Starting 2025 with soulful R&B vibes, Heman Lee, aka palemoon.wav, kicked off the year with “Desire” featuring Kitty N. What started as bedroom productions has evolved into a collaborative, multicultural project, bringing together artists across genres and continents to create meaningful music.
Could you walk us through your creative process for “Desire” – how did it evolve from initial concept to final release?
Desire started off with me playing around with the catch drums you hear in the chorus with the many syncopated and offbeat rhythms. In fact, I believe it started on my backup laptop that didn’t have any of my preferred sounds of VSTs. I was waiting for my main laptop to be fixed and got bored.
Kitty and I were discussing the idea of putting out a track in January and I sent the mini beat section that I had made and she was quite keen to work on it. From there, it was just a back and forth of production ideas and developing the sections of the song, creating depth and variation to make the track feel alive (the liveschool process in arrangement definitely helped haha)
You mentioned “facilitating a fusion of ideas and cultures” – how do you see this vision developing over the next year?
I find that it is amazing that we live in an age where people from all over the world can come together to make a song without even meeting one another. In fact, most of my songs on the palemoon.wav project have been made with people I’ve met online and never actually seen in person.
In 2025, there are many releases that are lined up with an even bigger cast of artists from all over, including many project with multi-nationality collaborations which are all really exciting!
Which artists or producers currently inspire your approach to collaboration and production?
In terms of production, I would say FINNEAS is one of my inspirations, especially looking at his attention to detail and the creativity in sound selection. I would also say I’m quite influenced by many Funk leaning artists like Cory Wong, Vulfpeck, Lawrence (the band), Maya Delilah. I’m also very inspired by the songwriting skills of Sarah Kinsley, Eloise, Carlos Abril.
Beyond the music, you’re building a community of artists. What’s your advice for other producers looking to foster meaningful collaborations?
I think this advice is really cliche and overused but it still holds true: Seek to build genuine connections. Creating art is a process that involves telling stories and conveying an artists life story through a creative output. It’s one of those things that really can’t be forced and can’t be faked (if you want to make genuine art).
Another thing is really just to not be afraid to reach out to people! I started doing music in my own bedroom as a mega introvert and for a period of time, was frantically just messaging artists whom I found cool and wanted to get to know better. Yes, I did get ignored and rejected a lot but I also ended up finding many amazing friends and fellow artists along the way.
“Desire” launched 2025 with a strong R&B/soul vibe. What inspired this direction, and how did the collaboration with Kitty N. come about?
I’ve always been a big fan of groovy and “vibey” music and as I developed my craft throughout 2024, I felt myself drifting in this direction naturally! This project was actually a pretty last minute one as we only decided to do it December of 2024, which left us with a little less than 2 weeks to finish a whole song from start to finish. I had met Kitty N. and collaborated with her earlier on in a track and knew she would be the perfect one to hop on this soul track with her smooth and unique vocals and she absolutely killed it!
Your palemoon.wav project has a beautiful mission of bringing artists together. What sparked this vision of creating a platform for collaboration?
From the beginning of my music production journey, I had always loved the process of collaboration and being able to create art by combining ideas from different people. I also realised that there were so many talented people out there that weren’t getting heard just because of how complex the music industry had become. I decided to start palemoon.wav to be able to both bring people of different cultures and backgrounds together but also to be able to help fellow artists be heard more by combining everyone’s reach and influence in different parts of the world!
From composition to final master, you’re handling multiple aspects of production on your releases. Which part of the production process do you find most rewarding?
I think that it definitely has to be the sessions where we build something together that I know I definitely could not have done on my own. Receiving vocal files and stems and seeing the insane talent that the amazing artists I collaborate with have to be a big part of it.
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