Manae Solara Vaughn is a young Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer who put down roots in the local music scene much earlier in her life than most of her peers. Daughter of Chicago house-music royalty DJ Lady D, Solara Vaughn grew up immersed in her parents’ community of music legends. She recently left her job at Reverb, a Chicago-based online instrument marketplace, to work as an assistant engineer at Chicago Mastering Service.
Solara Vaughn plays in several bands—she drums for Tenci and for my group, which performs under the name Debbie-Marie Brown, and she plays guitar and synthesizer for Harvey Waters. She also has a solo project, but her main focus is cultivating her band Oux, which she founded in early 2018 with her partner Indigo Hope Finamore. Oux also includes Arya Woody on bass and synthesizer and Alaska Jules on drums.
Solara Vaughn studied music theory and composition at Columbia College Chicago after spending a year at Whittier College in California, where she met Finamore. She would eventually like to offer her services as a recording engineer to local artists at as low a cost as possible, because she knows that recording can be inaccessibly expensive. “I’m trying to figure out how to give back to the community that gave me so much,” she says.
As told to Debbie-Marie Brown
My mom grew up when the house scene was taking off, when the rave scene was real. Whatever we call raves now is not a fucking rave, at least not the way it used to be, according to my mom—I was never there. But I could feel the reverberations and the aftereffects of that culture, because I was always around my parents’ friends. They were always coming by, taking care of her, taking care of me. I never felt isolated from life. My parents made all the connections that I have benefited from now. Frank Orrall, who’s the founder of Poi Dog Pondering, he’s my godfather.
I started engineering at Columbia College Chicago. When I got to Columbia, my mom had been working there—and still is—as a career counselor. That’s why I went. Otherwise I wasn’t able to afford college. I was proud to learn about audio and sound at Columbia, especially from Ted Cho who was my boss, a family friend, and also the guitarist of Poi Dog Pondering.
I was on the team for the department of events, production, services, or whatever. It’s called [DEPS, the Department of Exhibitions, Performance and Student Spaces]. I was lucky that I was getting experience that way. In college, you have room to fuck up, get all your mistakes out, and then you get out into the real world and you can make mistakes on the same level as everybody else.
I definitely got all of my mistakes out with Ted. I had interned at this one audio warehouse called Lakeshore Audiovisual [LSAV] at first, and that gave me a pretty good start out. And another case of classic Chicago nepotism, because Brad De Lisio, who hired me to be an audiovisual technician intern at LSAV, used to live with my parents.
When I was working as a stagehand at college, Louder Than a Bomb would host at Columbia. It was the level where they’d pick their spoken-word semifinalists. The Chicago History Museum would have a conference once a year at Stage 2 at Columbia, and I would work that. The theater department would have an annual performance with the music department, or music students would play in pit orchestras for choirs. I got really used to not having the same thing twice.
I feel like I owe so much of my social likeness to music. Those are the only spaces I’ve been so consistently that you start to know people. That’s just where it all happens and starts.
After college, for a while, production was a very quotidian experience to me—just a way to make money. Audio is such a thankless job in so many ways, especially when you’re just starting out as a stagehand and you’re just trying to get experience. They call you green. They’re also the same 20 white guys. And then maybe a white woman as an engineer. I’m just there sitting, like, well, I need to make money.
There was one time I was working Michelada [Fest] as a stagehand and I got a text in the middle of the day, like, “Can you come substitute?” That was the first time I’d ever actually gotten to run sound on my own in a venue—the event took place at the Sandlot in Wrigleyville. I got a text because I had been on Facebook adding myself to as many substitute lists as possible. There were Facebook groups where Chicago engineers were looking for folks to fill in as A2s [secondary audio engineers], stagehands, or crew.
I had been working in sound for maybe three, four months at that point, around when I was 20 years old, and I’d never run a show on my own. But I just did it, and I knew how to do it. Another time I worked sound for the Lakeview 5K. I spent a lot of time at Cubby Bear, learning monitors, working monitors, and also doing front of house under my mentors there, Nick Cartwright and Melissa Adams.
I would be remiss to not mention Golden Dagger. I’ve gotten some of my highest compliments and mixed some of my best shows there. Some of the coolest artists I’ve ever seen and gotten to work with were there. I also work occasionally at Gman Tavern, 2019 till now—until some point in time nebulously in the future.
When I decided to pursue audio production, it was as a form of discipline. I was putting myself into musical boot camp so that I could have the focus, the knowledge, and the experience to own the stage. There’s a very different energy you bring to a stage when you know how it works. There’s a certain ownership that I feel onstage that I don’t think I would ever have felt had I not worked in audio and done sound for as long as I did. And do.
A playlist of songs engineered by Manae Solara Vaughn
It’s hard too, because it took up a lot of time in my life. I don’t even consider engineering specifically such a big part of my identity. But in hindsight, they’re all just pit stops, and I needed to refuel at each one of them. And so it’s hard to be diminishing of them, while also acknowledging that there are so many that I’m not mentioning that I can’t remember.
I’ve always been a musician first, and I’m always going to be a musician first. It got to a point after the Dagger fire where I realized I needed to prioritize my musicianship over my engineering. I was becoming known as an engineer, and people were asking me to come and engineer for things, but I wasn’t really getting asked to play as much. And I was starting to get bitter from being behind the board.
My first instruments were my hands and my voice. I would beat on pots and pans, and I would sing. At a certain point, my parents were like, “We’re gonna put you in choir because you can sing.” And I was like, “I don’t know I can sing, but OK.” I was in the Chicago Children’s Choir [now Uniting Voices Chicago] from when I was like six till I was ten or 11.
But I was also defiant as a child. I would say, “I’m not going to be a musician,” because my parents were broke, and I watched them be broke for years. They were broke broke. So I felt, no, I’m gonna do something that actually makes me money.
There were so many things I wanted to do musically because I saw and heard people doing them and I thought they were so cool. But I also realized that I didn’t have access to these [opportunities] in the ways I saw my peers did. My parents had this cultural capital, but not any actual capital.
When I finally decided in eighth grade, “OK, I’m going to switch from chorus to band and play the trumpet,” I received my first trumpet from Max Crawford, the trumpet player of Poi Dog Pondering, since my mom couldn’t afford to buy me one.
It was that same time that I made this personality shift. I got into punk rock and skateboarding like the prototypical 13-year-old, and I was like, I guess I’ll learn guitar now. I had a MacBook and GarageBand, and so I just took the free lessons and I did fucking every single one of them.
I had been doing them for about four to five months by the time Christmas came around freshman year in high school. My mom was like, “OK, you’ve been practicing. I’ve seen you, I hear you, you’ve earned me spending the money on an electric guitar for you.” I wanted a white Strat like Jimi Hendrix. . . . That Christmas she got me a guitar. It was the $200 Squier version, but it was badass. Around that time I also hyperfocused on learning bass guitar, to get good enough to replace the graduating senior bassist in my high school jazz band.
I found out about this little group called DIY Chicago on Facebook, and then I found my first actual band through DIY Chicago. The band was called Vaguewaves. I had been in that band untiI I graduated high school in 2014. We played all the old DIY circuit. There was a place called Wally’s World that we played, and Old Mount Happy. We came around just after Animal Kingdom had died. There was the old-school Humboldt Park/Logan Square DIY scene. . . . Oh my God, there was Jurassic Park, the worst place ever—it was literally predatory, but we played there. It was so scuzzy.
It was so grimy everywhere I played, and it was unsafe in so many ways. But I felt safe. I felt safer there, at those kind of shows, than I did at school, sometimes. Actually, all the time, because I didn’t feel safe at school, socially.
I ended up playing in this band called the Oxford Comma with my friend from Evanston, Noah. I also played in Fox Room with Noah and in Noah’s solo project as Noah Roth & the Magpies.
Anybody that was around that scene at the time would have seen Nnamdï playing everywhere, in so many different projects and bands. He was also putting out music all the time. I was surrounded by all of these great people who were young, putting out music all the time, and playing everywhere all the time. So I realized, oh, so in order to be a musician, you have to do this all the time. You can’t really let up.
I wasn’t musically focused at all at my first college, Whittier College in California, until I eventually transferred to Columbia. I couldn’t afford being at that first college, and the administration was coming down on me for not being able to afford it.
I thought to myself, if I’m going to have to leave here at the end of the year, I might as well make a mark. Let me find the musicians, and let me make one thing happen. And that one thing was the battle of the bands the school had every year to determine which student band would play their end-of-year college fest. So I was like: Who’s the best singer on the campus? Who should be the bassist? Who’s the drummer? I found them, and we had a chillin’ seven-piece including a trumpet, saxophone, and a trombonist. We won the battle of the bands, and we opened the end-of-year college fest for T-Pain.
At the same time, I met Indigo as I was leaving campus, but we knew we had to be with each other. It was kismet in so many ways. I had flown out to Indi for winter break—a Christmas-to-New Year’s type of deal. And that was when we wrote our first song as what was going to become Oux. I was fucking around on Ableton trying to make something, and Indigo was like, “I got lyrics!” And then we just made it.
Once Indi moved to Chicago with me, we got around to finishing our EP Honeymood in summer 2019 and putting it out. All of those, I think except “Mood,” the last song on that release, were pretty much all Indi, with the exception of my production and adding a little percussion stuff and some guitar. I’ve wanted to let Indi lead the bus more and more for songwriting since then. The album that we’ve been working on since 2019 is like 11 of Indigo’s songs and two of mine.
We put out Honeymood, and then we were playing a lot of shows locally. It’s weird when you’re a duo with a laptop doing all your backing tracks and you’re both playing guitar and singing. Being a visible face of a project in tandem with them was so formative.
Over the course of the pandemic, we were playing livestreams as a duo from our living room, and it was basically the same thing. But we could put our music through the Internet speakers, so it sounded really good. Not that we didn’t sound great before, but I think it made us appeal to people in a way that we hadn’t been appealing to them before.
Oux got attention on Twitter at first, and then we got put on the [Spotify] Best Non-Binary Artists of 2020 playlist at the end of that year. That blew up one of our songs, “Queer Like Me,” to an extent—we got a lot of streams on that song. And so once we got back to being able to play live shows, we had people showing up to them. We were like, well, if we’re gonna have people show up to a show, we should have a band, with drums and a bassist.
Oux’s 2019 debut EP, Honeymood, recorded as a duo of Manae Solara Vaughn and Indigo Hope Finamore
We tried to book as much as we could, and we got asked to play some really incredible shows. We played a sold-out show with Glass Beach at Subterranean, upstairs.
We played Wicker Park Fest and Logan Square Arts Festival last year. We did Cultivate Fest this year. We also played in Virginia at William & Mary’s end-of-year college fest.
Throughout all this, I was moonlighting for a lot of folks, just playing occasional shows or being in bands for very short periods of time, and then they would fizzle out. Or people asked me to fill in for shows, and then we would play a few. Being a gigging musician, I felt that whatever I can do to keep my chops up and keep my face out there, I’d do, and I still do.
But I’m so, so deeply invested in the future of Oux in ways that can’t be disentangled from the love of my life and my career. They’re intrinsically linked in such a deep way. I’ll be out there and be around the scene, but Oux is all about premeditation. Oux is all about intention and the execution of the highest tier of artistry that I can aspire to and accomplish.
All the sounds really start in the DAW [digital audio workstation]. It’s very much a recording-based band and project; it always begins with us fucking around in Ableton. But then we know that it can go in so many different directions—that can be acoustic music, that can be electronic music, that can be improvised—if you figure it out. It can be highly composed as well. I’m pulling from places of deep electronic production, synthesis, microsound, and ASMR-type musics. Crate-digging sampling!
I would like to shout out our homie Shravan Raghuram, who has seen Oux and was like, “You’re very much trying to make headphone music, but live.” That stuck with me. Our sound is a very immersive, all-enveloping type of music.
Getting myself into the discipline and profession of audio was my gateway into having Oux become what it is, because it’s so much about pushing sonic limits. It takes a certain focus that’s hard to maintain consistently. It was the drive to become an engineer that made all of this possible. I wouldn’t have known how to make the songs as good as they can be. I wouldn’t know the difference between something good and something great.
Now I’m an assistant engineer at Chicago Mastering Service, being mentored under Greg Obis and Bob Weston. Mastering is such a unique part of the music-creation process, and also so vital—it’s the end stage. It’s also the most meticulous. Mastering is really the culmination of all of my work as both a musician and an engineer, to be able to contribute to such a pedigree of quality and musical artistry. Making music with the end goal in mind is something that I feel really misses people. It’s helped me focus more on: What does my life look like when I’m focused on completion? What does my life look like when I’m focused on finishing?