Camilla Cantu doesn’t like to be put in a box, and her strong vision for her music prompted her to learn how to do it all. She can DJ; produce; play guitar, bass, piano, and vihuela; and sing and write songs in several genres and a mix of Spanish and English. She describes her music simply as “soulful Latin.”
Cantu’s array of talents earned the 23-year-old Southwest Detroit musician a headlining spot in this year’s SW Fest, which will take place on Aug. 19.
Her musical journey started off early; Cantu remembers first writing a song after a break-up in the eighth grade. But she didn’t get seriously into her music career until the COVID-19 pandemic, when she saw a burst of creative energy during the time of isolation.
“I just fell into a really deep depression, not creating, not gigging or doing anything, so I just kind of started going to the studio and making my own music,” Cantu says.
For her, music is a way to conceptualize emotions and show others that they are not alone.
“We have the challenge ourselves of recognizing our own emotion and then how to alchemize that into whatever art form we want,” Cantu says. “With me, it definitely is very releasing. Usually, a lot of the stuff that I write about is emotions that are just weighing so heavily on me that it’s just like, ‘I have to get this out.’ Where that relates with people, I think, is to remind people to be human.”
“If you listen to Kehlani and then want to text your ex after, that’s OK,” she adds.
Cantu’s main musical inspiration growing up was Selena. She says H.E.R. is the only artist of today she really looks up to.
“I think she follows a trajectory that I would want to be on, which is just kind of like standing her ground in the musical aspect and showing to the world that she’s a musician before anything,” Cantu says. “She’s gonna rock out, she’s gonna play the double bass, but also her being very direct and her being very expressive with her art — so doing stuff like poetry during her performances or anti-America language. I really, really, really love that.”
While she didn’t initially plan on becoming so multifaceted, Cantu’s frustration with not being able to produce her music exactly the way she wanted led her to embrace multiple roles.
During her last year at the University of Michigan, where Cantu studied biopsychology cognition and neuroscience, she decided to take a music production class.
“I’m just a workaholic,” she laughs. “I like it because it all connects at the end of the day. You make the music, you release the music, then you play the music as a DJ. It’s just this, like, streamlined process that I really enjoy.”
Cantu has now been a producer for two years and a DJ for less than one. Looking forward, she hopes to create an affordable studio space that is safe for women and nonbinary people.
“Guy engineers and producers are mad weird ... I just think that there’s a lot of bullshit that women artists, women singers, songwriters, have to deal with, and I would definitely love to just open a space where they know they're safe,” Cantu says. “I’m hoping to turn my upstairs studio into that studio, where it would be kind of a donation base, and you can ask for me to engineer and then I will charge a small fee, or you can record yourself and then and you could literally pay $5 for the studio time if that's what you have.”
Partially inspired by these struggles, Cantu (whose DJ name is Teauxswanx) and her friend Imani Nichele (whose DJ name is maniduhmixer) created a DJ duo together under the name 22xSoulful.
“We were talking about the challenges that we face in the music industry as women,” Cantu says. “She faces a completely different set of challenges being a Black woman in the hip-hop industry, and then I’m facing these challenges of being a Latina woman in the producing scene, so we were like, ‘We should just create it like a duo.’”
Many artists enjoy expressing their identity through their artistry, and while that’s also true of Cantu, she doesn’t let it define her.
“I just make good music,” she says. “I feel like at the beginning of my journey, I was just super disappointed and just super like, ‘Well, they should be booking me because I’m a woman and because we need these spaces to be filled with more women.’ But I think the relationship that I’m getting to my identities and my art now is kind of like it really doesn't matter.”
In the past six months, Cantu has been playing shows with her band Slut Club Tonight, which consists of all men. Her bandmates really respect her, she says, and respect that she makes good music, identities aside.
At SW Fest, Cantu will be playing a set of original music with Slut Club Tonight, and says that anyone who is at the performance can “expect a show.” The festival takes place at Detroit’s Senate Theatre from 2 -11 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 19.
The Southwest Detroit area is more than half Hispanic and home to many Latin artists. With a free all-day event, SW Fest aims to promote local talent in an accessible way for the community.
When the festival debuted in 2021, Cantu was on the planning committee and saw how tedious the planning can be. Now that the festival is in its third year, she is headlining and proud to be a part of it.
“Nobody else will give Detroit artists the festival time they deserve, so SW Fest is literally born out of a desire to promote Southwest artists and Detroit artists but at the same time doing it in a way that values morality and that doesn't try to drain community income and community resources,” Cantu says.
Cantu feels that SW Fest is curated with a lot of thought and intention, and she hopes to demonstrate to the audience that she makes her music the same way.
“I just really want to show people that I’ve been putting a lot of time and work into the craft, and by the craft, it’s not just the producing or the DJing or the artistry, but everything as a whole,” Cantu says. “I think the cherry on top of being an artist is just being a good performer.”
Cantu says her next big goal is to produce more music of her own. For now, two singles by Camilla Cantu are currently available on all streaming platforms.
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