In the mid 2000s, music duo The Bumblebeez—comprising siblings Christopher Colonna and Pia Colonna (AKA Queen ViLa)—catapulted themselves onto Australian charts with the track “Dr Love,” part of an explosive, hypnotic and jittering trip-hop catalog. Since then, Colonna, a producer and multi-instrumentalist, has collaborated with everyone from Beyoncé to Devon Lee Carlson and Troye Sivan (by way of Sivan’s fragrance line, Tsu Lange Yor). Lately, he’s been working a lot with the artist Byron Spencer, and likens their shared creative energy to “a turbo butterfly.”
Colonna first began producing music as a student at Pratt, where he’d craft immersive sound installations. In conversation, he makes frequent analogies between the act of making music and visual art—sampling and Dadaism, to him, are cosmic twins. The former is “a form of sonic, ready-made art, repurposing existing sounds to challenge convention.”