Heard It Here First

At HeardItHereFirst, we love introducing our readers to new artists and genres that are taking the scene by storm. One genre that has certainly gained a lot of traction recently is “Phonk”. For years, Phonk has been thought of as strictly Internet music, meaning the main way that fans and listeners have been able to consume this music is via the Internet with YouTube, TikTok, SoundCloud, etc. However, there has been a major shift in 2023, where Phonk is now starting to make it’s way into the live music setting. When looking at some of the recent bass music lineups that have been announced, you are now starting to see names like DJ Yung Vamp and Soudiere being added to these stacked cards.

One of the prominent figures leading this Phonk charge is Ryan Celsius. For over a decade, Ryan has built a massive following and platform for Phonk with his YouTube channel, which now has nearly 600,000 subscribers. His “Trappin in Japan” mix series is one of the most popular on YouTube, amassing tens of millions of views. With Phonk now gaining a lot of traction, Ryan is preparing to embark on the first-ever all-Phonk tour that will be hitting several cities across the United States over the next month.

This Friday, Ryan will kick off “The End of Underground” tour at the 8×10 in Baltimore, MD. This show, presented by the folks at Headnod Entertainment and Phonk Around & Find Out, will feature some of the very best that the genre has to offer. Ryan will be joined by other prominent names like VonStorm and BACKWHEN, as well as local rising stars BadKidsGoodPeople and Saint Pond. Additionally, there will be Phonk Around & Find Out residents Imperivm b2b Hoodiemane b2b Wasabi Jackson laying down the vibes to kick off the night.

If you’re in the Baltimore area and want to experience this show, grab tickets right here!

Ahead of this historic tour, we caught up with Ryan Celsius to talk about Phonk origins, his music career, Phonk’s emergence in the underground bass music community, the upcoming tour and more in this exclusive interview. Check out the full conversation below and let us know if you plan on hitting one of these upcoming shows!

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HIHF: Let’s start with the basics. For a lot of our readers who might not know what we’re talking about, what exactly is Phonk music? What are its origins? Tell us a little bit about the background of this genre.

Ryan: Phonk, not to be confused with funk, is a genre that is actually really diverse. I want to start with the current day view. I think that a lot of people have heard Phonk for the first time via some of the viral trends that have emerged, particularly on TikTok and on YouTube. There’s a certain sound we call “808 Cowbell”, which is this detuned, 808 cowboy bell sound that’s usually used in pretty fast-paced styles, which is what we call “Drift Phonk.” Drift phonk is a version of Phonk that’s very hard, very aggressive, and very fast. It’s what I would say is the most in line with existing EDM in terms of tempo and energy. It doesn’t necessarily have drops, but it does have that type of high energy. I think a lot of people, especially in the EDM space, are probably familiar with Phonk from hearing that 808 cowbell sound from artists like Kordhell, PlayaPhonk, and some of the other Russian producers that have been really pushing Drift Phink. So that’s the sound I think a lot of people are hearing and saying “hey, that’s what it is.” 

But really, that’s an offshoot of something that started a long time ago. The roots of Phonk, for me, are in Memphis with Three 6 Mafia, specifically the production of DJ Paul and artists like Kingpin Skinny Pimp, DJ Zirk and all of these guys from the mid and early 90s that really pioneered this gritty, underground sound that would oftentimes be almost like lofi. Not in the sense of chill lofi, but more like low fidelity. There’d be this muddy, dirty sound, like you got it out of a trunk. And that dirty sound, alongside a lot of chanting lyrics at the time, was novel to me because I think hip hop in general was kind of dominated by New York during the early 90s. You started to see people in the South doing a lot of hip hop, but Three 6 Mafia and a lot of others in the South were really killing it in their own lane. So for me, Phonk started with that Memphis sound and then evolved to include elements of Houston and DJ Screw and all these things. So, what I want to call “Modern Phonk” is sort of all of these aspects that start to coalesce from Memphis to Houston to Atlanta trap, and then fuse it with sample-heavy mix culture. 

So now in the modern day, and specifically 2012-2014, you started to have producers putting out what they would call Phonk tracks on SoundCloud, and this sound became really, really prevalent with artists like DJ Yung Vamp. There was also Loud Lord, COSMASTLY, Soudiere, Roland Jones a little bit later, some of the guys like that. They’ve been doing it for a long time and they each have their own style. The way they would sample things and what they would lean more into created this gritty, almost evil sound like you’re listening to a horror movie soundtrack on a terrible VHS tape. Some would lean towards a more clean, sample heavy, mashup Girl Talk style. DJ Smokey is most known for that vocabulary of sampling; so many different things and still having it hit hard with really fat 808s, and it’s a really big, bombastic sound. Phonk has evolved to include all of those things and they all have their own kind of subgenres within Phonk, so that’s the simplest way I’ve described it to people. It’s a genre that’s very versatile. So now you have things like “Future Phonk”, right, which has heavy synths and these futuristic sounds blended with Phonk. There’s all sorts of styles within Phonk – you can mix it with drum and bass and have its own sort of feel, but really not sound insincere to drum and bass either. 

It’s a very flexible genre, but its roots are in those Memphis samples. Its roots are in the use of 808s and different strong, powerful basses and the slowed down, chopped and screw sounds and all of these different tools that can be utilized just like samples. That’s what I would say. I would say it’s the fusion of Southern hip hop, electronic and sample-heavy mashup culture distilled into a single genre.

HIHF: That’s very interesting and I really appreciate that breakdown! Looking at the landscape today, are there specific Phonk “hot beds” here in the United States as well as around the world? You mentioned the origins in Memphis and Houston, as well as Russia—are those considered “Phonk hot beds”?

Ryan: It’s hard to really tell what’s happening on the ground. That’s a lot of the reason why I try to encourage everybody to get out into the communities because realistically, I can go and look at the Spotify stats and see that there are people playing this genre, but with any underground genre, it’s very hard to tell. Most underground genres are what I call “Internet Music.” So Phonk is really within that realm of Internet music like Vapor Wave and other things that I don’t think would exist really as heavily or as prevalent, or have their own appeal without the influence of the Internet platforms like SoundCloud and Bandcamp, specifically.

I would say in terms of actual geographic hotbeds, one thing that is most notable is that Phonk was really blowing up in Russia. Right before Spotify introduced itself to Russia in late 2019, you started to see more and more Phonk producers put stuff up on Spotify. You had already seen this trend of a lot of Phonk producers in Russia and South America, which I think caught people in the US a little bit off guard when they would meet a lot of producers online and become friends. There’s a whole set of producers in Ukraine that’s going nuts. There’s a whole set in Moscow and Russia that’s going nuts, and it’s like 20-30 guys that have their own collective. They know about this other hip hop from the 90s and you find out some of the strongest guys are in Europe. So then it’s like, well is the hot bed where all the producers are? Or is the hot bed where all the fans are? Is the hot bed where people will actually come out to a show? Or is the hot bed just where the Internet numbers say, “hey, Texas has the most views for Trappin in Japan” or something like that. 

I would say it’s kind of a moving target and for me, it’s something that I really want to dig into and explore because I’m familiar with a lot of underground genres. I’ve been a part of a lot of different underground movements and there is an invisible hand that pushes these things forward. There are a bunch of people that are doing work and it’s not really about credit or anything like that, but you don’t know those people who are doing the work. They are guys like me, these faceless Internet people just trying to push something forward. For example, I did a lot of stuff within vaporwave and lofi hip hop. This invisible hand type of movement within that is setting up the right conditions for a lot of people to pop off, not just one person or one superstar. So that’s kind of getting away from the point of the hotbed, but I think it goes hand in hand with it. You have to build up a community and then feed that community. And that community may exist purely on the Internet. 

For me, I feel like the hotbeds that were surprising to see were over in Europe, specifically Russia and Ukraine and all those areas where you had tons of incredible producers and fans. I think people in the U.S. are coming around and you’re starting to see major artists really utilizing that sound more and more. To me, the biggest indication of this was when you started seeing guys like DJ Paul become a part of tons of projects. Over the last three or four years, you’ve seen DJ Paul on a lot of tracks and bringing in things like Project Pat. If you look at one of Drake’s more recent albums, Certified Lover Boy, you have a Project Pat track featured on there. To me, that’s an indication that the sound has already broken through a bit because I feel like Project Pat is a mainstay in terms of vocal sampling on Phonk tracks. When the greatest do it, it’s like we’re finally starting to put respect on the names that built this.

HIHF: Speaking of surprising places where this sound is prominent, I recently read that Brazil has quite the Phonk scene. It’s incredible to hear how far this has extended around the globe.

Ryan: Oh yeah, a lot of Brazilian and South American Phonk draws from a deep well of music in South America that, most of which in my opinion, hasn’t even been on any digital platforms. There’s all this folk music and all of these styles that are hard to find, and I think producers in that area are really utilizing it. That community is showing what they can do with those samples that have never been heard before, or there’s styles that people never heard before fusing it with this underground scene. So yeah, they’re doing some incredible work down there.

HIHF: Yeah, that’s super cool. I want to go back to something you said about how early on in your career, you were involved in a lot of different underground scenes. I’m curious about what your musical background was like in general—what were you involved in early on and how did that progress over time to becoming one of the leading figures in Phonk?

Ryan: Music wise, I grew up playing piano. I love classical music, soundtrack music, this almost cinematic type of stuff. I love alternative, a lot of rock, names like Portishead, Deftones, Incubus, although Radiohead is my favorite of all time. And then you had southern hip hop, which I love equally as much—guys like Pastor Troy, MJG, Trick Daddy, Outkast, and obviously Three 6. 

When I got to college, I started meeting people that were into what they called “underground music.” It really opened my mind up; this was in the early 2000s, so at that time it was very unusual to have just beat tapes. That wasn’t something that was particularly common, but it’s something that I wanted more of. I loved instrumentals and I loved production, but it was hard to get DJ cuts at that time and things like that. You just get the acapella or instrumental. You had to be in the scene to get that kind of stuff. But when MF Doom came out and was putting out these beat tapes, it opened up my mind that you can just produce instrumentals and they could be a minute long and incredible. And then you could hand them out to people. It sounds so simple, right? It sounds so simple, but no one was really executing on that or thinking about that. Everyone’s hyper focused on making something and hopefully a rapper jumps on it and hopefully this lottery ticket works out with this situation. And so that opened up my mind to say, hey, there’s music out here and there are ways to put out music that are great and may not necessarily be that popular, but they’re incredibly important. At the time I wasn’t even thinking about paying it forward. I was thinking about how I just want to go as deep as possible and find out.

I started working at the radio station at the university. One of my good friends was a super talented mix engineer, and he showed me the ropes. Here is Logic; this is Pro Tools; this is how we get these vocals in; this is us sitting in the studio for five hours, having dudes repeat the same line for two of those hours, and then the rest of the time we’re sitting there EQing and learning what mastering is, and all these things. So I got deep into that production lane, which was mainly hip-hop, and at the time we were getting people that were, I guess, now more well known into this small little studio. You had guys like Yo Gotti, you had Raheem DeVaughn, you had people like that and it just kept motivating me more to produce some crazy s***. 

So, basically from 2004 to 2007, I was just producing a lot of mashups at the time. There’s no real name for it, but I typically refer to it as just “Mashup Music.” It was like slowed down Three 6 Mafia mixed with samples from cartoons and stuff like that. And no one really understood what that was. There’s an artist named Girl Talk that was going nuts with this type of sound. What he was doing was definitely different than some of the other mashups that were made. It was far above simply combining two tracks like Smash Mouth and Biggie, in my opinion. So I had my own evolution of that, which was utilizing more down south samples. Like what if we had 8 ball MJG over this perfect circle baseline with this other thing going on, so I did that for quite a while. Then I had a traumatic experience where my house that I was living in with my roommates got robbed and they really stole all of my stuff, which at that time was very expensive. The hard drives and all that stuff; I was broke and in college, so they stole more than the physical items—they stole hundreds and hundreds of hours of work that I put into producing tracks. So from that point I got very demotivated and didn’t do any work. 

Years later, that work was going on to YouTube and going on to SoundCloud and finding these pockets. One pocket that I found earlier on was this electronic, sort of chill wave? I guess that’s what you would call it. So there was a lot of chill wave, right before future bass started to emerge. Dubstep was happening at the same time and it was fire during like 2008. But then you had this chill wave that was going on. Guys like Mr. Suicide Sheep, Majestic Casual; these online curated people really interested me. They’re just putting out and promoting this incredible music. I tried to emulate what they were doing and just say, oh, I want to put out incredible music and have people discover it. 

Then I started my YouTube channel a little bit later after that and a lot of the music on there was for these rare genres that didn’t really have names. The genre elitists hadn’t made it there yet, right? They didn’t call it lofi hip hop. They didn’t know what to call it. They just called it beats, so there are a lot of these beat tapes and earlier on it was like, OK, this is the guy that has all of the beat tapes. We don’t know what to call these things yet. Someone else will figure out a cool name, but he has all the chill out music. So I started putting more and more of that out and I discovered vaporwave and started making aesthetics for vaporwave because I was huge into gaming and video games, so I would make all these vaporwave covers and just put them out and help people on Bandcamp. They were trying to put out this vaporwave music, which most people thought was garbage, but at the time, I thought it was really cool and I thought it really needed an aesthetic. And a lot of other people in that community felt like that was part of it, too. Let’s have a visual style for this thing. And so I contributed a lot to the visual side of the genres and that continued on with vapor wave and lofi hip hop fusions.

I continued to push within those realms and support all of the large creators within them and helped them with whatever they needed. So that’s what I mean by this “invisible hand” that’s pushing genres forward because there’s tons of people like me doing that and trying to really push things forward without extracting from them. So yeah, that’s kind of my background with that, just going into those communities and then doing as much as I could to give it any type of platform.

HIHF: That’s awesome, I really like that. And you mentioned the YouTube channel that you started. I definitely want to dig into that a little bit. Tell us how that channel started as well as how your mix series Trappin in Japan took off.

Ryan: Trappin in Japan is one of the more notable mixes, a lot of people love that series. I think Trappin in Japan started when the YouTube channel had already been around for about four years. When I first started the channel, it was technically two channels, but at the time the idea was that I wanted to upload new music every single day, period; at least one new track every single day, so that I might maintain that for like 7-8 years on the channel. And then around 2015 or 2016, that’s when I wanted to start putting out a mix. Just a selection of tracks or a full album of tracks, which was very unusual on YouTube at the time, you know? Even the big guys didn’t really put out a whole album or a mix of tracks. It would be one track with the image and that’s pretty much it. I wanted to try and put out a video of the whole thing. And that’s when I started putting out the first mix series, which was called “Journey Through Japan”, which I think was 12 different tapes from this producer named JPN (literally just Japan without the vowels). I put these beat tapes with videos of bus rides going down through the hills of Japan and looking out on these clean Japanese highways and all of that. It was a big vibe, it was very chill. 

At the same time, I started to listen to a lot more bass-heavy Phonk at that time earlier on and I thought, well, what if we created the same trip, but at night? What does it look like in the city? That sort of thing. So the first Trappin in Japan really aligned with the idea of you’re traveling through Japan at night, looking at the bright lights, and there are bangers playing and you got a stink face on and you’re really digging it. So that’s how Trappin in Japan was born. It was definitely influenced by some of the YouTube guys and what I was listening to, but then it became pretty popular along with another series called HIGH AT WORK, which was ironic because I didn’t really even smoke at that time. But the vibe was something where you could watch it and you could feel like you were literally high at work. You have these smooth bangers that aren’t quite trap hits, but they’re laid back, chopped and screwed, and you’re driving through Japan and going through different countries, but mainly Japan. And so HIGH AT WORK and Trappin in Japan were the series that people started to love the most from the channel.

HIHF: That’s super cool. And as you were building that channel and this series over the years, was there a particular moment or period of time when you were like, “oh wow, this is really catching on. I really need to keep pushing this forward” ?

Ryan: I don’t think there was necessarily an “Aha!” moment because I had been doing it for so long. I’m a very introverted person, so I’m not a person that’s looking for validation or that sort of stuff. I was more so looking for that thing where I wanted to be seen just by virtue of the fact that I’m a gamer at heart and it’s competitive. I want the numbers to go up. So for me, the “Aha!” moment was the first video I made. I made a video that took me like a month to make; literally a three-minute video for a song by Clams Casino called “Gorilla” that was off of that legendary mixtape, which also featured that eventual A$AP Rocky track that he used and a bunch of other incredible experimental bangers.

I wanted to make music videos from all those tracks using movies that I really loved, and so it took me like a month to make this one thing and I was just so proud of it. I was so excited showing all my friends at the gaming sessions and showing my family. I’m like yo, this is so fire and nobody cares. They’re like, yo, what is this? What are you doing? You just chopping stuff up? I don’t get it. But then I got like maybe 100 views or something on YouTube and to me that was really exciting. There was this guy, Hugo Red Rose, who has his own YouTube channel. All I wanted to do was really impress him with the music video I made. He eventually saw it maybe a couple months later and said that he really liked it. To me, that was enough for me to say, OK, this is my high moment. I’m gonna keep grinding. I’m gonna keep doing what I think is cool, and I know that that will make me feel great. I don’t care if I got 100 views or 100 million views at this point. I’m just locked in.

For the first three or four years, I had more videos than I had subscribers—maybe like 160 videos and like 140 subscribers. So when things started going “well”, I’m getting those millions of views and thousands of people watching the livestream—obviously it felt great to have more people vibing with it, but that wasn’t like the “Aha!” moment that happened already. I already knew in my mind that it was dope, so when people started vibing with it, they were seeing what I was doing. So then it became, hey, let’s see where this can go. Let’s just keep pushing. Let’s keep experimenting. Let’s add more on to it. I hope even more people like this. Let’s go ahead and keep it going. So yeah, the “Aha!” moment came to me really early and I think that allowed me to have a lot of fun with what I was doing and not be burdened with any thoughts of the scale of “ohh I want it to be this, that and the third”, which I think would have been a huge distraction.

HIHF: I love that. Just sharing something you’re super passionate about, and if others like it, that’s awesome too. That’s super cool to hear about. You mentioned that gaming has played a huge role in your life—I think I had read somewhere that the name “Ryan Celsius” was like your gamertag that you used. Is that where the name came from? Was that always your gamertag?

Ryan: Hah, I think I had less quality gamertags before Ryan Celsius, I’ll just say that. I had a process with my gamertag. The name Ryan Celsius actually came to me during a weird, inception-style dream. I had a dream about the name, then I woke up and told my roommate like yo, I got the perfect name. We were always trying to come up with names for different games that you could play as. He said, damn that sounds pretty cool. But then I woke up because that was a dream inside of a dream. I was tripped out because my roommate was in the exact same spot. He was in the dream sitting on his computer next to the bunk bed. I said, yo, I just came up with this name, Ryan Celsius. He said, “oh yeah, that’s pretty cool!” and I thought ohh wow, this is trippy. It’s too trippy. I’m going to leave him and leave it alone. So then I started using it within games and it became sort of like an evolution or like a game within the game, in a way. 

I talk a lot of trash in games and other people talk a lot of trash in those Call of Duty chat rooms, for example. So we’re playing fighting games, and I would almost challenge these Internet, thug-type people by having my gamertag as my given name. My government name was my gamertag. Right there on every platform, and people wouldn’t believe that it was my real name. They thought I was trying to scam somebody. I’d say, “Yeah, come see me. What’s up? It’s me” and they’d be like “no, no, no, that’s not you.” So that’s Level 1. So when I would get to a certain skill level, I would change my tag to Ryan Celsius in Call of Duty, for example. And then when it gets to a certain point above that, I change it to another name that I would utilize as well. For me, I just really like those gaming concepts, like the evolution from this to that. Everyone is a Pokémon person at this point, you know? But the idea of evolving and leveling up, I took that very literally with the names. And so the Ryan Moses was an evolution of my regular name. Evolve it to this, evolve to that, so there might be another thing after Ryan Celsius that’s an evolution of what I’m doing when I feel like I’m at a certain level of expertise or knowledge. 

HIHF: Looking at Phonk in 2023, in general there definitely seems to be a huge shift in how people are not only viewing it, but listening to it. What has it been like to see Phonk begin moving from being strictly Internet music to the live music setting and why do you think Phonk has been able to find a space in the underground bass music community? 

Ryan: To be honest, I think there’s something that’s been missing within those bass scenes for a while. For some of those scenes, the influence of hip hop on EDM specifically is something that a lot of EDM artists almost shy away from in a way to differentiate it from hip hop. But then Phonk says it can all be the same s***. You can have drops in a track that samples Project Pat, for example, and you can have all these different elements. I feel like the bass scene has always kind of been limited to a flow chart. You know what a dubstep track is supposed to sound like. I’m gonna play that flow chart and I might mix it up a little bit. But you know what I’m not going to do? I’m not going to randomly play that Project Pat sample here, I’m not going to do anything that’s outside the bounds of these invisible rules, and I feel like EDM and some of that bass music would play by those rules a lot. I think Phonk released them from the idea of putting things into boxes where it’s like hey, this is a trap track. This is an EDM track. This is a bass track. This is a wave track. These are all different things, right? I think the producers within Phonk are experimental enough because they’ve made all these different genres to say, oh, well, I’m gonna fuse them all. I think that’s why they’re getting added to these lineups, because it’s been missing for longer than it should have. 

Obviously, the majority of the mainstream has been a lot of hip hop and then when you go to EDM, you see some of that influence. I think the kids coming up now who are 18, 19, in their early 20—they’re heavily influenced by hip-hop, even if they are EDM heads or whatever the case may be. They still know the samples, they expect certain cadences, and when you start playing with their expectations, that’s really engaging. And so I think that’s why you’re gonna start to see more and more Phonk artists at these live events. My goal is to be like the Steve Aoki of the underground. There should be a character like that, right? Because the quality of the music and what it can do for an audience is expansive to that degree. Even beyond that, I think it has looser bounds and leads directly to the idea of this debut tour and all that. I’m really trying to impress upon people that this is something that’s at the same level as what you call EDM and at some point, I think there’s a lot of people that want to just fuse them together, but that’s more marketing. I’m not an elitist with the genre names. That’s just for people to help people find the s*** that you know. 

Philosophically, it doesn’t really matter to me to be honest, but I think right now there’s definitely a push to put Phonk—specifically that Drift Phonk sound—into that dance EDM lane and you can see this from some of the articles that have been written. There was a Rolling Stone article that came out and I think I was referenced in there, but the idea was that Phonk is a dance genre. That’s what it says in the Rolling Stone article. And to me, that’s more marketing than anything, because that’s going to be the thing that the venues reference and say, hey, what type of dance music? What is Phonk? I’ve never heard of this before. What is it? And they Google it and it says, oh, it’s a dance genre. Then it’s like, OK, let’s book that. So, for me, when it comes to Phonk within bass music scenes and general EDM scenes, it’s definitely something that’s very interesting. I could talk for hours just about the dynamics and why certain things need to happen, even though they may not be accurate to the lore of the sound, but the idea of Phonk being a dance genre is something that needs to happen to push it into the mainstream. And then from there you can do whatever you want.

HIHF: Now that this is coming more and more into the scene, what does the future have in store for Phonk moving forward and what are you most excited about for the genre’s future?

Ryan: In terms of the genre’s future, I’m just happy that it’s so wide open and that there’s options for the future. My whole goal is to establish the idea of options and opportunities. I hate the idea of a superstar because realistically if it’s about superstars, Phonk should have already popped off by now. Technically, for example, what do $uicideboy$ make? They’re basically making Phonk, but the idea of a singular group or just a couple of people at the top is something that’s not sustainable for a genre. I feel like you see this in EDM a lot to be honest. With Phonk, you don’t have superstars; you have a community of people working and the waters being raised and raised and raised, and you get these big jumps and these trends from certain people. However, the trend isn’t married to that person, which I think is really good because it’s still so underground. I like to say the future of Phonk is more flexible and wide open than other genres that have hit really hard and kind of faded and become “wax.” Off that, you’re going to start to see it more and more on big projects. You’re going to start to see more discussion around what is Phonk versus what isn’t Phonk. I love those discussions. The more ambiguous the genre is, the more experimentation you can do, and people don’t have these invisible walls around how they produce or what they make. So I think, sonically, the future is very bright. 

In terms of true growth as an art form, I feel like the tour and encouraging others to go to these shows is a good thing because right now the whole thing is, what does a Phonk show look like, right? Most people have no clue. And I think that’s good because maybe a Phonk show is something you don’t expect. Maybe it’s a whole event, maybe it’s an art installation, maybe it’s the scene from Blade where there’s blood coming from the sprinklers. I want to impress upon people that Phonk can have that type of boom, visceral response to what you expect. And you should always continue to try and push that, because really it’s all about art and entertainment. It’s about the experience you want to create, something that’s a super interesting and valuable experience for yourself and for the people that are ingesting it. So for me, the future of Phonk is bright for that reason. There are a lot of pieces to making it work. People are so dedicated now that I think we’re in the trenches, we’re in the mud right now. We’re grinding. You know what I mean? It’s not about the money, I guess, it’s really about the sound. We’re doing it for the love and I think for that reason, that hasn’t waned yet. My heart stands from my artistic standpoint. It’s very bright from an opportunity standpoint and from a sonic standpoint, there’s a lot of room to grow. 

HIHF: That’s super exciting to hear about. I definitely want to touch on the upcoming tour as well. How and when did you decide that now is the right time to embark on this tour? How many stops are there? Who are you bringing? Tell us a little bit about the tour.

Ryan: So for the true origins of the tour, I gotta give a shoutout to my homie Flying Lotus. During the pandemic, I’m doing my thing, I have the live stream, but more or less I’m not proper DJing. I mean I’m making the majority of my mixes in Ableton Live or like directly within the DAW or within the video editor. I think almost all the Trappin in Japan episodes up until episode 14 were all made in a video editor. I’m not even using the DJ equipment or mixing them in a way that people would assume. I’m just manipulating the .wav files in the video editor, lining things up, chopping them manually and making effects in a very retrospect, incredibly inefficient way. And then Flying Lotus hit me up and basically invited me to do a DJ set and open for him. He was a GOAT to me on the Mount Rushmore of hip hop—MF Doom, J Dilla, Flying Lotus, Mad Lib.

So for him to hit me up and say, “hey man, I want you to come and do a live show”, that was a a life changing moment to where I said, OK, well, I need to learn how to do this at a high level very fast because he asked me to do it like 7-8 days before the show was supposed to happen. And at that time I’d only started DJing in my room here alone, which I don’t really count. I’m in my room alone mixing stuff using a controller, whatever. And so long story short, I played the show with Flying Lotus and apparently it ended up working out. And from that point forward, I just started getting hip to the idea of there’s more to this Internet music than just the Internet, right? Getting out here and doing it live is a different thing and I need to figure out how to provide something different for the community. Then people in the community started hitting me up saying they didn’t know I DJ’d. And then the conversation quickly became “let’s figure something out, man. Let’s do a tour one day.” 

So fast forward again, I’m doing more shows, I’m getting bookings here and there, but it’s nothing really consistent. Then in January, I had been talking about it for a while, and I said let’s just pull the trigger on trying to book shows and really do this thing. And then that’s when I went over to The Black Box [in Denver] and met Corey. We did Phonk Around And Find Out and VonStorm and BACKWHEN were there. The energy in Denver was crazy. We had just sold out The Black Box and that’s when it really hit me that this tour needed to happen. Everyone who came out was there for Phonk. It wasn’t just, “hey, come to this and you might hear some Phonk music”. No, no, they left their homes to come see some Phonk. And so at that point, I decided to start the tour. 

The idea of the tour is the “end of underground.” It’s almost like a dystopian apocalyptic end to this underground and in that wave, we’re breaking through into something else and it’s not guaranteed that it’s going to be a happy ending. It’s the end of underground. I like that idea of a post-apocalyptic tour series where the sound is going to be very experimental. It’s going to be very fun and it’s going to be a wide range where you’re not just gonna be hearing the same bass lines for four hours. You’re not gonna be hearing the same drum patterns for that whole time. You’re gonna be hearing a lot of different stuff, and I think that’s my main goal with the End of Underground—to showcase the variety of sounds and the variety of artists, so that’s why we have a couple different artists coming on board. The mainstays right now are gonna be VonStorm, the homie Enokalypse, who is an incredible producer that has roots within EDM. 

The first show in Baltimore with Saint Pond and BadKidsGoodPeople is going to be amazing. I’m a really, really huge fan of BadKidsGoodPeople. He’s just incredible. His mixes are always just so clean, so I’m excited to meet him. Haven’t met him or Saint Pond before, so I’m excited to meet them. BACKWHEN of course at this point is a Purple Posse OG and we have a lot of other guys as well coming on board. We’ve got M!NGO, for example. It’s a laundry list of producers and I want to keep adding on as many as possible. So for me, the end of underground represents all of that and putting on as many of these guys as possible and really showcasing them. It’s not necessarily about me, it’s not “the Ryan Celsius tour.” The end of underground is the main idea and we’re trying to push things as high as possible. It’s looking good so far, people are buying tickets and I have a lot planned for the show.

Visually, it’s going to be a very cool experience. What does that look like for a Phonk show, you know? I want that visceral feeling like we were talking about earlier. I say we’re going to a death metal show. You expect the mosh pit, you expect people dressed up in certain ways. Or I say we’re going to EDC. And in Vegas you have certain visual effects and lasers and big sound. That’s what that experience is going to be like. You don’t even need to know who’s playing; whoever is playing is like a huge cherry on top. So then it becomes, how do we build that for Internet music? That’s what the end of underground is really about.

HIHF: I did want to ask about your A/V set for this tour. What does your setup look like and what does prepping for an A/V Phonk set look like?

Ryan: The main thing I want to do for this is with my full analog VHS DJ setup. Basically I have a PlayStation 3 connected to two VCRs and then I have that connected to my DJ controller as well as another trackpad controller, where I have things mapped out for when I’m live VJing. So with the two VCR’s, I’m switching out tapes and then while I’m changing the tracks, I’m glitching them out with my custom glitch gear as well. You can do things like crossfade between the two analog feeds and distort them and do all that. So that’s kind of the goal of what I want to try to do each time. However, depending on the venue, depending on the setup, depending on whether it might just be overkill for whatever the situation is, I have ways of toning that down. I want to control all this s*** on stage—the music, the visuals, the lights—and have people understand that’s what’s happening. I feel like that would be the perfect marriage of the format because if one person is designing and doing all of it, then it’s more of a vision in my opinion. If multiple people are doing it, even if they are all experts, there’s going to be something missing. There’s gonna be something that can’t really be done the same way.

So the A/V set that I’m going to do in Baltimore is going to be shades of that depending on certain factors. But, it’s gonna be heavily influenced and utilize some of the glitch gear that I have to distort the feed on beat while I’m making a big drop or while someone is saying a certain sample like I mentioned. Maybe I have a visual sample queued up of a scene from Boyz n the Hood of someone pulling the gun out of the car and I switch it to something else to match the lyric real quick. I do little clever things like that throughout the set and then people that are watching are being bombarded with this imagery, and some people will get it right away. I want to do what I do on the YouTube channel, making these heavily beatmatched videos and things like that, but doing it live and seeing people’s reactions live. Every set is basically a freestyle and I think adding that element to it makes it interesting to hear and provides that sort of feeling of the unknown or that you don’t know what’s gonna happen. There might be failure, who knows.

So that might sound crazy. It’s the first tour, but I feel like providing something interesting and dynamic and a little bit dangerous and a little bit risky is good. Now is the time to make a stamp of what this is. I’ve been doing stuff long enough to know that you’re not going to figure it all out at the beginning. It may not even be the vision. It might be something that’s the side effect of what I want to do. We’ve got all this old technology, all this new technology, so let’s do something really interesting with it, you know?

HIHF: Yeah, I love the idea of “you won’t know unless you try.” I think that is just great. This idea of people wanting something different combined with what you were saying earlier about there being a whole lot of opportunity for experimentation—I have this phrase in my head as you were talking about this that I think sums it up pretty well: The Journey is The Destination. I feel like that’s kind of a good way to summarize not only your story, but also Phonk in general with this tour and its rise in popularity.

Ryan: Yeah, I think that’s a very good way to put it as well. I like that a lot actually because I’m a big proponent of that idea. You can get the win, but it’s not like there’s no happily ever after, right? You know what I mean? You can win, but then what else? What’s next? Oh, this mix has 10 million views. Well, when’s the next one coming out, you know? To me that’s just the practical personification of that idea of like, it’s not the goal but it is more so the journey, because that’s all you’re ever going to have. And so you want to make it as interesting and enjoyable as possible and then when you get a win, great, but let’s keep exploring, you know? So for me it’s definitely that. It’s definitely that energy.

HIHF: That’s awesome. I feel like we covered a lot here just now. Is there anything else our readers should know more about you or about Phonk that we haven’t covered yet?

Ryan: I think for me it’s mainly about pushing forward these philosophies of exploring. Ego and pride are tools that can be utilized in a good way and sometimes utilized in a poor way, especially in the underground scene. I think if everyone is aware of the idea of wanting to raise all these sounds and all these communities, that’s one of the most important things. It’s definitely going to be needed with a lot of the innovations and things that are happening with music. There’s going to be a revolution within how we consume music and how we consume video and things like that within the next six months. Being really open and adaptable is going to be the most important thing for the producers and for the fans and everything, and it’ll be really important to take advantage of these new opportunities. 

There’s a lot of talk about new technologies in the music industry and within the underground. I think this is the hot bed where the underground should be the first people to utilize new tools, because there’s low risk involved. Go utilize new tools, learn new things and create as much as possible for you. I think the main thing is people think they can predict trends and for someone that has predicted many, many trends, knowing the future isn’t important enough, you know what I mean? Knowing the future is not necessarily going to help you in the ways that you think it would. Being present in the moment and executing is going to help you be a part of the future. You can actually create trends yourself by putting in the work. I think if you’re in the underground, that is your position. Your position is to be the person that is creating the new wave. That wave is going to start off as a ripple, but as long as you are committed to it, who knows where it can go. I don’t want people to get lost in the sauce and stop making incredible music because I want to listen to it selfishly and I’m trying to experience it. So yeah, that’s the one thing I would express to the community.

HIHF: I think that’s a great message to end on. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us about your background and this incredible overview of Phonk. I’m really excited to continue following not only your journey, but also the increasing popularity of the genre.

We can’t thank Ryan enough for taking some time to drop some unbelievable knowledge on us! Be on the lookout for Phonk, this is only just the beginning.

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