Mizz Beats

Mizz Beats, originally uploaded by chantelle.

With a serious lack of women sitting behind the mixing desk, Mizz Beats is hoping to inspire a generation…

Studio’s are testosterone battlegrounds yet it was always going to be a matter of time until we found our potential Missy. Cliché perhaps, but we’ve got a contender and armed with her fruity loops program, eighteen year old Mizz Beats is looking to master her destiny and make history.

While grime girlies Lady Sovereign and Maihem have been known to dabble in production, Mizz Beats is the first to drop bombs on vinyl.

Her name’s been spreading the streets of London like wild fire since her first heater on Nekkle Records, ‘Signal’, featuring the vocal talents of legendary MC D Double E. Future collaborations already in the bag include ‘They Never Saw It Coming’ with Wiley, JME, Footsie, Jammer and Ears and a bag of goodies for rapper Klashnekoff.

“A lot of people have been wondering why it’s taken me so long to get something out cause I’ve been building up for time but I had to wait and see where I was heading. I had to be ready.”

An only child, Mizz Beats, otherwise known as Iman Yanee (“I was named after the model but the name means faith and I’ve got that”) was born into a musical family; her grandad playing the piano and guitar while her four uncles were in a reggae band. Growing up in and around Leytonstone, east London, Iman got used to enjoying her alone time and It was soon after taking up piano lessons herself, and at only 12 years old, she found herself recording keyboard sequences onto a four-track. More heavily influenced by her parents jazz and soul collection than anything else the likes of Roy Ayers, Quincy Jones, The Neptunes and Missy Elliott have also sculpted her sound.

“I don’t make one sound, I’m original and a musician first and foremost, I don’t want to pigeonhole anything. I am signed to Jammer’s label but my style is ‘I am music’.”

Now 18 she’s further honing her skills at college (“well It’s like college but it’s in a warehouse in Islington”), studying music technology and business, learning to play the guitar, penning tracks for girlfriends and doing her upmost to stay away from singing.

“I guess being a girl has actually made it easier because certain guys don’t see me as competition but there’s others who see it’s not about gender but the individual, my stuff will sound angrier and darker than theirs and they can’t work out how I do it.”

Words: Chantelle Fiddy
Mizz Beats feat. D Double E ‘Signal’ is out now on Nekkle Records. A version of this article appeared in i-D Magazine, May 2005.