Acyan Examines MASCULTURE: Emerging Fort Collins electronic artist Acyan got his start I music production during his freshman year of high school.
"I ended up going to a different high school than all my friends in middle school, and I didn’t entirely fit in with the community, so I had time to dedicate to a new craft," Acyan says. "During that time I was also doing animation/editing for Minecraft YouTubers. A lot of those videos were synced up to audio in some way, like Call Of Duty montages and that’s where I started getting invested in how the music was made. I started to make my own music for those videos and a couple years into that I enjoyed making music a lot more than Minecraft content, so I eventually dedicated all my time to it."
When asked to consider his sound today, Acyan describes it as "an aggressive and rhythmic take on the trap sound developed by RL Grime and his contemporaries. That Minecraft YouTube intro sound was heavily inspired from what Trap Nation & Trap City were putting out, and I always loved having a fun focal rhythm for people to latch onto."
Acyan says that there are a lot of things making his excited about the current electronic music scene.
"I also have some things I have my reservations about," he says. "A lot of my excitement around the electronic scene comes from two lads out of San Diego named ISOxo and Knock2. Those two put out song after song that all build toward a really incredible rave culture that I can't help but get behind, but it’s also very easy to hate and feel down about the biggest songs out of electronic music being, essentially, remakes of classic songs that were pretty influential for their time, and in some ways it feels harder than ever to break ground to a broad audience with new sounds instead of nostalgia bait."
His latest release is the MASCULTURE EP.
"MASCULTURE was born out of my debut live performance at The Black Box here in Denver," Acyan says. "A lot of the songs were built as ideas to get me from one place to another in the set for that show. The concept of bringing them all together was a crushing feeling I had gotten regarding media consumption. It almost feels like the opposite thing to the emptiness and vastness of space, where it's so much stuff all moving in such a quick space it hurts my brain. It's hyper energetic, moves pretty quick and has a lot of loud movements for that reason."
Looking ahead, Acyan has plenty planned for the rest of 2o23.
"As of right now, I am planning on releasing two more music videos for songs from MASCULTURE other than the one for 'NONSTOP.' One on the day of release and another in about a month. I have a show in Denver with my friends Synova and Lunai on October 8th, and I'm very excited to show off a set based around MASCULTURE for that show. As for music I do have upcoming releases after MASCULTURE, but for now they're secrets."
Acyan Examines MASCULTURE: Acyan's MASCULTURE is out now.
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