Cactus Club hosted a third Palestine Benefit on Thursday evening, partnering with local activist group Milwaukee 4 Palestine and raising money for Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA)’s Gaza Emergency Fund. Ve9us, Dak DuBois, MIZZY and Delicious Monsters all performed, showing their solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

Ve9us incorporates elements of hyperpop and hip hop into her style. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Ve9us became interested in making music from her father, as she explains. “He was always producing beats and playing them quite loudly in the house, so it was always a part of my life. He was also a DJ in the 80s so I always looked up to him in that aspect. I wanted to get into it myself around the time I turned 18, so I started making beats on GarageBand and then realized I wanted to start recording songs.”

She cites The Internet, Odd Future, Noname, King Krule, ABRA and FKA Twigs as some of her biggest influences. Ve9us explains her artist name, “I felt connected to the goddess Venus and the image of her and her influence of feminine roles in history. My sun sign of Taurus is also connected to the planet of Venus. I study numerology, and the number nine is correlated to creation and evolution, so I feel that represents a time I was going through a lot of healing and changing.”

Ve9us’ debut EP “Lilith” dropped last month. Describing what she wanted to do with her first full project, Ve9us shares, “It’s a compilation of things I made in the past six months of that time. I wanted to have a body of work that was like a snapshot of me at different places of my writing evolution. Lilith is like a deity – or goddess – and she represents transformation, and that’s what the EP kind of represents too.”

Currently, Ve9us is working on recording and producing more on her own. She is performing at Cactus Club again in February, date to be announced soon.

MIZZY consists of vocalist/guitarist Sea Bass, vocalist/bassist Joe Nsubuga, guitarist Skip Lago and drummer Emilio De La Rosa. Their style could be described as shoegaze with elements of punk and grunge. The band’s original guitarist coined the name “MIZZY”, which was originally just a working title for the project.

Everything started for MIZZY in 2021, as Nsubuga explains. “Me and Sea Bass have a mutual friend who I reached out to about starting an all-POC band, and he put me in contact with Sea Bass and we just went from there. Our friend Danny played guitar for the first year or so but then decided he didn’t want to be in the band, so it was just me and Sea Bass for a while writing and recording music on our own.”

Lago and De La Rosa joined MIZZY this past fall. The band is sonically influenced by modern shoegaze acts like Fleshwater and Narrow Head as well as punk bands like Dystopia and Discharge, doom metal band Electric Wizard and local acts like Harvey Waters and Kingmaker. Nsubugu cites Black Liberation activist Kwame Ture as a storytelling inspiration, and Bass indicates Chilean artist-activist Victor Jara as one of his.

MIZZY’s debut single “Heist” dropped last April. Nsubuga shares the story behind the powerfully stormy track, “I mostly wrote it by myself and then brought it to the band. The idea behind it was how we spent most of our lives working to make someone else richer but we’re not reaping most of the benefits of our labor, so it’s kind of like a “heist” on us. In the song I talk about being a kid just skateboarding around without any real responsibilities, but then you lose track of time and the next thing you know, you’re in your mid 20’s spending all your time at work and you and all your coworkers look dead inside. I wrote the song kind of in relation to my own life.”

Bass adds, “Once Joe brought it to me, we made the song into kind of a cathartic fastball with the hook. It almost becomes like an 80’s punk song with the ballad at the end.”

Then they dropped the two-song EP “Time of Death” in July. Nsubugu continues, “I wrote “Glass” also by myself before bringing it to the band. That one is about how the United States government will go across the world terrorizing other people and ruin the economies and infrastructures of other countries…and then feed this idea to people that they can come immigrate to the United States and have a better life, but then they come here and it’s kind of the same thing where they’re not treated with dignity or respect. The reality isn’t even hidden from us; the people above us have no fear that we have the ability to do anything about it. We’re behind “glass” and seeing it all happen right in front of us – but nowadays, people are becoming more politically conscious and aware of the way things work, and it’s getting to a point where the “glass” can be broken. “Missing” was the first song that Sea Bass and I fully wrote together.”

Bass jumps in about “Missing”, “It’s a slower, spacey song that tells the story of a parent who has to sacrifice a lot to make sure that their kid is good, so they miss out on watching the kid grow, which is one of the most beautiful and important things you can possibly do as a human being. The song is about the pain and suffering that comes with that. It’s an experience that’s not okay but lots of people have it.”

MIZZY’s most recent release, “Isolation Crisis: Swell With Pride It’s All You Have Left”, is also a two-piece EP. Bass begins with description of the project itself, “It’s about the displacement of Indigenous people around the world from white imperialist capitalism. Those forces come to these countries and wreck the shit out of their economies, they by force or through money manipulate their political systems – and people become displaced and exploited. “A Fire Burns” is about the sorrow and pain; there’s anger and grief in it but there’s also lots of beauty and hope with these stories.”

Nsubugu shares about “I’m Returning to the Mountains”, “That song is more about a specific character who originally lived in a rural setting, but because of industrialization and capitalism they were forced to relocate into the city – an environment that doesn’t want them to be there. This person feels isolated living there so they ultimately decide they want to leave the city, so they try to go back to where they used to live but there’s nothing left for them there at that point. Then the character passes away because they’re not able to live off of the land how they were traditionally able to.”

MIZZY are currently focused on playing more shows and continuing to write and record more material. They play Company Brewing on January 25th, High Dive on January 28th and February 2nd, X-Ray Arcade on February 18th, Lilliput Records on March 9th, and then both HeapFest and Bremen Cafe on 4/20.