Miami Duo Shines A Light On Black Musicians Creating Electronic Music With Debut Album
Paperwater, a Miami electronic music duo, is changing the way we hear music one sample at a time.
The group features Eddy Samy—a 2011 Kendall Campus graduate—and Daygee Kwia. Their sound incorporates genres like electronic music, hip-hop, psychedelic and R&B into their work.
On May 5, they released their first album, B.E.M., which stands for Black Electronic Music. It includes a compilation of beats and electronic music they created during quarantine.
“Black people and electronic music are really underrepresented,” Samy said. “Black people were the earlier adapters and inventors of electronic music and it’s a genre of music that has been very whitewashed since Europeans started adopting it. So we want to bring awareness that Black people make different types of music [like] indie, rock, trap or R&B.”
Kwia and Samy met during their sophomore year at Miami Sunset Senior High School, where they both played on the football team. They developed a bond over their passion for music and stayed in contact after graduating high school in 2007.
Samy enrolled in Mount Ida College in Newtown, Massachusetts, in hopes of continuing his football career. However, he fell out of love with the sport and decided to transfer to Miami Dade College to study business administration in 2009.
“I knew I was done with football when I decided to come back to Miami,” Samy said. “I didn’t want to continue playing and knew I wouldn’t make a career out of it. It turned into a job rather than something I truly loved.”
Soon, Samy started to make a name for himself as an independent hip-hop and R&B artist by working as a full-time disk-jockey and producing his own beats and mixes.
Kwia was also carving out a career in the music industry. He was a member of After The Smoke, a Tallahassee-based hip-hop band that got signed to Warner Bros Records. Kwia said he left the group after he had some issues with another member in the band, but he kept producing music.
Samy eventually pitched Kwia—who was studying architecture at Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University—the idea of forming a group and Paperwater was born.
But it wasn’t an easy venture. They faced various obstacles to make Paperwater a reality.
Samy started waking up at 6 a.m. to work on music before going to class or work, which caused his grades to slip. But he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in international relations and affairs from Florida International University in 2015.
Kwia had to constantly commute from Tallahassee to Miami to attend studio sessions every other weekend until his graduation in 2013. He earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture and construction engineering.
“It was a hard process. From getting people to work with us, printing our own CDs, printing our own flyers and passing them out to people so they could come out and see us perform,” Samy said. “…The biggest challenge wasn’t questioning whether we could do it, it was questioning whether we would be able to financially sustain a career as musicians.”
Guided by their work ethic and talent, they started to break through.
On the strength of singles—Company (2020), Zordon (2019) and Clyde (2017)—they produced before dropping their debut album, they opened for Flying Lotus, Mura Masa, SOHN and Lido, and booked slots at well-known music festivals like III Points, Middlelands in Texas and Electric Daisy Carnival Orlando. They have also performed in Berlin, Switzerland and France.
In the future, the duo hopes to publish monthly releases and produce different volumes of B.E.M.
“It took 2020 for us to realize what we are doing is a blessing,” Kwia said. “Creating music full time and knowing there’s a group of people that listens to our music is a privilege.”
Paperwater’s music is available on Spotify, Apple Music and Youtube.
