay. What is the movement to you? What is it that you are trying to preserve?

When I look at it? I just think again about the transfer of energy, and how it can't be killed.

Going back to like an earlier question about what we hope to do, it's like even after we're gone, regardless of what happens I feel like we've already kind of made like an impact and that that energy will just keep going through people right with influence.

I like that. It's like, you know, in whatever you do, you're going to leave a mark on something. Like every word you speak is going to have an impact, is going to echo to something. Whether or not it's like the biggest, thing ever, it's going to make a mark at some point in life.

Definitely.

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If you enjoyed this interview and want to stay up to date with Mouse you can find his SoundCloud above, and you can also follow him on Instagram. While you there you can also check out DKTM on Instagram and check out our previous interviews with Baat Choy, Morgan Marsh, Pope Loud, and 95.

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