Welcome to the first ever EDM Sauce emerging artist of the month write up. Today we are bringing you an extremely talented and fresh sounding producer/DJ out of New York City. He's currently supported by Skrillex, Diplo, DJ Snake, Laidback Luke, and Bingo Players just to name a few. He's basically a man on fire. My artist of the month is Kevin Schuppel, also known as his stage name, ‘KANDY'.
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After months of pushing out quality productions and gaining support from blue chip acts, KANDY has just come off the heels of his first ULTRA performance, an accomplishment and milestone as a seemingly former up-and-comer no less than 6 months ago. I had the luck of sitting down with this now extremely sought after talent for an interview about how his life has changed in the last few months.
The best place to start is with KANDY's recent E.P. The fire album that shot him into the spotlight.
“Well it all started when I tweeted to my fans, ‘Who wants an E.P. from me', because I had so much music backed up, and everyone show insane support and all of a sudden Laidback Luke tweeted at me telling me to release it on his label. So immediately, I started to reach out to other artists that I knew wanted to collaborate with me like Candyland, and she was super excited about it. It's crazy because I met her at EDC as a fan before I was producer and I sent her a picture of that meet up after the collaboration. You just never know where you're going to be a couple years down the road. And the song ‘Weapons', my manager hooked me up with Example from the U.K., and his vocals fit perfectly with the record; It was a great collaboration because Example is HUGE in the U.K.”
Listen to KANDY on SPOTIFY and BEATPORT
Moving forward and asking KANDY about how his Ultra performance came to fruition, he made sure to give credit to his management team, Matt Medney, Mattie Evans, & Bella Atkins and all those at After Dark Management.
“Ultra was insane for me. I go there as a fan every year, so going from the crowd to the stage was insane for me. Going from producing and getting flung out onto the stage at Ultra was a crazy experience. I was nervous but it went over so well. The stage actually was so over capacitated they had to rope it off so nobody else could get in. The feedback from the people was crazy, people were screaming my name, reaching up and high fiving me, I was like, what is going on? It was crazy. It was all new to me ya know? I just feel it all coming together finally after 5 years of hard work. I have a passionate team around me and that's important.”
Photo Cred: Dash Grey
After learning about what it's like to take over Ultra stages as an up-and-coming artist, KANDY wanted to let everyone know he has a ton of material coming up this Summer.
“I have tracks coming up with TITUS on April 5th & April 29th which is huge for me. TITUS is an amazing artist and it's a dream to work with him. I also have another track coming up on Artist Intelligence Agency. Specifically though I have a track called ‘Non-Stop', which is a dubstep track which is awesome for me because that is my favorite genre of music, yet I don't get to make it much. That comes out on thrive which is Sony's dance music sub-genre label.”
And with that, we leave you with our artist of the month, KANDY. Be sure to check back each month to see our featured break through artist and a deeper insight into what keeps them motivated, hungry, and driven to heights they reach every week!
kandyPhoto Cred: Voodoo Bownz
