.png)
MIMIXOMI — the collaborative project of Madison Benton and Omar Jemili — is unlike anythng else in Santa Cruz's underground electronic scene. The duo's music is born out of the queer rave spaces they inhabit and help sustain through their own parties and events. MIMIXOMI reworks the sonic language of archetypal club music into ironic, unsettling, and disorientingly uncanny futuristic concrète and cut-up rhythms. Their practice centers a commentary on the hedonism and contradictions of club culture, approaching it with equal parts affection, critique, chaos, and indifference.
We caught up with Madison and Omar, Indexical's 2025 Artists-in-Residence, ahead of their culminating commission, MXO, an audiovisual performance premiering on Saturday, November 22 at Indexical. Their latest release Dolce, was recently featured in Bandcamp's roundup of standout electronic music.
The two of you come from a rave background. How are you approaching your upcoming performance at Indexical, an experimental space?
Omar: I feel like our art has always lived in experimental music. Even the stuff that we DJ can come off as ‘questionable’ to some audiences. So this is kind of our pride and joy – making experimental performance.
Madison: We're also primarily producers. We do DJ, but it's not our main passion. I kind of just stopped DJing and focused on producing. I've been producing for way longer.
Oh really?
M: Yeah, seven years. DJing for like two.
O: I started producing and DJing at the same time, but I definitely enjoy producing way more.
Is there a different objective between your DJing versus production work?
M: Yeah, way more experimental with production. When DJing, people are trying to have fun and dance, but when I’m producing I'm just gonna make something I want to make. It doesn't have to be a dance song.
O: I definitely learned from the first time I ever DJed that I cannot play exactly what I want all the time because people will just end up confused. I enjoy having a space like this to be as weird as I want with my music.
M: Same. Yeah.
Both your DJ sets and productions play with a tension between the dancefloor and disruption. Is there a guiding philosophy to your sound?
M: We're influenced by ballroom music and dance genres. Dance music in general has gotten extremely experimental in certain scenes in the past decade -– a lot of these producers inspire us a lot. It's almost like: we're DJing dance music, and then after we're done DJing we go and create something extremely warped out from what's familiar to us.
When you’re DJing, do you feel like you have to play to the crowd?
M: We’ve created a crowd that we like to play to. We like fun. It's not experimental stuff 24/7.
O: Our approach to ‘deconstructed club’ is definitely not as heady, I guess.
M: Yeah, like – we go to raves, we go to clubs, we throw events. We’re still part of the degeneracy we comment on. We try to be in that space and listen to, like, normal fun music.
How do visuals (eg. lights, video, and design) play into your artistic vision for this performance?
M: I did the visuals. I was really inspired by Newgrounds animation. Extremely outsider and rudimentary.
O: Like DeviantArt.
M: Yeah, like DeviantArt of the 2010s. Something where a 12- or 13-year-old drew it with their new Wacom tablet. I love how that looks. It can look extremely uncanny with the type of shading people use. It can look really scary and nostalgic and simple – like the Newgrounds animation or Flipnote. We’ve definitely tried to make stuff that's scary and weird and gory and unnerving.
O: I made a few drawings. They're kind of like picture-book drawings of different spaces of the story we created, and they're inspired by that same DeviantArt…
M: …like a young adolescent…
O: …yeah, like outsider art.
Can you talk about the fusing of seemingly disparate aesthetics – dark, bleak, and dystopian, but also kawaii or cute.
O: Our experiences are definitely shaped by having this ebb and flow between finding cuteness in dystopian-feeling situations. So it just feels like second nature to put that into our art – having that contrast.
How do the two of you break up your work and process?
O: For this, Maddi has been doing a lot of visuals. I'm producing probably like 50 percent of the production stuff.
M: We kind of just hang out and make a beat, and usually it's really bad, but sometimes it's good.
(all laughing)
Lastly, do you think your work and creativity relate to the world at large? Are there political or social implications behind your work?
O: I would say it does, but it's not created necessarily for social or political reasons. I definitely think a lot of the aesthetics we use–
M: –could be construed as commentary on society, but that's just part of the over-the-topness of our visual aesthetic. People will probably watch it and be like, “Oh, this is a reflection of our society,” but I just want people to project their own meaning onto it.
So, you’re less interested in social critique?
M: I mean — in our day-to-day lives when we DJ, it does play a real role in the community. Especially for queer college kids who don’t always feel like they belong. We try to create that space. So yeah, the work functions socially, but the aesthetic itself… it uses the language of political or societal commentary, without making that the actual purpose. The purpose is nothing — and people can project whatever onto it.