*。BIO ✧ *。

Born in Houston, Texas, March 21st 1990, Mat Kastella spent his childhood watching music videos on MTV while singing and dancing in front of his bedroom mirror.

In 1999 he had diligently watched the careers of The Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, N’SYNC, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera blow up right before his eyes, as he decided singing in front of a giant audience was exactly what he wanted to do.

When the bubblegum sound of the late 90s started to fizzle and music on the radio took a more mature and acoustic turn, Kastella, having witnessed the dramatic change in American mainstream popular music, turned to other musical outlets. Not much later, At 11 years old, he happened to be taking Japanese lessons. His language teacher had 2 daughters who would let him borrow their Japanese pop music CDs and VHS tapes of Japanese pop idol music videos, such as Morning Musume and Ryoko Hirosue. This sparked Kastella’s obsession with pop music from around the world, especially from different Asian countries.

Soon afterwards he started recording demo tapes of himself singing in Japanese and began mailing them off to Japanese record companies in Tokyo. His mother and stepfather were unenthused, but allowed him to continue sending demo tapes for years believing that he wouldn't get a response. The battle to pursue music with his parent’s would continue when at 15 years old he snuck into and passed an audition to enroll at the Houston High School of Performing and Visual Arts, only to be told by his parents that he was not allowed to attend.

At 16 years old, his hometown of Houston was quickly becoming nationally recognized for its then newly booming rap scene, and while the city was still buzzing with music makers, he started working with local R&B and Hip Hop music producers to create original music.

Taking the music he had worked on, Kastella relocated to Tokyo to pursue a music career in Japan, without knowing anyone in the country. At 18 years old, he began working with Sony Music Japan and eventually joined a Japanese pop idol group produced by Japanese television personality Atsushi Tamura (a household name in Japan).

After over 4 years in Tokyo, Kastella reluctantly called it quits on the Japanese music industry and returned to Texas. He began packing his bags for New York City, where he envisioned he would have the creative freedom to write his own music as an openly queer artist.

Re-assimilating to the US and life in NYC proved to be a culture shock for Kastella, as he was desperately searching for a stage to perform on. He started performing his original music at drag nights in different gay bars and clubs throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. These performances led to a performance at the 2014 Bushwig Festival, which in turn led to an invitation to perform in Stockholm, Sweden, in the capital city's biggest dance venue Trädgården. In Sweden, Kastella opened for London based record label PC Music's Finn Diesel.

A chance encounter in NYC led to a friendship with producer Sophie in 2015, after passing her a CD of his songs in a nightclub. A collaboration track titled “Body Mop” produced by Sophie featuring NYC rapper Le1f, with vocals and lyrics by Kastella happened soon after, and the song was featured in Sophie’s shows internationally throughout the summer of 2015.

Kastella started writing songs with NYC based PC Music label artist Umru, after artist Hayden Dunham introduced them and suggested they work together. By the end of 2019 Umru and Kastella had come up with 6 songs.

In 2021, intending to release the songs as an EP, but bored of the digital norm, Kastella decided to embark on an IRL park tour, in which he would perform all his original material, as well as cover songs, throughout different parks in NYC five days a week for the entire summer of 2021.

The tour was given it’s official name  “The Mat Kastella NYC Summer Park Tour ’21” and is still currently underway with Kastella’s “tour bus” making regular stops in Lower Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park and Washington Square Park, as well as weekend performances in Koreatown, to name a few locations.

The first single off of Kastella’s forthcoming EP “Capital D” is slated for an August 2021 release, with the second single and official EP release still steadily bubbling. All the while, Kastella is currently accepting donations for a fully fan funded music video to be released by the end of 2021.

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