Buckle up, this is a long story.
I mentioned in passing that I make some music from time to time and that I would dedicate a part of this blog to that. This is still in the works; my plan is to have a completely separate page only for music and the behind-the-scenes of my tracks and demos. (The artist Sunnexo inspired this idea with their amazing blog!)
I think the best way to approach this is to start from the very beginning. What was my first interaction with music, and how did it become such a passion for me?
Truth be told, I actually don’t really know when my brain first acknowledged music as something more than pleasant sounds. That is, as an art form that inspires something deeper. Having the need to consume music just for the sake of it. One of the first memories I have of music having an impact is Disney Fantasia (the original and the 2000 one, my parents had both). Specifically, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and that whole animation. I remember it having such an impact on my developing brain. I would re-imagine the scene in my head over and over. By the way, quick tangent, that piece of music has a fascinating history which I think is extremely relevant to today’s music. Other than that, I also grew up in a household where classical music was very beloved. My parents had a nice collection of CDs and would play a lot of music as background ambiance. I think it’s undeniable that I soaked up a lot of that subconsciously.
Speaking of my family, my parents were always very interested in music themselves and really wanted me to learn an instrument, so they sent me to music classes when I was very young, as well as a little bit of violin. But these were very short spur-of-the-moment things that didn’t really go anywhere. I certainly didn’t learn how to play the violin 😆. I don’t really know why none of that stuck with me, but most likely my tendency to want instant gratification/results and lose interest in things quickly as a result of ADD. So, years went by and I completely stopped getting a musical education.
Around 2012-2013, my family and I moved to Germany and I started going to a new school. This was honestly the event in my life that completely split my childhood from my transition to adulthood. It was around this time that I started getting into internet culture, particularly early Minecraft (yes, I feel old…). Those who are familiar with old gaming YouTube know about the now-infamous YouTuber intros. Basically, they would have their name in 3D animated to some music, almost all of the time some Electronic Music. This was my very first exposure to the medium. I remember not understanding it at all and being kind of blown away by the sounds. I had only known music that came from instruments before, so hearing these sounds was almost like magic. I traced back some of the tracks I liked and found the duo Approaching Nirvana’s album Not Even Once as well as early Monstercat, specifically Pegboard Nerds and Tristam’s Razor Sharp. At the time I had no drive to try to make it myself, but the seed was planted in my brain.
Simultaneously, while on a trip to Italy, I heard some of Linkin Park’s music on the hotel TV. Oddly specific, I know, but I actually remember this perfectly. It was their track BURN IT DOWN. It was also a very new sound for me and also kinda blew my mind. There’s actually a lot of electronic stuff behind the main instruments of Linkin Park’s music, which definitely also had an effect on me.
So, my first two big musical influences besides what I absorbed through “familial osmosis” were early 2010’s YouTube EDM and Linkin Park. Also worth mentioning would be videogame music, as it was also around this time that I basically fully inherited my mom’s Nintendo DS, which had Tetris on it and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, both of which I would literally sometimes just have on to hear the music instead of play.
From this point on I have to split the article into two parallel timelines: the Drummer arc and the EDM arc. I will stagger the paragraphs one after the other, but these events take place roughly over the same timespan.
Continuing with my life, when I reached middle school, I suddenly had the option to take a particularly strange class: Taiko. Yeah… the Japanese drums. There just so happened to be a teacher who also owned some and wanted to have an optional class where he would teach us how to play them, and we would then perform at school events or even sometimes at city events. I joined because I thought it was cool as hell. Not really out of a huge interest in the actual art of Taiko drumming, I just wanted to be cool, like every 13-year-old. So suddenly I was gaining a musical education again, albeit very minimal, as this was purely a rhythmic art and also completely out of my own volition. I continued to improve at drumming and stayed with the Dojo for a few years, even after it unfortunately left the school.
Meanwhile, I had continued to listen to EDM and was now heavily into Skrillex, Knife Party, Astronaut, etc. I also finally started to ask myself how this stuff was even made and sort of found an answer accidentally. In our IT class, the school computers had a demo version of the now absolutely ancient and basically abandoned Stagelight, which was technically my first DAW (digital audio workstation). With a huge asterisk, as of course it was on school computers. I have no clue who on the school staff had the brilliant idea to pre-install it on all computers, but thank you! Strangely enough, the program was heavily backed by Linkin Park’s lead member, Mike Shinoda, and there was even a demo made by them with the program. I would open it and mess around with the parts (then proudly proclaim to my classmates that I """remixed""" it…). Somehow this has all come full circle!
As for my Taiko playing, I really wanted to continue down this path but obviously couldn’t just own a frickin’ Taiko myself, so my parents got me basically the cheapest Alesis electronic drum kit there is. I would plug in the music that I liked, mostly Linkin Park and a little bit of Jazz I randomly got into, and do my best to drum to it. I picked this up relatively quickly, since my sense of rhythm was already well developed from Taiko drumming. This all led me to start getting a lot more into metal, which would eventually become a huge thing during my later teens.
Now we have reached around 2017. I was now 15. I had sort of stopped listening to as much EDM and was now a lot more interested in instrumental music again. I rediscovered classical music, this time less as a subconscious listener and more actually invested in the music itself. I realized that having heard these pieces as a child had kinda burned some of them into my brain, where I could name precise movements and whistle to them accurately. This is the first time I started thinking that, despite having basically no formal musical education, I might have the brain for it purely because of my ease in remembering musical phrases and patterns. I got into music YouTube, specifically Adam Neely, FrankJavCee, and Dylan Tallchief. I was now actively interested in the process of actually creating music and became fascinated by the theory, even if more of it honestly went over my head. For me it was more a matter of feeling the concepts intuitively. I got really into more complicated drumming, gaining a passion for technical rhythms and such. Big influences were the bands Sungazer and Animals as Leaders.
At this time I also discovered the game osu!, which is a well-known rhythm game. I got super addicted to it and discovered an immense amount of new music through it. Geometry Dash also had some influence, but less so. Some of the names that come to mind are Camellia, Ne Obliviscaris, and a LOT of Touhou remixes… (I was also really into Touhou for a period of time.) This also reignited my love for EDM, as well as discovering the YouTube channel Syfer Music, which would basically upload underground artists in the same format as Monstercat. This is how I discovered some of my favorite artists: Foxhunt (now ASH), Jenceno, Similar Outskirts, and many, many others. At the time I sort of viewed these people as being on a different level, fundamentally. I had absolutely no idea that they were all only just a few years older than me or just the same age. I viewed trying to make something myself, even though by now it had very much become my dream in life, as somehow impossible. I thought I had to have a “spark” that “real” artists have. As I’ll explain later, this is an extremely toxic mentality and you should never do this.
So when did I first try to produce music for real? We are approaching 2020, and so far I’ve just kind of absorbed a huge variety of genres and styles. It’s not even clear to me when I really tried, but at some point in 2018 or ‘19 I installed the FL Studio demo and started trying to follow some tutorials on how to sound like Virtual Riot. Obviously, it was an absolute disaster, but I didn’t really care because I didn’t show anyone. I remember I couldn’t save anything I made because it was the demo version, so I would try to make finished tracks in a single sitting, sometimes staying up until 4 in the morning. I had basically zero consistency and was just trying things without any care for what came out. I just thought, “I’m never gonna be an artist, so who cares?” Because of this philosophy I made extremely slow progress, taking years to start sounding remotely acceptable.
We reach the year 2020. I have now graduated high school and am freshly 18. By now I have a pretty mature musical taste, by which I mean extremely varied and, in some cases, very underground. I went through so many different phases by that point: EDM, Metal, Vaporwave, Classical, Jazz-Fusion, ambient… the list goes on. I am dabbling in the FL Studio demo, trying to make cool sounds with Harmor, mostly trying to sound like Foxhunt, an artist I really admired at the time. Then, I randomly stumble across his Complextro tutorial on YouTube, where he breaks down how some of his music was made. This was a huge moment for me, as I actually had direct commentary from an artist I liked. I joined his Discord server and started interacting with his very small community. This was my very first 1-on-1 interaction with other artists; I even got some stems for one of his songs I really liked. I was absolutely over the moon! This pushed me to try to really create something for the first time, and so I put together a VERY shitty remix of his track Graveyard Shift. He reacted to it and gave some helpful feedback. Only problem is I couldn’t actually do anything since I was still using the demo of FL.
Now, having gotten to this point, one might think, why not just buy the full version? Clearly I want to go down this path, and this would be the logical next step. Well, it’s a bit complicated, but the short explanation is: I was ashamed to ask my parents for it. FL Studio is NOT cheap (like 200 euros for the most basic version). I didn’t have any income myself, and so I just didn’t bother. I kept using the demo and trying to make tracks in a single sitting. I put together a very amateurish compilation of songs and put it up on Bandcamp.
Some of the ideas in there were not bad, but obviously, having to rush every single track, the production was all over the place and extremely lacking. I sort of gave up a bit after this point, eventually leaving Foxhunt’s server, probably out of embarrassment over how my music sounded compared to the more experienced people in there. I would continue to very rarely open up FL Studio and make some ideas, mostly very eclectic demos ranging from neurofunk to piano studies to experimental noise.
It’s worth mentioning that around 2018 I also gained a sudden huge interest in digital art and started really going after it, so I viewed that as my “real” art and music as a pure side-hobby. So, by 2021 I was actually enrolling in art school (not actually art school, that’s way too expensive, more like a vocational training academy for different disciplines, among them 2D/3D digital arts). I really wanted to do concept art for videogames, and my parents fully supported me on this venture. Music took a back seat.
For the entire years of 2021 and 2022, I think I made almost nothing at all. I got my hands on Vital, a free synth that I still use for almost everything to this day, and made a few demos with it, but that’s about it. In 2023, however, I was in a game project with the rest of my peers which suddenly needed some music and sound effects. I was the only person in the group that had any background at all in this, so I took on the task. I was given a massive collection of samples by a friend and even allowed to use their FL Studio license to finally be able to save my projects. To nobody’s surprise, this was the next major step up. I could now finally return to the songs I was working on to improve them and develop them. My music took a massive jump in quality, although obviously not very professional at all still. It was now listenable. I continued to make songs after finishing the music for the game, now under my very first alias, “OSIRIS”. Sadly, I had a very bad habit of starting new projects almost every day and never returning to existing ideas to develop them, probably because the multiple years of having to use the demo had influenced my workflow to be almost ephemeral.
In the latter half of 2023, I finally stopped using my friend’s license and bought my own. I decided this was truly worth my time and realized it was truly stupid that I hadn’t done this sooner. Now, with completely legitimate and unrestricted access to music creation, I started creating hundreds upon hundreds of demos. Some of them developed into longer ideas and some of them were abandoned on the spot, but now I was steadily improving with every new demo.
In 2024, I had moved back in with my parents after graduating from “art school”. I was, ironically, absolutely burned out from art and had basically no interest at all in continuing it. I instead became much more interested in programming and software development (hence why that is now my main profession). I was also now starting to heavily regret not having stayed in the EDM community back in 2020, as some of the names that I saw back then just starting out were now pretty established artists. I had a sort of whiplash moment where I realized that I could have probably been there myself if only I had put in the time and effort back then instead of hiding in my shell.
It’s hard to describe this emotion. Almost bittersweet because it heavily saddens me but also is the flame that burns inside me that keeps me going. I still have that dream of being an artist myself and having people enjoy my music, just wish I would have seen it as possible earlier. If you are in that position right now, please: put yourself out there. Even if you think your music sucks, you have to put it out. Don’t think you aren’t capable of being like your influences, because your influences are also human and also had to start somewhere. Never let insecurity rob the passion from you!
Anyways, around mid-2024 I decided to start a new alias and scrap OSIRIS entirely. I had very little success because of my erratic style of making music anyway, with only a single release by an actual label (my song Just Friends, from 2023). I accidentally created the name KixiK by trying to make a logo out of a different name. This time, it stuck. I made my first full song, Hello World, under this new alias and put it out on SoundCloud (not officially released). I also started putting together all the demos I was mostly happy with and mixing them into a compilation, inspired by how Space Laces’ Vaultage series goes about releasing demos.
Some of my music had very mild success on YouTube but mostly stayed very obscure because I didn’t put any effort into advertising it, being not 100% content with its quality yet. One huge benefit to having taken almost 5 years to make a proper alias is that by now, after so much experimentation, I actually had a pretty distinct style and sound design collection. I know that this is one of the biggest struggles of new artists, so I guess it’s not all so bad that I stayed in my shell for such a long time.
The latest compilation I made back at the end of 2025 has some almost finished ideas that I definitely want to turn into full songs for my debut EP (which I would like to have finished and released before the end of 2026!). For the first time in now almost 7 years since I first touched a DAW, I’m starting to feel like my music has some value. My friends often compliment it and even ask that I finish certain ideas. The general public seems to react very well to the music work I did for games a few times (including the currently in-development narrative platformer The Fabric of the Mind, which you should absolutely wishlist on Steam right now haha…). So, very recently, I tried to start really putting myself out there and interacting with other people in the community. ASH (formerly Foxhunt) gave me some feedback on a remix I did after all these years, and some of my biggest recent inspirations, such as Emplexx and Convexity, have acknowledged my existence, which already means the world to me.
So, with that, I’ve basically covered my entire life through music, which implies that “Music’s place in my life” is… well, frankly, everywhere. Music has been a force that has guided me all this time and inspired me to really try something for years. Music has a way of moving me that almost nothing else does. Some hard-hitting electronic banger or a well-composed and arranged soundtrack piece, doesn’t matter, I’m there for it.
As for why I leaned fully into EDM? It simply has the most influence in my life. It’s the genre that I sort of self-discovered first and has been almost a soundtrack to my life. I absolutely love the inventiveness and the pure, unfiltered creativity and nerdiness that people have in this genre. It’s also a style of music that you don’t need thousands worth of equipment for. A 15-year-old can make a professional track in their bedroom for absolutely free if enough time and effort is spent, and I already know cases like that. Electronic music has always felt to me like the music of the people, and I love that.
This is something I’ve wanted to document for a long time, as much of my story with music is probably very relatable to a lot of young artists, and I wanted to share the most important lessons I learnt over the years.
Never stop creating, never stop the music.