REVIEW & INTERVIEW: GYATS0 “JOY”
“‘Joy’ was intended to express the line between overwhelming sadness and irresistible euphoria. It’s that feeling where you start crying, and you don’t know why and all you can literally think in your head is that life is beautiful and terrible and overwhelming. It’s anxious, the song itself is anxious. It’s waiting for something magical and nostalgic and comforting but knowing it’s so unlikely to show up that day. or that week or that year. Life is so hard to predict. for me, times, when I feel content and happy, are rare and hard to see coming, and when they do come it’s never for any real reason. It’s always the smallest most insignificant seeming things that remind me how much I value life and how beautiful it is.” Gyats0
The story of “Joy” started with Exoskeleton. The sonic project revolves around the life journey of a cicada. When Gyats0 visited Des Moines, Iowa every year in August, he would listen to the sound of cicadas falling asleep with his window open. The loud cries eventually died out when summer ends, and all that left was their exoskeletons. Gyats0 was fascinated by the poetic ideas behind the life of cicadas: “They spend most of the years and their lives dormant in the ground, basically dead. Then they emerge for three or so glorious weeks and give this electricity to the whole month of August,” he said, “Nobody exists outside of cycles. I want the album to feel like an open window, where the dreams and nightmares and thoughts drift in and out. I hope to give people comfort and provoke questions with my music.”
Like Exoskeleton, Gyats0’s music usually starts with a poetic idea or a cinematic vision. “I am a poet at heart and I just have found music to be the most honest and specific way I have of delivering my words,” he commented. From the sketch of each idea into a poem, he witnesses it evolves and leads to another idea, then it eventually becomes gigantic. “I want my albums to feel cinematic and dreamlike, psychedelic at times too, a ride you are on and see all the way through to the end. I try to start conceptually,” he said, “I try to put together a sonic scrapbook of sounds and do mockup mixes for the drum sounds. I’ll create effect chains for my guitar with the next song in mind already, knowing I want to push the limits of a distorted sound because the next song will be bright, clean, and hollow.”
Although the sound of “Joy” is rooted in dream pop, it’s hard to ignore an evocative nostalgic flavor mixed with rigidness in its attitude. Influenced by his rocker father, Gyats0 grew up in rock n roll music imprinted into his subconscious mind. Metal and classic rock was his introduction to music. As soon as he learned three chords on a guitar, he would start messing around making up songs in the same style. Grunge made a comeback in his late teens. This time, he dived deeper into its aesthetics and essence, which became fundamental to Gyats0’s sound.
Photo credit: Misha Davydov
“In the same way Cobain used to play out of tune or use vocal takes where his voice cracked. I was inspired by that rawness. The feel of the drums, the effects on the guitars are all intended to be the most honest to lyrics and sometimes perfect execution doesn’t make sense depending on what you want to convey,” he said, “sometimes you have to get drunk and sad and bang on your guitar, recording it that night instead of the next morning. That was the coolest thing about a band like Nirvana, in my opinion.”
Gyats0 isn’t interested in staying in the past. Inspired by those before us, his vision lies in the present and the future – the embrace of modern sound design, pop culture with the comeback of guitar-driven music, and an honest, rigid attitude. “All the people I look up to spoke in the conversation of music and had something to say – something that changed the way people thought about music,” he said, “I want to bring back honesty about the state of things in pop music. We don’t need more escapism. We as a society and as a world need truth. I want to inspire a new beat generation, fierce and passionate in their search for truth, fighting against systems, living freely.”
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