Today we’d like to introduce you to Kenley.
Hi Kenley, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Brook Legends really started in 2019, although at the time, music wasn’t where I thought my life was headed at all.
Track and field had been a huge part of my identity. I competed in college and continued training afterward with the goal of earning a spot on Panama’s international team. I had spent most of my life as an athlete, and that was how I saw myself.
Then I got hurt.
Not being able to train and compete the way I was used to sent me through a bit of an identity crisis. When something has defined you for that long and suddenly it’s gone, you start wondering who you are without it.
Around that time, some friends took me to a music festival. I remember standing there watching Hannah Wants perform and seeing how she could control the energy of an entire crowd. I distinctly remember thinking to myself, “I can do this.”
So I went home and started practicing. And I mean practicing day in and day out. I approached DJing almost the same way I had approached being an athlete. I wanted to get better, so I put in the reps.
Eventually, I met some other guys who shared the same passion, and we formed the Raleigh House Collective. That period was really when I started seeing Raleigh’s underground house music community come alive. We would throw Sunday parties at Clockwork with maybe 30 to 50 people packed in there, just jamming from 3 p.m. until 9 p.m., and sometimes much later. It wasn’t huge, but there was something special happening. There was a community forming around the music.
Then COVID hit.
Like everyone else, we had to figure out what came next. We started doing livestreams and finding creative ways to keep the music going. We even started doing open-air parties at Lake Wheeler Park. At the same time, we were traveling between places like Charlotte and Orlando and playing together as a unit.
COVID also gave me the time to start learning another side of the craft: music production.
I became obsessed with that too. I was fortunate to have mentors around me who believed in what I was doing, particularly Luke Andy. He ultimately invited me to Ubbi Dubbi, where I had the opportunity to experience the festival with an artist pass.
That weekend became another pivotal moment for me.
I suddenly had the opportunity to be around and network with artists like Valentino Khan, Green Velvet, Noizu, OMNOM, VNSSA and others. More than anything, it allowed me to see the industry from the other side. These weren’t just names on a festival lineup anymore. I was able to have conversations, build relationships and understand that this world I had been looking at from the outside wasn’t as unreachable as it once seemed.
I came back from that experience with a completely different level of belief in what I was doing.
From there, my individual career as Brook Legends really started taking off. The records I had been working on began getting signed, my music started reaching people outside of Raleigh, and opportunities to perform began expanding beyond the local scene and eventually internationally.
When I look back, there are a few moments where the direction of my life completely changed. Getting injured felt devastating at the time, but it pushed me toward something I may have never discovered otherwise. Going to that first festival and watching Hannah Wants gave me the idea. Those early Sundays at Clockwork gave me a community. COVID pushed me to learn how to produce. My mentors helped me see what was possible. And getting that first real exposure to the larger industry showed me that I could actually belong in it.
What started with me standing in a festival crowd in 2019 thinking, “I can do this,” eventually turned into releasing my own records, performing around the world, and helping build a house music community right here in Raleigh.
And I still feel like the story is only getting started.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Definitely not. One of the biggest struggles early on was that house music really wasn’t accepted in Raleigh’s clubs and bars. And when you did hear house music, it was usually a much more commercialized version of it.
When I first started, I went almost everywhere trying to get a residency and was rejected over and over again. I knew there was an audience for this music, but at the time, it was difficult to convince venues of that when they hadn’t seen it for themselves.
Halcyon was one of the first places to take a chance on me and gave me my first residency. I’m extremely grateful for that opportunity because it gave me somewhere to start, but even then, I was still pretty limited in how much house music I could actually play.
Eventually I realized that if the opportunities I wanted didn’t exist, I was going to have to create them myself.
That’s when I started promoting and throwing my own events. I was given Sundays, which wasn’t exactly the easiest day to prove that a new concept could work, but I took it as an opportunity. At first, maybe 30 people would come out. But those 30 people genuinely loved the music and the atmosphere we were creating.
Then 30 became 60. Sixty became 100.
This was still around 2019 and 2020, and seeing that growth was validation that the audience was there. We just needed to give them somewhere to go.
That experience ultimately shaped the way I approach WH0 CARES, which is really my brainchild today. Instead of waiting for someone else to decide whether our music or our ideas belong in a particular space, we create the experience ourselves.
Now we’ll see anywhere from 250 to 500 people at our events.
For me, that’s probably the most rewarding part. It’s not necessarily the size of the crowd. It’s remembering being told “no” by venue after venue, then thinking back to those first Sundays when 30 people showed up because they believed in what we were doing.
We didn’t find a scene that was already waiting for us. We helped build one.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My work really has two sides to it: Brook Legends, the artist, and WH0 CARES, the events and community we’ve built around the music.
As Brook Legends, I’m a DJ and producer primarily focused on house music, particularly tech house and minimal/deep tech. I’ve been fortunate to have my music signed and supported beyond Raleigh and to play in different markets around the world. But for me, being an artist has never just been about getting behind the decks and playing records. I love the entire process, from producing a track by myself to eventually getting to play it in front of a crowd and seeing people react to something that started as an idea in my head.
Then there’s WH0 CARES, which is really my creative outlet for building experiences.
I don’t necessarily want people to feel like they’re just going to another nightclub or another party. We think about the location, the music, the energy, the crowd and how everything comes together. We’ve done warehouse events, rooftops, open-air parties, day parties and other concepts because I like taking spaces and figuring out how we can turn them into something people will remember.
What I’m most proud of, though, is the community.
There was a point when we were trying to convince venues that people in Raleigh actually wanted to hear this music. We were excited when 30 people came to one of our Sunday parties. Now we can have 250 to 500 people show up to a WH0 CARES event.
Seeing that many people together dancing to the type of music we were once told wouldn’t work here means more to me than almost anything else we’ve accomplished.
I think what sets me apart is that I’ve never really waited for permission.
My background is in athletics, and I think I carried that mentality into music. When I wanted to DJ, I practiced every day. When I wanted to produce, I studied production. When I couldn’t get the bookings I wanted, I started throwing events. When the traditional venue model didn’t fit what we were trying to create, we found different spaces and built our own experiences.
I’ve always had the mindset that if there’s something I don’t know how to do, I can learn it. And if the opportunity doesn’t exist, we can create it.
That’s really what Brook Legends and WH0 CARES have become about for me: pushing myself creatively, taking chances on ideas, and hopefully showing other people in Raleigh that you don’t necessarily have to leave your city to experience something special. Sometimes you can build it right here.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
I would say resilience, but resilience backed by discipline.
My life has rarely gone exactly according to plan. I was training to compete internationally in track and field, got injured, and suddenly had to figure out who I was outside of being an athlete. When I got into music, I was rejected by almost every venue I approached. When we finally started building momentum with events, COVID shut everything down.
At every one of those points, I had a choice to either stop or figure out another way forward.
I think my athletic background taught me that you don’t become good at something just because you’re passionate about it. You have to put in the reps when nobody is watching. When I decided I wanted to DJ, I practiced constantly. When COVID took away live events, I learned how to produce. When venues weren’t giving us the opportunities we wanted, we created our own.
I’m also not afraid to fail at something publicly. I’ll try an idea, learn from it, adjust and try again. Some things have worked incredibly well and others haven’t, but every experience has given me something I could use for the next one.
So if I had to choose one characteristic, it’s resilience. I don’t necessarily need everything to go according to plan. I just need to believe there’s another way to get where I’m trying to go.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brooklegends?igsi=MWNxaGJzYWM1am4xdg%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1Bx6GJNn1k/?mibextid=wwXIfr
- Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/VQkIZbQSTgzZ0aBPLU
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/s/AthJA1g
