What’s your stage name and where are you from?
Jay Kasai, From San Bernardino, CA aka The Inland Empire
What’s the story behind your stage name?
Kasai is a japanese name for fire
Describe your musical journey in three sentences.
What started as music with friends transitioned into Kasai wearing many hats in order facilitate the group. Now equipped with years of experience in production and visuals, he’s honed in on his solo career in music.
Share an interesting experience you had while creating your latest track.
My latest track only 9 was an amazing experience that included bringing together several different influential personalities from the IE to perform, design clothes, provide locales, film the video and simply support. It doesn’t happen often outside peoples immediate friend circles.
What message do you want to convey through your music?
I want to inspire people to create their own worlds when they’re being creative and take time to dig into into my own. I put a lot of effort into making sure the closer you look the more you’ll find.
Tell us about a challenge you faced during production and how you overcame it.
It can be difficult adding too many moving parts to any machine. The more ambitious the collaboration the harder it is to make everything align and meet a quality standard. Most of my releases had much bigger ideas and we settle for something as close as we can get to the original big idea.
If you could collaborate with any artist, who would it be and why?
If I could work with any one it would be Serj from System of a Down for vocals, Phonte for my rapper choice and I’m pretty satisfied with my friends doing the production. Ohgoshleotus and Nabeyin.
Where do you see your music taking you in the next year?
I’m unsure but I’m releasing everything from the past 5 years in 2025 so i’m excited for an outcome.
What’s the next big step for you as an artist?
I’m going to prioritize visual work and creating my ideas that require a larger team for the projects. Things like Films, Soundtracks and Events that are immersive.
Where can we hear/watch your most recent work?
youtube.com/jaykasaitv and jaykasai.bandcamp.com are where EVERY single release will get uploaded at the minimum.
