Meet Chicago’s Secret Teenage Producer: Mir Mir

Please introduce yourself:

My name’s Emir. (Mir Mir)

How did you get started?

I started off helping small artists on soundcloud make songs that I met through a genre people seem to call hyperpop or bedroom rap. I one day came across a song I liked randomly on youtube and it had a different feel for me than others so I fell down a wormhole of songs made by artists who pretty much noone knew. I was able to come in contact with them and produce many songs that we thought were mostly for a vast audience until one of them blew up on tiktok. It felt amazing because one of the songs I made became a tiktok sound over quarantine with hundreds of thousands of videos uploaded to it. I liked the feeling of noone knowing I helped make it. It felt like a secret noone knew about me and I knew noone would believe me if I said the artist who’s song has been showing up all over their feed was someone I made that exact song with.

What are you currently working on?

I have been releasing a lot of songs since last year starting high school again. I quitely have been releasing songs for the reason being I like the thought of it being sort of private but also a way that people I knew were able to know it’s me that made these songs. It’s like a diary where I just said the stuff I was thinking and gave it an odd sound to the ear.

I don’t believe in loud promotion or pity streamers. I don’t ever want to beg people to listen to my music or try and convince them I’m gonna be big some day. I don’t care where I go with it, it’s just something that keeps me invested when I’m at home.

I have a Tiktok page with 40 thousand followers that I made when I was 15 after coming across a funny video on my for you page about the country I’m from. Living in Chicago, I never really met people from my country, and when I saw there was a whole community of them on Tiktok I felt like I just had to take part. My first video got 50 thousand views and then my second I uploaded shortly after hit 300,000. Within a day I hit 1,000 followers. My parents did not like that at all, they’re more of a privacy type family and didn’t feel comfortable with that form of exposure of myself on the internet so I stopped. Over a year later it was my sophomore year of high school and I just felt like I needed to connect with people online in some way. Quarantining got the best of me so I made a new page where I uploaded videos I found to be funny and after a while got 400,000 followers. I didn’t like the form of content I used to post and I wanted to focus on music, so I deleted the whole account and focused on one thing: how to get better garageband.

What's next for you?

I now feel I have a small circle in a big way where I know whatever I post gets the amount of exposure I like and am comfortable with. I continue trying to make weirdly humorous videos with my friends about Albanian culture and I continue to make a song almost every day. The amount of stuff I make and just end up trashing is jarring, but everything I post that is heard to the ear is made solely by me, from often the beats to the vocals, production, and even cover art. It’s something I feel proud about and plan on doing for a long time along with whatever path life takes me through during and after school.

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