By.SESSIONS with HeartWerk

by Ely Cocklin

February 14, 2025

Elyjah Monks: Moody house music from someone who cares. What is it that you care about?

HeartWerk: Art, the actual passion, history and culture of it. There's so many people that make alot of dance music that has the right sound and the right samples but it's soulless.

EM: When you were coming up with the name HeartWerk, was that in the back of your mind?

HW: I was playing around a lot under my name (Darku). I decided that I really wanted to shift, because I was playing everything from top 40 to electric, EDM, dubstep, and playing a lot of like bottle service kind of clubs. I didn't really want to do that anymore. I wanted to shift back to house and techno, which is kind of why I started DJing and writing music in the first place. So I was like, ‘oh, I'm coming back to my heart.’ And the second part was a duality of like ‘all right, it's time to really put in the work.’ And then also, a nod to Kraftwerk, because they're kind of credited as being the first ever electronic band.

EM: In your song ‘Deep in Isolation, All Are Loss’, the drum pattern is super jungle inspired. A lot of the tracks I hear from you are pretty jungle inspired. What are your thoughts on, how we define music and what genres actually mean today?

HW: I feel like genres are getting more and more blurred every three weeks, right? Over the last few years, I've noticed a lot of people bringing back the 90s chopped jungle breakbeat sound on top of house music or techno. It's not nearly as fast or rhythmic as jungle or D&B but it's still taking on those elements. I think I heard a lot of that and wanted to try it. So I started playing around with that idea.

EM: Where is the best city to DJ in right now?

HW: New York, still.

EM: New York over Berlin or Japan? Tokyo?

HW: I didn't get to experience as much of Tokyo as I'd like, but I'd say, it might be Tokyo. Just from my experience, I was in a small listening environment. It was really nice.

EM: What kind of role do you think drugs and alcohol play in the club scene?

HW: One thing I've noticed outside of Europe, and New York is an outlier, slightly; a lot of people in Europe, and it seems it's the same kind of thing in Japan as well, that people there genuinely want to go out and hear crazy music and dance. A couple beers or some sort of other substance is an afterthought. And maybe something that kind of enhances the mood for the night, but that's not the reason they go out. I feel like New York is kind of that same way, too. But everywhere else, especially in the US, the reason people go to a nightclub is to get drinks or to take something. And good music and dancing is just a bonus to that. It's a little bit backwards.

EM: You think the culture around music is actually around music and other countries? Imagine that.

HW: How many people have ever said something along the lines of, ‘I need a few drinks before I get on the dance floor.’

EM: Do you think that has to do with America's self obsession, rather all of our obsession with our personal image?

HW: Kinda. I think our obsession with our personal image comes from the fact that now you're going to find yourself the next day on somebody's random tik tok. I've been DJing in clubs for a pretty long time, pre smartphone era and people danced a lot more up until around the 2014-16 era. When it went from anybody can take a photo of me, to anybody can take a photo of me and go viral within the next hour, right? I could do something silly on the dance floor and by the time I leave the club, I'm already a meme. Which I think has sadly made a lot of people not really want to lose themselves.

EM: What are you listening to outside of house music and techno?

HW: A lot of jazz. John's (John Pierce) got me really hooked on Yussef Dayes over the last two years or so and he keeps putting out these crazy videos of them playing in the most beautiful locations. We're having a Dilla party this weekend. So I've been trying to listen to a lot of him. The man sampled so much stuff. And it's like, ‘What was this sample? All right. What song was that?’

EM: When you're sifting through records, how do you find something that you know will have a good sample on it? Especially if it's something you’ve never heard of?

HW: If anything's in a TK disco sleeve, I know I'm just gonna buy it. Which I gotta start being careful of because I think I have most of the collection. I always try to find singles. Which is harder and harder to find in record stores now. Especially if something on the label says dub mix, I know that there's probably something fun in that. A lot of times it’ll just have really good cover art. Like, ‘yeah, nobody can have that much flavor in their visual art and not have at least some of that in their music.

EM: What's your favorite record store?

HW: I used to love Under the Mooch, which was over on 15th and Harvard.

EM: The Mooch?

HW: Yeah. To me, that was the last time Tulsa had a record store that was actually curated. You aren't gonna go find repressings of Dark Side of the Moon or like, Urban Outfitters type records. They had a big focus on punk and hardcore but, there's also just tons of crazy unheard of rap singles in there. Lots of good dance music singles. I got introduced to LCD Sound System through them. Currently, sadly, just online. Yeah. My friend Taylor out of OKC has a really nice record shop, but it's entirely digital. So I either buy off his web store or if I'm in Oklahoma City and he's free, I'll just go by his house and browse what he's got.

EM: I just saw that you played at Palo Santo the other night. Where's your favorite place to play in OKC?

HW: Currently Palo Santo. It's kind of hard to beat. I feel like I constantly go in waves of being very involved in Oklahoma City's music scene and then I'm not at all. I’ll get very into it again. And then nothing goes on.

EM: We need a lot more diversity of clubs.

HW: Yeah, I need to be playing at least once a week and I can't just be playing the same spot every single week. It's hard to turn a venue that's not built for it into that vibe. It's getting a lot better around Tulsa. But that was the biggest gripe for the longest time was just like, we're trying to do events, and we're doing them at dive bars and having to rent our own PA’s and, you know, we’re able to throw some pretty cool events but at the end of the day, the space was not built for this. It's not really catering for it either.

EM: Is there anything that you're currently working on?

HW: I got another vinyl release coming out soon.

EM: Do you know the name of it yet?

HW: Yeah, (it’s called) Earth Calling.

EM: What was the inspiration for the name?

HW: I got this Euro track module about a year ago called Pet Rock and it literally outputs rhythms and gives it a clock signal. Then from that it just gives you two opposing rhythms based on the cycle of the moon from whatever day it is. So you don't get to choose the rhythm at all. It goes off of the moon. It takes three years for it to ever repeat itself. And they're all synced. So if somebody else has that same module, and you turn them on at the same time, they're doing the same thing. They're locked in. Which is pretty crazy. It’s super nerdy and mathematical to even figure all that out.

EM: Who’s working with anybody for the artwork on that?

HW: I did all the artwork myself.

EM: Do you typically do the artwork yourself?

HW: I'm trying to do more of it. I went to school for printing. So, I learned how to do offset printing, screen printing and a lot of negative developments. I got early into Photoshop and Apple used to have some kind of program, I think it was called the comic bookmaker or something like that. It was basically a very watered down Photoshop that I was using for a while. Then, I bought Photoshop and Illustrator and I started designing a bunch of stuff. And I thought that was going to be my career path. I started DJing about the same time I got into this, but when I was 17, a club in Tulsa booked me off MySpace. They were very shocked when I showed up and I wasn't 21. But there were way less people DJing then. It was like, ‘all right, well, the club opens in an hour, don't tell anybody.’ Literally the owner was like all right, if the cops come in, just hide. And then the night went really well. They were like ‘let me talk to my lawyers and see what we have to actually do.’ Then, I started playing there all the time. So, you know, 17, 18, 19, and I was already one of the top 10 DJs in the city, right? So I kind of stopped doing nearly as much graphic design stuff then and I, over the last couple of years, kind of missed doing that graphic design work. I've been trying to get back into it and try to design as much of my own stuff as I can.

EM: Do you think there'll be a revolution with music because of everything that's going on in the world?

HW: I hope. I think now more than ever, it's important to go out dancing or to see a band or singer songwriter, especially ones you've never even heard of before. Put your phone down and actually be in the moment.

EM: Do you think our ability to live in the moment and have fun is lost in general?

HW: I don't know it's lost, but you see so many people that saw on some TikTok, reel or whatever that this is how you go to a Boiler Room set. And now the amount of Boiler Room clones on YouTube are terrible. It's just because it's like, ‘what if we put the crowd behind the DJ video?’ You know? It's like, ‘we need everybody to act this way and dress this way and the DJ needs to act this way.’

EM: Taste has been homogenized. I think genre blending is cool and there's obviously a place for it, but when Jay Z and Linkin Park first did their collab it was the most mind-blowing thing in the world and now with TikTok we have people blending every genre every single day. Which again can be cool but we kind of lose this sense of origin and intentionality and what was the kind of purpose for it.

HW: I mean you can see that a lot right now even with Fred Again. You know, he did that Boiler Room and just kind of blew out of nowhere. Even though he had been active for a long time prior to that and he came with kind of a new twist on a sound. It was like, ‘okay, this is fresh. This is new.’ Now in my inbox it's just a bunch of DJ promos that just sounds like somebody downloaded the Fred Again sample pack and just right there's no there's no like, ‘oh, this is my sound. They're just like ‘well, he blew up on this sound. So I want to copy that.’

EM: I work with a ton of younger artists and I always say when you're in your teenage years and early 20s even, it's important to find people that you look up to and that you really like and it's a good thing to copy those things that you really love about them but you have to have a turning point where you've developed the skill enough to start evolving and finding your taste in the things that make you interesting and different.

HW: When I started producing music that was the advice I kept getting. Just find a song and try to reproduce it. But then I can't put it out right? Now I'm producing one to four songs a day that almost always will just die on my hard drive but you have to do that to be able to get good at producing. Once you figure out what's going on, you figure out why that works and then when you want something it becomes second nature and you can do it. You won’t get hung up on something and then you're able to let the ideas flow. I think one of my favorite art stories is Basquiat meeting Andy Warhol and he was so excited to meet him that he ran home, painted a self-portrait of the two of them then ran back to the restaurant with the paint still wet and Andy Warhol was even just like, ‘oh my god, he's faster than me.’ Andy Warhol is jealous of Basquiat. He's done it so many times that he can be quick at this and that's whenever the true inspiration kind of comes and you want to create something and it's like you don't have to sit there and ask ‘how do I do this again?’

EM: It's kind of ironic that when you are youngest is when you need to have the most patience because that's when you're learning everything and then when you're older is when you finally have the patience and hopefully, by then, you're able to produce faster. Is there anything you want to ask me?

HW: What started By.Everyone?

EM: Well, By.Everyone started out as Silent Riot, which, at the time, I didn't know that Quiet Riot was a band. And I had made a couple hoodies and a couple t-shirts with one of my best friends growing up. We were little skate rats. So we had little skate groups. Really, it was Okidelyc first. I made t-shirts for that. Then I wanted to start something a little bit more serious and did, Silent Riot, which is where I started sewing patches and doing screen printing myself.

Then started Silent Studios in 2016, which was rip on Midnight Studios. Again, I kind of didn't know that I was doing that because I was 16/17 years old and then was like, ‘Oh shit, Midnight Studios is a thing and my clothes kind of even look like it.’ I did SIlent Studios for a couple years. Then I opened my first brick-and-mortar with my personal brand and two other brands. And it felt like we couldn't call the store Silent Studios because there were other brands in it. So I called it By.Elyjah, because it was just me running the space. And to be honest, we were opening really fast. And I didn't have a name for the store yet. My mom was literally like, just call it By.Elyjah. It's already on the tag. Then when I asked my first employee, Joe, what would it take for you to come work here? I had to pitch to him why he should come work for the shop haha. And he was like, ‘whenever it's not feeding into your God complex.’ So I said give me a better name right now and he said, I don't know, just call it by everyone. So we changed the Instagram that day. That's kind of where the name comes from. And how it all started. Skating is the real origin.

HW: I think skateboarding is a great life analogy for life. Because, almost every single thing in skateboarding, you have to fuck it up 1000 times before you finally nail it.

EM: Skaters are some of the most patient, well, aggro for sure, but, the fortuitousness that you have to have as a skater to get good at all. You have to basically destroy yourself and kind of rebuild back-up a million times.

HW: I mean, a skateboarder is a person though, that like, has an idea for something, and they do it and they fall. They don't just go well, that's-that, it didn't work anyways. Yeah, now they just keep doing it. I skateboarded a little. A lot of my friends were a lot better at skateboarding. I remember one of my friends had some low level sponsorship or something like that. I don't even remember what but I remember just sitting there. Cody has been trying this exact same thing for almost six hours now. Like,I went to TacoBell and came back. Then he finally gets it and then does it three more times. All right, cool. Good. Let's go home and play Smash Brothers now. Right.

EM: Even skating now is kind of becoming this thing where everybody has their camera out and is constantly filming and things like that, which isn't a bad thing. I love when I see skaters going absolutely harder than they've ever gone for hours and there's no camera. And that still exists, very heavily in skating, where it's just for them. Most people don't have aspirations of going pro, they just do it for themselves. And I think that the music's a lot like that, too.

HW: COVID lockdown hit and for a minute, I was like, oh, that's been my career my entire life. What else should I do? Obviously, nothing's ever open again. Maybe I could be a computer programmer. And then I was just like, well, I made three more beats today. I guess I can't stop this. That's whenever I knew that I wanted to do this, you know.

EM: By.Everyone's struggled throughout its entire existence, financially. I've had different ideas and things that I could have done or wanted to do. But when I'm happiest is when I'm designing, and I found that it's the only thing I truly love to do. So I'll do anything to just keep doing that.

HW: Prince, during soundcheck for a show, would just continue playing guitar all the way until they had to kick him off the stage for the doors to open. Right? You know, I love stories like that, where, you know, when the cameras are off, the doors are locked and nobody's around, and they're still doing their craft. It's like, okay, this person's locked in. I've dealt with that a lot. I made a Facebook post saying I want to collab with more people. I was flooded with people like, yeah, I'm down, I'm down, I'm down. And then I've had only like two people actually come to the studio. You know? It's like, Mm hmm. Both times we made something really cool, right? It's almost like a cliche to me now when they say they want to collab and we set a date and I know I'm gonna get a text two hours before it was set saying something came up. Just come do the art.

EM: I think all of my favorite musicians, designers, artists, etc. When they talk about their craft, they call it their work. Whenever I was younger, I didn't really understand that. But now that I'm older, I realize you have to treat it that way. For the days that you're not feeling it to get your ass up and do it because it's just like working out as soon as you get in the gym, you feel better. I think some people always find an excuse to not do art because they don't put in the work. And that sounds like such bro science but you know what I'm saying? Half the battle is just showing up.

HW: If I'm not feeling like making anything, usually if I just open Ableton and start fucking around with some random plugin that I bought and probably forgot I owned or whatever. And just work it out till I’m like ‘hmm that sounds kind of cool.’ Okay, now I can build something off of that, of you know I have a rule with myself that if I start building something, I have to finish it then because I don't want to be opening up Ableton projects and it's just a little loop and that's it. I have to make this all the way to the point that I could give it to somebody and be like, here's a demo. Right?

EM: That also keeps the flow and keeps it all coming from the same time and space. I think that's important. If I have a part where I get stuck on, I'll have another project going that I can go work on. And then almost inevitably, I'll be in the middle of the other project and figure out what to do for the other one. I always have a ton of projects going on but I always try to make sure that when I start something, I always finish it. Even if I don't like it, you have to see the completed project.

HW: I watched this video one time; I want to say it's called the art of done or something like that. It's just better to finish a bunch of projects than have a bunch of projects half finished. Once you finish it, it's done. You know, it might not be your favorite, but it's done. You can move on to the next thing.

EM: The stuff that's undone is holding you back from doing the next thing. Finishing something is a practice because those last few steps, even if you're 90% of the way done, that last 10% is sometimes the hardest bit and you have to practice finishing.

HW: Yeah, when I send a finished song off to distribution, it's like, okay, that's it. I can't make any changes anymore. It's out there. Any changes I make don't matter now.

EM: Unless you're Kanye, then you can go edit it after it's put out.

HW: I mean, I think I can, but I don't know how. I'd rather not learn. That's just, again, bad practice.