AYCH, The Nashville-based producer, is coming off a massive year. He has been continuing the momentum by releasing bangers like “9mm” with OVEREAZY, and performing at festivals that are staples of the bass scene like North Coast Music Festival, Sound Haven, and Wakaan Fest.
AYCH is known for his hefty sonic design and his bass-face-inducing remixes. Last year, some of his breakout flips included reworks of “No Broke Boys” by Disco Lines & Tinashe and “Pride” by Key Glock. AYCH has track releases on iconic electronic labels like Subsidia, Bassrush, Deadbeats, and Gravitas, which has positioned him among the artists that are shaping the space moving forward.
We got the chance to sit down with AYCH following his set at North Coast Music Festival to talk about his musical influences, the festival, and much more. AYCH is a down-to-earth producer who we can tell genuinely cares about the bass community and wants to see the success of everyone around him. We hope you enjoy this interview from North Coast with AYCH just as much as we did!
—
HIHF: Thanks for sitting down with us AYCH! I was at your set, it was unreal. The Fire stage is such a cool place and they did a great job this year. Can you talk a little bit about your set and the stage?
AYCH: My set was great. This was like a rendition of my SoundHaven set. So I took some of the deeper songs out of it and replace those with a few more flips that I had played out a lot recently. To start my set, I played “Transitions Flip (I Shine)”, which I dropped super lowkey on my SoundCloud the weekend of SoundHaven. That one’s been received super well. I thought,“I’m in between two Riddim artists, I’m gonna just go out start off with some hip-hop, and see where it goes.” So I played out “9mm” and then played out some Daily Bread, just kicked it off with some good hip-hop vibes, and then went up into the heavy trap and dubstep regions then back down again. It was super fun. In terms of the Fire Pit, we heard fire, and thought cool, that’s the theme. Then Steven, the stage manager, an awesome guy and a great DJ that goes by the name of Rudashi said “I’m gonna fire up the flames now”. He came up on stage and all of a sudden the whole stage was on fire and the ceiling in the dome was full of flames. It was sick.
HIHF: What are your thoughts about North Coast Music Festival? Is this your first time here? Are you going to see any other acts?
AYCH: This is my first time at North Coast. I’ve been to Chicago a bunch of times. I went to Lollapalooza a little while back and then I was here for Spring Awakening in 2018. I had a great time at that festival and Porter Robinson actually played the year that I went. For a while, that was one of the few Chicago festivals that I’d been to. Since then I’ve played at The Point and at Chop Shop with SoDown. I arrived at the artist area for NCMF and was shocked by the scale. I didn’t realize the stadium was this big. It was just a sea of people.
North Coast has definitely stacked up to my expectations. After this, I’m probably gonna catch the Levity b2b Tape B set. I’ll also be here for the next couple days. I have some artist friends based here, like Cozy Kev’s in town. He’s a Chicago native. Tazu, big fan of his. And obviously Levity being from Chicago, that’s pretty sick. They get to come out and headline this hometown festival.
HIHF: You’ve talked about how your sister introduced you to dubstep and that you grew up playing the cello. Knowing that, who are some of your earliest musical inspirations? Can you give us an electronic one and maybe a non-electronic one?
AYCH: When I was a kid my parents would take us to concerts. My earliest memory of a concert was the Blue Man Group. They played the song “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer. I vividly remember thinking, “Oh my goodness, this is so cool. They’re up there drumming, playing their own stuff, making their own stuff. I’m gonna do this someday.” So, since I was a little kid, I always wanted to go this route, with touring and stuff. Also, I was big into metal music when I was younger, like Slipknot and Disturbed. My grandfather listened to a lot of country music and bluegrass, so I had a lot of different musical exposures growing up.
HIHF: You’ve mentioned some of your producer friends and have spoken a lot about Discord. How has that community been important to your growth? We saw that a lot during COVID but know it’s still relevant today.
AYCH: I moved to Nashville and there were a whole bunch of people in the artist community. A few of the artists did weekly beat battles during COVID. I joined that and hung out with them cuz we couldn’t really do shows at the time. I was like a super beginner and wanted to learn.
That’s one of the reasons Discord is a great platform. There were so many producers sharing content on the daily, and we were all stuck inside, so we had people to hang out with. If our friends couldn’t come over or some people had high risk family members, Discord was the only way to talk to people. That opened up a whole new world with production lessons, YouTube tutorials, and Patreons from artists. It used to be so much harder to get the information we can now. Discord gave novice producers, like the people that could make a beat and stuff but still didn’t have a good concept of how to make sounds, a path forward.
Those communities took me to that next level. I’m learning from artists that I like, and I can take their sounds, learn from them, look at their project files, and see what they’re doing. That led me to meeting so many other people like, SCHMUX, who I’m a big fan of, also VelcroShirt. There’s OVEREAZY, who I just collaborated with on “9mm.” We spent so much time together on Discord early on. The community encouraged each other and lifted each other up. We were all giving each other feedback, really trying to become better at the craft.
That was followed by people listening to our music and finding it organically through the Hypeddit stuff, like the download gates. The chain of influence from going from COVID to Discord to Hypeddit, to hanging out with friends on calls and lifting each other up really catapulted my career. Discord is one of the most powerful tools for an up and coming producer to find the people that they get along with and resonate with their music. It’s impossible to build a project without being a part of the community, going to shows, listening to other peers’ music, and just getting to know people. At the end of the day, these are the artists we see every time we’re at shows. So, you want to make sure you’re building good relationships and doing what you can to push the genre forward. I ask myself all the time, “what is my goal with this?” What I always come back to is I want to give people opportunities, the same way that Discord did for me.
I have my own discord community which is super important to me. It’s not as active right now, but when things slow down a little bit, I’m definitely gonna get that going again and start introducing lessons and other tutorials. A lot of artists have this super big individualistic mindset, and that’s never been my thing. I really try to encourage people to get out there and meet other people doing the same thing. There’s plenty of room for every artist to make it. You just gotta focus on making good music and being a good person. Because everybody I meet, the artists playing here, they’re all nice people. These are all producers that have been kind to people, which is just a small part of getting to where they were at, but it’s a very important part of it. And they’ve all done what they can to push the genre forward and lift up other artists. If one of the larger artists like Levity or Tape B plays your song out, that’s a huge deal for a smaller artist. I don’t know of many other genres that people do that. When you think outside of EDM, like hip hop or rap, it feels very individualistic compared to EDM and bass music culture. We have a really cool community compared to other genres, and I think it’s super dope.
HIHF: What’s next for the AYCH project? Any cool collabs or upcoming shows you can tell us about?
AYCH: I have some cool stuff that I was working on with rSUN. We’ve got a few collabs that I’m really, really excited about. I’m also working with a new guy named Emrys. He just had a track on “We Are Deadbeats Vol. 7” alongside myself and the other producers. He sent me a demo and I thought, damn, this is sick. I was actually gonna play it today, but for some reason, there was a plug in that was bugging out and it would not let me export the project. The song’s almost there. I’m super excited about it.
I’m taking my trap influences and hip hop and stuff that I did in the past with my flips and trying to integrate that into my newer music, really focusing on the sampling and taking more time to tell a story through every song. There’s just been so many personal experiences where I’ll be making a tune somewhere, like at my grandma’s house when I go to visit, and it’s a new environment. I’ve been really inspired traveling to new places and working on music. Being able to work in a new space has opened up so many new ideas for me. Being able to work on the road and not be stuck in one place definitely helped spark inspiration.
I’ve had the opportunity to work with a bunch of different artists, especially in the underground. One artist I’d like to work with would probably be Fossils. He’s another underground artist I really f**k with. I really like STVSH, we have a few collabs that we’ve made together. We’ve got one heavy one called “Beat Them Down” and then the other ID that we’ve got is called “Be My.” It’s got some cool chords in the intro, it’s definitely more of a melodic dubstep song. I know that we will probably make some new stuff in the future too. He’s one of my favorite producers around right now.
I’ve also got some tours coming up in January. Some stuff that I can’t really announce yet. I’ve got merch on the way. We just finished up some stuff for this Fall, and then I’ll also be releasing some other stuff in the Spring that I’m really excited about. These designs are really cool. We spend a lot of time getting all of the mockups done the way that I wanted it to be. This will be merch that you can wear outside of a festival environment and still feel good. I’m more of a fan of streetwear, and I personally have never bought a lot of artists’ merch. Artists’ merch I do buy are pieces that are custom and tailored to my taste or the artist’s taste. I know it’s specific to them and not a reprint of another artist’s stuff. It’s exciting to finally get that merch stuff done because I’ve never dropped merch before. I did a run of Beanies but then I changed my logo. I have a bunch of them sitting around with no place to sell them yet, but I might just offload them on Instagram and say, “anybody want an old beanie? I’ve got these 1st gen ones.”
Lots of new music on the way. I’ve been cooking, hanging out with friends, going to festivals as much as I can, just being a part of the scene and it’s been great. I feel like bass music is in a really good place right now. There’s a lot of new opportunities, not only for myself, but for so many people around the space. The fact that there’s this many of my peers at a festival of this scale is super cool. To have bass music represented in this way is really cool. I’m just excited for the future. Seeing where it all leads me. I don’t know what is gonna happen next honestly, but as the years go on, I’m just gonna keep making bangers.
HIHF: What is one thing or hobby that you think the fans should know about that maybe they don’t already know about you?
AYCH: I did Jiu-Jitsu for a little while. I was really into it. One of my friends is actually a professional fighter now. He just fought in Dana White’s contender series. His name’s Jon Kunneman. He had been the one initially that said, “you need to go and try this out”. We were in college when it happened. I was just a sophomore. So I went and did it and I thought, okay, this is super cool. I had never done martial arts or anything like that. I was just a studio guy, I like to weightlift and stuff, but I got super into it and spent the whole summer learning, did a competition, got my ass kicked, and then took a year off before I moved to Nashville. I did it to keep in shape more than anything. I lifted weights for so many years, I just got so bored of that. The community inside Jiu-Jitsu was sick. When I came to Nashville, I found a gym in Franklin, and it turned out to be one of the best in the country. The people out there were awesome. It was a different level of training and a different level of community than anything I’d ever experienced. I kept going back and did that for about a year. Then I got injured. I had a variety of things that took me out of the gym. That was unfortunate, but that’s one thing that people probably wouldn’t know about me. I also grew up hunting and fishing. I love to hunt, fish, and just be out in nature. That’s about it.
Huge shoutout to AYCH and his team for coordinating this interview and having our team out, be sure to show him love on social media!