Browsing Tag

Music Interview

Beth Jones Interview: Smoke, Stage Shadows and the Jazz-Bar Ghost Story Behind JOHNNIE WALKER RED

Posted on 10 September 2026

Beth Jones makes spooky jazz-rock feel like a candlelit confession overheard in the back of a noir bar. In this interview, she opens up about JOHNNIE WALKER RED, a smoky, decadent single shaped by lost recordings, brass-band grandeur, bedroom melodies and the freedom to be unapologetically self-indulgent. The conversation moves through spooky performance art, 50s and 60s jazz, vulnerability, theatrical instinct and the visual world surrounding her upcoming winter album. Jones also reflects on Queen, Billie Holiday and Elliott Smith and why drama can make personal pain feel communal rather than self-pitying.

Welcome to A&R Factory, Beth Jones. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us about your music, your visual world and the spooky jazz-rock storytelling that makes your work feel so bewitching. 

Your latest single, JOHNNIE WALKER RED, feels like it could be a gateway for goths into jazz, with that woozy melancholy, theatrical swagger and dark narrative pull. Did you always imagine the song having that smoky, almost decadent atmosphere?

Somewhat – we always wanted it to sound big, as if it was being played by a brass band in a jazz bar – very smoky, very decadent, French Noir type – but we were never sure how big it was going to be until we recorded it.

It’s funny, we actually had two recordings of this track – we had one and then the recording was lost, and we had to redo the whole thing from scratch – but that first version was never quite right. It was very soft, very piano and saxophone Ella-Fitzgerald type classic jazz, so it was kind of a blessing to start again, and to build the track up from the drums. That’s kind of what gave it that theatrical, dramatic feel – we basically gave ourselves the freedom to be completely self-indulgent with it!

You use spooky performance art to tell the stories behind your songs. What came first for you creatively: the music itself, the visual character of the performance, or the emotional scene you wanted the listener to step inside?

It depends on the song to be honest. For Johnnie Walker, it was definitely the melody first – I remember sitting in my bedroom at Christmas, coming up with this little idea for the second verse and building it up from there, but for some songs, the visual definitely drives it.

For the next single, we actually filmed all the visuals before we even started recording the track, and that let us get the emotional scene and soundscape we wanted set up before we started arranging, and that definitely pushed the song in a certain direction. I think that tends to make the songs much more cinematic and feeling, cos you’re almost writing a track to accompany a scene in that way.

Your work carries the glow of 50s and 60s jazz while pulling in classic rock drama. What is it about those older jazz textures that still feels inspirational to you now?

I think it’s the vulnerability. I know there’s an Amy Winehouse quote where she says modern music can be very “fuck you, I’m independent” whereas the old stuff is very “I don’t care if you don’t love me, I’ll love you anyway” – it’s that concept of real devotion, and I think that comes through in my music quite often.

There’s also a feeling to classic jazz, like if you pop on some Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald when you’re walking home, it puts you in that little romantic mood, and I think some modern music can do that too, like Radiohead and Elliott Smith, but nothing’s like the classics.

How do you approach theatricality without letting it swallow the vulnerability at the centre of the song?

 I really don’t try to be theatrical, I think I’m just very overdramatic. I started out singing musical theatre when I was like four, and I think that paved it a little bit, like I remember when I was in primary school and my crush didn’t like me back, I sung “I’m Not That Girl” from Wicked on the way home, and I think that kind of sums me up as an artist, I am very vulnerable but the way I show it is a little unserious.

And I do think you need some theatricality if you’re being vulnerable – when you’re being vulnerable in a song, the quality just has to be there, cos otherwise you fall into a place where people see you and think “oh she misses her ex, I feel sorry for her” rather than “oh, she’s putting what I feel into art”. I think drama lets you project feelings into a space where other people can see it as relatable rather than just personal whinging.

You have mentioned artists such as Queen, Elliott Smith and Billie Holiday as influences. What do you think those very different artists taught you about performance, emotional candour and letting a song hold its own shadow?

God, that’s a hard question.

I think Queen and Freddie Mercury especially are hugely inspirational to most artists because they didn’t see walls. If someone thought a song was too weird, they released it anyway. Too camp, they did it anyway.

I mean, it’s funny, we’re talking about Johnnie Walker Red; Brian May’s actually one of the reasons I kept at this song, cos I happened to be lucky enough to meet him at some event and I asked his advice on it, and he said keep going with it but let it write itself, so, honestly, it wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for Queen.

Elliott Smith and old jazz music carry feeling – they’re like soundscapes. If you’re walking home, or you’re on a bus at night, listening to Elliott Smith or Billie Holiday incites this kind of feeling or this mood, and I think that being able to create that in people, to bring that sort of nostalgia, is real magic.

Your upcoming album is set to arrive in winter. How does JOHNNIE WALKER RED set the tone for the wider record, and what side of you should listeners expect to meet across the full release?

Johnnie Walker Red just explains what the album is about and what inspired it in the clearest terms a camp artist who doesn’t talk about her feelings can put it. The album’s been mixed so that the tracks run into each other, so Johnnie Walker is a lot longer than you think when you hear the album.

Every song is very closely linked, because they’re all telling the same story. Johnnie tells it as it is, but some tracks are more introspective, more metaphorical rather than literal.

I think listeners should expect a mixture of pretty straightforward tracks and some complete indulgent weirdness: we’ve got jazz-inspired work, we’ve got opera-inspired cuts, we’ve got shoegaze, we’ve got pop, it’s very very theatrical, and I think the influences are very clear.

You have been creating artsy visualisers around this material. How involved are you in shaping those visuals, and what do they allow you to express that the songs only suggest in sound?

I’m a bit too involved in shaping them – they’re all my ideas, I direct, I produce, I help to create some of them physically as well.

I see songs as projects, and I think that really influences the way I work. A song isn’t just The Track, the song is every instrument on it, it’s the single cover, it’s the photos, it’s every live performance, it’s how people react to it, it’s the story, it’s the digital booklet and it is the visuals that you put around it.

And I think that some songs do hold their own – I don’t really think Johnnie Walker really needed much in terms of visualisers, but I think that for songs like Lullaby, or my next single, visualisers come part and parcel with the song and help to tell the story. I think it’s all a part of asking the song what it needs and listening and not forcing anything.

Where do you find that you fit in the big smoke’s music scene? 

I really don’t know. I love London, my recording studio’s in London, all my gigs are in London, a lot of my songs are about London, people I’ve met in London, it’s definitely a great place to be if you’re an artist.

I don’t know where I fit. I’m the kind of person that will bob around to all the tiny basement jazz venues, I’ll sing a couple of things, and I’ll head home. I don’t think I’m the kind of person who’s going to be big on the indie pub scene anytime soon – I’ve been there, done that with my band, loved it but it’s not who I am anymore.

I think I’m an artist influenced by London, who writes and records and performs in London, but if you do see me, it’s likely to be in a tiny little jazz place or the studio, not a massive rock venue.

–

Discover more about Beth Jones via her official website. 

Connect with the artist via Instagram and TikTok.

JEAN MICHAEL PAUL Interview: Meet the Father-and-Sons Trio Turning Their Living Room into a Global Sound Machine

Posted on 9 September 2026

JEAN MICHAEL PAUL began as a father and two sons making music in their living room, but the project has already pushed far beyond the family home. In this interview, Raphael Rocha opens up about stepping away from a 20-year global marketing career, reconnecting with his sons through music, and turning that bond into a fast-moving independent project. The conversation moves from BritPop, Ibiza nightlife, K-Pop and Brazilian EDM to the viral 2026 FIFA World Cup Anthems project, which carried their songs into more than 60 countries, FIFA spaces and even Times Square. There is also a sharp, timely discussion around AI, transparency, family creativity and why JEAN MICHAEL PAUL want to build without waiting for the industry to hand them permission.


JEAN MICHAEL PAUL started during Raphael Rocha’s sabbatical after a 20-year global marketing career. For readers discovering you now, can you explain how a break from corporate life turned into making music with your sons?

For two decades, my life was a blur of flights, business meetings, spreadsheets, presentations and events. I had the opportunity to work in many countries and experience very different cultures, and I loved that. But when I looked in the rearview mirror, I could also see my sons growing up too fast, while I was increasingly distant from their daily lives and needs.

Adolescence is never easy, and I believe the father figure can play a pivotal role in helping teenagers navigate that period. Putting your career first sometimes makes sense, and sometimes it doesn’t. I took a sabbatical knowing there would be risks ahead, but I was also fairly certain about what I could help my children achieve in the medium and long term.

We started JEAN MICHAEL PAUL in our living room simply to laugh and to create something that was entirely ours. It wasn’t born from a master plan. It was born from curiosity. At home, it has always been normal for us to listen to music and sing almost every day.

The fact that it became a successful global project is amazing, but at its core this is simply a father and his boys finding a new way to talk, reinforce trust and grow together in this crazy world we are in.

Raphael, before working in global marketing for companies such as Samsung, TCL and VIVO, you had already lived part of your life around music as a radio announcer and Roxette-tribute band frontman. How did those early experiences shape the way you approached creating music again years later?

My relationship with music started early. Around 12 or 13, two gifts rewired everything: a Yamaha DD-6 electronic drum machine and a copy of Roxette’s Joyride on CD. Love at first sight, twice. Soon I was playing and singing with friends in a garage band, staying up all night creating songs or listening to the radio, and building what became a library of more than 1,000 CDs.

Then, in the second half of the 1990s, I moved to the UK and fell into BritPop during what I still think of as a high water mark of British cultural influence worldwide. Imagine experiencing Oasis, Blur, Jamiroquai and The Prodigy almost in real time, when living in Europe was not so common for a South American teenager.

Back in Brazil a few years later, I met the owner of a local radio station. Because I had just returned from England, he put me on a Saturday night show to bring “the news” from the international music scene: new bands, new sounds, records most people around us had not heard yet.

But the education did not stop there. In 2008 I was in Spain getting a second schooling in Ibiza nightlife: Thursdays at Pacha with David Guetta and Tuesdays at Space with Carl Cox. Electronic music felt less like a genre and more like a lifestyle, a way of connecting people who did not share a background or a language, but shared a passion and a true view of the world.

A few years later, in 2012, I was living in South Korea, inside another global musical explosion: PSY’s Gangnam Style and the rise of K-Pop.

In the 2020s I was back in Brazil for the next shift. Alok and Vintage Culture were taking Brazilian EDM onto the world’s main stages. More recently came the rise of Brazilian Phonk.

Looking back, that pattern is too consistent to treat as luck. BritPop. Eurodance. K-Pop. Brazilian EDM. Phonk. I was not reading about the wave. I was surfing it while it formed. I kept arriving where the sound is changing at the exact moment it changes. I do not call that a coincidence anymore. It feels like a life path.

Today I bring those rooms into JEAN MICHAEL PAUL as three perspectives at once: the performer who feels true emotion, the communicator who knows how to read an audience, and the strategist who understands how a song, like a product, has to leave the house if it is going to travel.

Your sons grew up around travel, a home club space, a DDJ and a 1,000-plus CD collection. What did that environment teach them about music before JEAN MICHAEL PAUL became a serious project?

To them, music is infrastructure like electricity. You do not worship the cable. You decide what to power with it.

Long before the project had a name, they had already learned that taste can be incredibly broad. In a single night, we could shift seamlessly from a 1990s club record to a Bass House track, then into 1980s pop and finish with a modern hook. They learned that music is a personal and social experience first. Most importantly, they realized that making music is infinitely more exciting than just consuming it.

Alongside an old DDJ controller, our house was always filled with guitars, flutes, electronic keyboards and karaoke machines. They were exposed to sounds from different countries and decades without ever being told that one style was superior or better than another.

Imagine growing up where Fatboy Slim and Iron Maiden sit alongside The Beatles and Queen as everyday furniture. Our CD collection is a library of human emotion and real life stories. I can still tell them exactly where I was, what I was doing and what I felt when I bought or listened to every single disc for the first time.

During the pandemic lockdowns, we turned our living room into a broadcasting booth on Instagram. We played DJ sets for our family and friends just to keep everyone connected. A couple of years later, we spent over a month backpacking across seven European countries. They will remember every detail of that trip and the exact soundtrack of each moment forever as music became linked to their memories and feelings.

Producing music as a father-and-sons trio is a rare setup. How does the creative process actually work between you, especially when you are bringing together different generations, tastes and ideas?

It is chaotic, beautiful, and a massive clash of worlds, which is exactly why it works.

Everybody brings the initial ideas. I put the structure, the melodic sensibility and the storytelling arc. They bring this unfiltered, raw energy, a modern aesthetic, and zero reverence for the way things used to be done.

When my experience collides with their fresh intuition, that’s where the JEAN MICHAEL PAUL magic happens. It’s the ultimate litmus test: if 2 teenagers and a guy in his 40s both start nodding their heads to the same groove in the office studio, we know we have a potential hit on our hands.

We do not romanticise consensus. Different generations in the same session stop a track from becoming only nostalgic or only fashionable. One of us finds the spark. We fight it into a shape. Then we ask the only questions that matter: does this still sound like a father and two sons having fun on purpose? Will your friends enjoy this song? What about teachers at school? What about grandma and grandpa?

We have different ages, different references and different instincts, so naturally we disagree. And that’s actually one of the strengths of the project. JEAN MICHAEL PAUL isn’t designed around three people trying to sound identical. It is about three people bringing different perspectives into the same creative space, studying and seeing what happens.

You have described the project as being operated almost like a tech startup. What does that mean in practical terms, and how do you balance that strategic mindset with music that still feels joyful, rhythmic and emotionally direct?

When we say JEAN MICHAEL PAUL operates like a startup, we mean that we experiment 24/7. We are open to testing, trying, making mistakes, learning and trying again at a speed that the traditional music industry may need to get used to. It is a business approach to music in terms of tools, procedures, management and goals.

My corporate background definitely influences that mindset. Over the course of my career, I launched more than 100 products and services, from smartphones and tablets to accessories and food products.

You don’t launch a single product per year and wait months to discover whether it worked or not. You study the market, you study the consumer, you study the competition, you build the best product you can, you test, you learn and you iterate. And that movement never stops. We apply the same philosophy to music.

Music is increasingly becoming about individual experiences and utility listening rather than a purely mass market approach. That changes how we think about audiences, discovery and even what a successful release can mean.

We still make creative decisions based on emotion, instinct and taste. But we use strategic data to help us balance those elements and make better decisions. This combination helps us create better music.

Your 2026 FIFA World Cup Anthems project reached more than 9 million views, appeared around FIFA Host Cities, Fan Fest events and Times Square, and attracted international press attention. What was the first moment when you realised the music was travelling much further than you expected?

The World Cup project was my younger son’s idea. We were working on another song when he heard Shakira’s Waka Waka and asked if we could write for the tournament too. I heard a strategy inside his question. Not one single anthem but many of them. Each one built to carry the pride, the history, the rhythm and the language of a nation that would be on the pitch.

We studied so hard and triangulated so much data before even starting to develop the tracks that you cannot imagine. But it was a lot of fun, as we were learning different cultures and testing sounds even we had never heard before.

21 songs, 21 distinct styles, 21 stories, 21 targeted messages in 10 different languages.

Relatives and friends called us crazy, but we stood by our convictions and by the feeling that no other artist in the world was doing anything like that. And this gave us a boost in passion and dedication that made a huge difference in the project.

Right after launching we started to observe an interesting increase in plays and streams on both YouTube and Spotify. One week later people also started to use our songs on TikTok and Instagram, but when the World Cup really started everything exploded. Our monthly listeners multiplied by more than five times, people started to buy our singles on Apple Music, started to add them to their playlists and we reached more than 60 countries. We were able to follow in real time a boost in song performance happening exactly in the cities that were hosting the matches, with both teams’ songs when available. It wasn’t just statistics anymore. It was real love and passion.

It became a deeply surreal experience. Specifically about our most viral song, the Algeria Football Anthem, we were having a pizza at home and suddenly we got a video of thousands of people celebrating in Times Square in New York playing it. Then everything started to spread organically at a speed we could never have dreamed of. Elderly people, youngsters, families, influencers, politicians, FIFA Host Cities, FIFA Fan Festivals.

A few days later, major international media reported that a second song of ours, the Saudi Arabia Football Anthem, was selected as a FIFA Goal song to be played during the tournament.

Together with these examples we also saw a surge in our songs dedicated to the Brazil, England, South Korea and Turkey national teams. So seeing people from completely different ages, backgrounds, countries and languages, all united by an anthem we created, was really the best feeling in the world.

You are open supporters of using AI in music, which is still a very divisive topic. How do you use AI in your process while keeping the human ideas, family dynamic and melodic identity of JEAN MICHAEL PAUL at the centre?

Many artists have been using AI tools for a while, but they are afraid to tell their fans. This is the conversation the music industry really needs to have.

When we look back in history, every time a disruptive technology arrives, people panic. When the MELLOTRON was introduced, musicians debated what it meant for traditional instrumentation. Then The Beatles used it on Strawberry Fields Forever and changed pop history. When SYNTHESISERS left the lab, critics treated Kraftwerk and Gary Numan as non musicians. When the ROLAND TR 808 arrived, people called it a fake drum. Then Marvin Gaye created Sexual Healing with it. SAMPLING was called stealing until hip hop made it a high art form. AUTO TUNE was a studio secret until Cher turned it into an iconic vocal instrument. And so many other examples.

AI is the same situation repeating itself throughout music history. AI is a tool. The artist remains responsible for the creative direction, the choices and the final work.

We use several distinct AIs to optimise our workflows, test variations and break through creative blocks. But the raw emotion, the father and two sons dynamic, the choice of theme, the choice of lyrics, the choice of style, the cover art development and the reason why the song exists? That comes entirely from us. And we simply love doing it together. We don’t believe AI replaces the artist. We believe it simply optimises the artist’s toolbox.

When we first thought about making music for the world, I told my sons that we would study hard, fight hard, put all our efforts into the project and the magic would happen sooner or later. Of course, I would not have expected such great results in 90 or 100 days, but this is just the confluence of passion, belief and hard work. And this applies to everything in our lives, not only to music.

JEAN MICHAEL PAUL puts #AI in our public bios on purpose. Listeners can know the stack. What they should judge is the quality of the song, the cadence, and whether The Father and Sons Trio is still clearly at the centre.

At the same time, just to make it clear, we understand the legitimate concerns around copyright, consent, training data and impersonation. We also advocate for fair artist pay, greater transparency and regulatory oversight around streaming data across platforms. Being pro-innovation in AI doesn’t mean being pro-anything. We believe artists deserve rights, attribution and control.

Your music now connects with listeners across more than 60 countries and over 10 languages. Looking ahead, what kind of global story do you want JEAN MICHAEL PAUL to represent for families, independent artists and listeners from different cultures?

The world is becoming increasingly tech connected, but sometimes it also feels increasingly divided and individually approached. Music is one of the few languages that can cross those divisions naturally and beautifully without previous permission.

We want JEAN MICHAEL PAUL to be a testament to the power of reinvention in the AI Era. The message that The Father and Sons Trio can build in public, every week, across cultures, without waiting for gatekeepers to assign them a lane is strong. #MUSIC4ALL and #MUSIC247 are our operating systems.

Our project represents something bigger than a particular band, genre, country or generation. We hope to encourage other families to get closer and start creating things together. Not necessarily music. It could be technology, art, filmmaking, gaming or something that doesn’t even exist yet.

For CEOs and Marketing leaders, my experience is also a reminder that when we put the consumer first, combine the right methodologies and tools with deep analysis, and add genuine passion, there is no limit to what can be created.

For independent artists, we want to reinforce that they don’t have to wait for permission to start experimenting. They don’t need to be afraid of making mistakes along the way. The music industry is a marathon, not a 100-meter race.

For listeners and fans, it is all about human connection. We make multi-style music to sing, dance and share. We want to be the soundtrack to their real life moments, constantly delivering renewal of happiness and emotion. Just like our first album recently launched “The 24/7 Flow State” that brings together our best EDM, House, Big Room and Dance tracks launched in 2026. What about the next? The next will always be an unexpected surprise…

–

Connect with JEAN MICHAEL PAUL on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Interview by Amelia Vandergast

Zeistencroix Interview: Inside the Industrial Smoke Alarm Before Society Catches Fire

Posted on 9 September 2026

Zeistencroix aren’t hanging around for the dystopian aftermath to make their harbingering point. In this interview, Orlando and Santi open up about Psychotronic, an album built around the warning signs that creep into ordinary life before collapse starts looking inevitable. From surveillance, censorship and manipulation to the loaded paranoia behind the lead single Deceiving, the band unpack how industrial rock can unsettle the body before the brain has time to catch up. They also discuss working with Ulrich Wild, and why their noir-heavy visual identity feels inseparable from the music.

Fans of Nine Inch Nails, Static-X, 3TEETH, Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie will want to read the lore of Zeistencroix in full.

  1. There’s no escaping dystopian media these days; what made you write about the precursor to the collapse of society as we know it rather than the aftermath?

    Orlando: I think everyone has already imagined the aftermath through films, books, music and other media, but not many people really stop to ask how we actually get there.

    That said, I never set out to write about one specific subject. I tend to let everything flow, ideas, lyrics, music, and this time the subject just spoke to me. I channelled it into the physical world.

    Santi: I think the precursor is actually more frightening because it happens while we’re still living our normal lives. Surveillance, censorship, manipulation, fear and division can become normal little by little, until people stop questioning them.

    With Psychotronic, we wanted to focus on that point where the warning signs are already there, but there is still time to recognise them. It’s less about predicting the end of society and more about asking how much we’re willing to accept before something fundamentally changes.

    2. The single, Deceiving, leads the album campaign, and even the title feels loaded with paranoia, manipulation and mistrust. Why did that track feel like the right doorway into the wider Psychotronic concept?

    Orlando: We’re mistrusting creatures because mistrust can also be a way of protecting ourselves, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. The deceivers, on the other hand, are the perpetrators. So you could see deception as one of the first symptoms of the wider problem.

    Santi: “Deceiving” represents a lot of what the album is about because deception isn’t always obvious. It can come from other people, institutions or even ourselves. Sometimes we convince ourselves everything is fine because the truth is uncomfortable.

    Musically, the song has that same tension, aggression mixed with something almost seductive. That felt like the right introduction to Psychotronic. You’re being pulled into something that might not be good for you, but you still want to keep listening.

    3. The album deals with fear, crisis, censorship, surveillance and how we can become complacent about the idea of control. Are you trying to wake people up, unsettle them, or drag them straight into the warning signs with the LP?

    Orlando: We’re more interested in shining a light on the situation. I believe in free will and that everyone should think for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

    Our role as artists is to reflect the times we’re living through, not necessarily to create narratives designed to influence people. We all have our own biases. People should use their own brains and develop their own ideas.

    Santi: Probably a little bit of all three. [Laughs]

    We’re not trying to tell people what to think. We want them to feel something first. If a song makes you uncomfortable, angry, paranoid or even curious, then it has already done something.

    For me, the most dangerous thing is becoming numb. Psychotronic is our way of creating a reaction and making people stop for a moment and look at what’s happening around them.

    4. Orlando, your throat singing gives Zeistencroix this really haunting, almost ritualistic charge. When did you realise that technique could sit inside post-industrial rock without feeling like a gimmick?

    Orlando: It came out naturally. I discovered it in my teenage years through screaming and vocalising, and honestly it has been a struggle throughout my entire career because everyone assumes it’s a vocal effect.

    Every time I try to explain that it isn’t, everybody probably thinks I’m being a petulant bastard, maybe rightly so. [Laughs]

    I’d actually love to figure out a way of making it a gimmick for us, but because we’re an industrial band, and the genre uses so many vocal effects anyway, it tends to fall through the cracks. So here I am again, being the pedantic asshole explaining that it isn’t a vocal effect.

    5. Santi, your drumming gives the music a physical, machine-driven force without losing the human punch behind it. How do you approach rhythm when the songs are carrying such heavy psychological and political weight?

    Santi: For me, the drums always have to connect the listener physically to the song. You can talk about fear, control or paranoia, but if the rhythm doesn’t make your body react, something is missing.

    I like the contrast between mechanical precision and human imperfection. Industrial music can be very rigid, but I don’t want the drums to feel programmed or lifeless. There needs to be a human pulse underneath the machine.

    When I play these songs, I focus on the emotional energy. Should this part feel threatening, hypnotic or explosive? The rhythm has to communicate that before the listener even starts thinking about the lyrics.

    6. You worked with Ulrich Wild on Psychotronic, whose history with Pantera, Static-X, Deftones and White Zombie sits right in the bloodstream of heavy alternative music. What did he bring out of Zeistencroix that felt different once the album was finished?

    Orlando: Ulrich is the man. He gave the music a sense of depth and heaviness that I think it needed.

    He also worked magic with my vocals and pushed me to improve in a really positive way. I love how the album came out.

    Santi: Ulrich has an incredible ear and knows how to make heavy music sound huge without destroying the character of the band.

    For me, one of the biggest differences was the drums. We wanted them to have that massive industrial impact while still feeling like a real drummer was playing them. He brought out details and dynamics that can easily disappear when you’re layering guitars, electronics, vocals and effects.

    He also knows when not to add something. Sometimes knowing when to leave space makes all the difference.

    7. The record has that cinematic industrial scale fans of Nine Inch Nails, Static-X, 3TEETH, Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie will immediately understand, but your noir aesthetic and theatrical visuals give it a very Zeistencroix identity. How important is the visual side when you are creating music this dark and atmospheric?

    Orlando: Very important. Santi is the one in charge of the visual side, including the designs and artwork for the band.

    For me, it was important that Zeistencroix had its own identity, that we could be different while still being ourselves. I’m very much the same person in everyday life, and so is Santi. The aesthetic isn’t something we simply put on for the band.

    Santi: For us, the music and visuals are part of the same world.

    When you create something this atmospheric, you want people to see something in their heads as well as hear it. Our noir and dystopian aesthetic gives the music another dimension and helps pull people deeper into the world of Zeistencroix.

    But the music always has to stand on its own. The visuals are there to enhance the experience, not replace it.

    8. You have played venues like Whisky a Go Go, toured the West Coast, supported Crazy Town across the US and built this reputation as a heavy live act. After Psychotronic lands, what kind of atmosphere do you want to create when these songs hit a room full of bodies?

    Orlando: The goal is always the same, for everyone to have a good time and come away with an experience they’ll remember.

    Santi: I want it to feel like the room has temporarily become part of the album.

    I don’t want people to just stand there watching us. I want them to feel the bass, the drums, the lights, the noise, everything. There should be moments where the energy is almost uncomfortable, and others where everyone is completely locked into the groove.

    Psychotronic has a lot of different moods, so we’re excited to bring that into the live environment. Ultimately, I want people to leave feeling like they experienced something, not just attended a concert.

    If they leave sweaty, exhausted, slightly disturbed but smiling, that’s a good night for me.

–

Stream PSYCHOTRONIC on all major platforms, including Spotify, now.

Interview by Amelia Vandergast

Amy Gilvary Interview: Funny, Sharp and Humane Truths from a Songwriter Who Let the Stage Lights Go

Posted on 31 August 2026

Amy Gilvary writes from the side of music where the idea matters more than the spotlight. In this A&R Factory interview, she speaks with unfiltered candour about stepping away from performance anxiety, separating the creator from the interpreter, and why writing has always felt freer than entertaining. Across the conversation, Gilvary opens up about the shortcuts threatening the music industry, the Catch-22 facing songwriters, and the sacred nuisance of creativity when it arrives unexpectedly. She also talks shelter dogs, musical theatre, prose, restlessness, creative floods, emotional droughts, and the projects that keep refusing to leave her alone.

You have taken a less common route as a songwriter who writes without performing. What drew you towards the writing side of music rather than the stage?

I was on stage as a singer/songwriter for years and I just had too much anxiety.  One night while performing, I’m pretty sure I turned into Steve Martin from The White Room episode of Only Murders in the Building and I realized- this is not for me.

Writing feels more natural and more free. I had an unhealthy relationship with entertaining. I’ve never had an unhealthy relationship with writing.

Do you ever feel more freedom when the focus sits on the work itself rather than on you as a performer?

Absolutely. This question reminds me of the exact moment I realized the two were separate.

I was in high school and my English teacher had two of us stand up and read our writing assignments aloud to the class. I was eager to do it but the other student was extremely nervous and shy while reading her work which baffled me. Her writing deserved a better speaker. So much got lost. I felt so disappointed how it was (or wasn’t) received.

Years later I heard someone say, “Writers write. Speakers speak.” They are two very different types of personalities and talents. They should not be expected to be both. That taught me to distinguish between the creator and the interpreter. The content versus the presenter. For me, the concept is the most important part, not the packaging. It can always be repackaged.

We’d love to hear your view on how it feels to create and preserve the messy nature of the human mind in music when the industry seems obsessed with shortcuts. What are your main frustrations and fears for the future of the industry?

I grew up playing songs written by solo composers. Dianne Warren. David Foster. Now when I sit down at the piano and open a songbook, half the title page is the names of all the 500 cowriters. That is insane to me. I miss the days where it was assumed most songwriters were self-contained. One person. One pen. Or two at the most. Not nine.

This industry is in dangerous territory now.

In terms of what it means to be an artist today, I do believe Ai is a short cut.

You know what’s not a short cut?

Being alive and experiencing life in as many ways as you can and sharing those experiences.

You have described the music business as a Catch-22. What part of that loop feels the most frustrating for writers trying to get their songs heard?

As with most ventures, people want to see that you’re accomplished before they put their time and money into you. And you can’t become accomplished without somebody putting time and money into you. The fix requires you to already have the thing you are trying to get. The wheels on the bus go round and round until the paradox inevitably turns into- Am I crazy because I’m an artist? Or am I becoming an artist because I’m crazy?

How do your songs usually come to fruition?

I need to quote Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic” here:

“Creativity is sacred, and it’s not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege, and it wants to be made through you.”

I love that she says “through” and not “by”.

Creativity is like a friend that comes over and knocks on your door to come out and play. I’ve always experienced it as an external presence. Do you answer the door? Yes. You don’t reject that needy, insistent, relentless, somewhat annoying friend. You answer the door because you know you need her as much she needs you.

Ideas come to fruition through one-liners I hear from conversations, or movies, or dreams, that hit me over the head and demand to be in song form.

We absolutely have to hear more about your musical for shelter dogs. What inspired that project, and how are you giving those animals a theatrical voice?

My husband’s version is that I got up abruptly from the couch one night, declared I was going to write a musical about shelter dogs, marched upstairs, went into seclusion into our bedroom to write, and came out 3 days later with a rough draft of “Shelter Me”. I’m going to take his word for it because I honestly have no recollection of what took over me. I was powerless.

I took A Chorus Line’s format in that each dog had a monologue and a solo about their situation. The Stray, The Returned, The Transport, The Starter Child and The Star (who was inspired by one of my heroes, Willliam Berloni.)

Here is a person who saw a dog in the pound who was going to be euthanized at midnight. Ran home to borrow a few dollars from his roommate. Ran back and adopted that dog and trained him to play Sandy in Annie on Broadway for six years!

I am so intrigued with the power that the eleventh hour holds, the gravitas of a Hail Mary pass, the last of the last seconds that changes everything.

I’ve had the luxury of being on both ends of that magic moment in life and I wish more people would realize their ability to change someone else’s circumstance. Often it doesn’t take much to alter someone’s story and gift them a better ending.

We’re all just walking each other home.

You have also published two books, which says a lot about your need to keep creating across formats. Do music and prose feed different parts of your brain, or do they come from the same restless place?

I love the word “restless” so thank you for that. I feel like that is much more accurate than “creative”.

I had a qEEG (which I highly recommend for everyone) when I was 19 and saw my actual restlessness mapped in red and yellow. That was a profound awakening and validation of what I already knew to be true which is- if I don’t have a project, it is not fun being me.

Returned came as an aftermath of Shelter Me because I still had so much more to say and by that point, had been involved for years in multiple rescue organizations. I wrote it for anyone who has ever volunteered or worked at a humane society. I needed to say “I see you”.

I’m AVG is a snapshot memoir of moments that I have spent years ruminating over, searching for meaning. It was extremely healing and quite fun actually. It’s nice when you can see yourself through older wiser eyes.

While prose feeds my intellect, music feeds everything else.

I can live on music alone. I cannot live on prose alone.

My need to always be creating was turning into a burden of sorts.

A fellow artist recognized this and gave me some great advice and it’s calmed me down quite a bit:

She said, “You don’t have to do something with every idea you have.

Some ideas are for later. Maybe in a few years.

Some ideas are for someone else to do.”

That may sound like a copout to some, but for me it was permission to let go of the backburner ideas and focus on the ones I am truly invested in. The ones that keep knocking and won’t go away. Those are the ones that keep me up at night. Those are the ones I live for.

With your “A writer must always be writing” ethos, are there any days where you hit the wall of writer’s block, or is writing a constant stream of catharsis for you?

My process has always been one of extremes, which is common for a lot of creatives I know. Intense Flood or Prolonged Drought. That’s it. There is no existing in between those two all-consuming states for me.

I try to accept that that’s how my operating system works. I know when I need to shut down and recharge and not force things. I don’t fight against the wall. I surrender.

And when Creativity comes knocking again, I’ll race to the door and answer like I always do.

–

Stream all Amy Gilvary’s releases on SoundCloud.

Interview by Amelia Vandergast

Interview: Katie Noir on writing behind a façade to bare her soul

Posted on 20 August 2026

Katie Noir writes like someone leaving a lamp on inside the rooms most people keep locked. In this A&R Factory interview, the anonymous artist and medical student traces how piano became a private language, how self-taught production gave her the means to build the sounds in her head, and how apology songs for friends gradually became the emotional architecture of her debut album, What Is Unseen Still Exists.

Across the conversation, Katie speaks about friendship, shame, anonymity, medical school and the catharsis of being understood by strangers without giving them her face first. It is a tender, sharply self-aware conversation as much as it as an attestation that unseen feelings can carry the most weight.

You describe music as something that began softly, almost too softly to notice, when you were eleven and first sat at the piano. When did those early lessons stop feeling like notes on keys and start feeling like a language you could trust?

I don’t think there was one dramatic moment where the piano suddenly became a language. It happened almost embarrassingly quietly. I started with a teacher when I was eleven, learning the same things everyone learns, where to put my hands, which key was which, how not to make everything sound like a small accident. But I learned quite quickly, and what fascinated me very early was how much a single key could carry. You could play exactly the same note twice and somehow make it mean something different the second time. Once I understood that, the piano stopped feeling like an instrument I was supposed to operate correctly and started feeling more like somewhere I could put things I didn’t really know how to say.

After a while I began catching up with my teacher, but the funny part was that I was becoming increasingly terrible at doing what piano lessons are technically for, playing other people’s music. I would learn something, get bored with repeating it, change a few notes, wander somewhere else and eventually arrive at a melody that had nothing to do with what we had started with. At first I think my teacher was amused by it. Then I started surprising him more often with melodies of my own. Eventually he told me, essentially, that I didn’t really need him anymore because I had passed the point where he could teach me much. I remember that feeling much less like, “Oh, I’m good at this,” and much more like, “Wait… you’re leaving me alone with all these keys now?”

I think that was when I began trusting music as a language. Not when I could reproduce something perfectly, but when I realised I could sit down without knowing exactly what I wanted to say and my hands would sometimes find it before my words did.

_______________

I love the image of twelve-year-old you making a serious little business proposal for music software. What do you remember about opening that digital audio workstation for the first time and realising you could build the sounds that had only existed in your head?

I remember opening it for the first time and feeling completely overwhelmed. I had this very serious twelve-year-old idea that if I could just get the software, I would finally be able to build everything I was hearing in my head. Then I opened it and immediately realised I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at. There were buttons everywhere, windows inside other windows, strange symbols, things moving that I did not understand and somehow every mistake seemed to create three new problems. I think I spent a lot of time clicking things just to find out what they did, which is probably the least elegant form of education imaginable.

But I have always had this slightly stubborn urge to teach myself things before I really know what I am doing. So I kept going. I would try something, ruin it, undo it, try again, accidentally discover something useful, forget how I had done it and then spend another hour trying to recreate it. Slowly, the chaos started making sense. What is funny is that for a very long time I did not know the proper terminology for much of what I was doing. I could hear what I wanted and I could eventually work out how to get there, but if somebody had asked me to explain it technically, I probably would have stared at them very politely.

That is still quite true of how I learn. I usually understand the feeling or the function before I understand the vocabulary. And I think that was the exciting part, the moment I realised I did not need to wait for someone else to translate the sounds in my head for me. Even if it was messy, even if I was learning through trial and error, I could slowly begin building them myself.

_______________

You write beautifully about feeling as though your mind moved differently from the people around you. Did music give you a place where that difference stopped feeling like a problem and started feeling useful?

For a long time, music did not make that difference feel useful. It simply gave me somewhere to put it. Before I ever released anything publicly, I made music entirely for myself. I wrote lyrics almost like diary entries, built the music around them and performed the songs privately because it helped me leave emotions somewhere outside my own head for a while. It was never part of a plan. It was just something that made me feel better.

I think music only started to feel truly useful in a larger sense very recently, when I became public with it at the end of May. That was when I began receiving messages from women who recognised themselves in things I had written. Some of them described feelings that were very familiar to me, but said they had never really known how to put them into words. That changed something for me. Suddenly, the parts of my mind that had sometimes made me feel overly sensitive, complicated or simply a little out of step with everyone else could become material that helped someone else feel understood. And strangely, that has helped me too. Music has become more of an emotional valve than it ever was before. I can take something that feels too large or too messy inside me, turn it into a song and somehow breathe a little easier afterwards.

I probably would have kept all of it private if my friends had not been extremely stubborn about convincing me that I was better at this than I believed myself to be. I resisted that idea for quite a while. They won. So yes, I think music eventually turned that difference into something useful. But it happened backwards. First it helped me survive my own emotions privately. Only later did I realise those same emotions might help somebody else too.

_______________

The album began as apology songs for friends you had hurt by disappearing during a difficult emotional period. Was it frightening to turn those private explanations into something other people could hear and recognise themselves inside?

Yes, absolutely. But strangely, the most frightening part was not showing the songs to my friends. They already knew what had happened. They had lived through the part I was ashamed of. Compared with disappearing on people I cared about, letting them hear the music almost felt less embarrassing. The songs gave me a way to explain myself that I could not manage in a normal conversation. When I tried to talk about what had happened, I would get overwhelmed, lose the thread, minimise things or say something that did not quite match what I actually felt.

In a song, I could stay with the emotion long enough to understand it. I could admit what I had done, why I had done it, how guilty I felt, how much I had missed them and how afraid I was that I had damaged something permanently. So for me, those first apology songs were not really performances. They were a way of finally saying things properly. What became frightening later was the idea that strangers could hear them too, because suddenly something that had belonged to a very small circle of people could be recognised by someone I had never met.

But that also became one of the most meaningful parts of releasing the album. The details were mine, but the emotions were not. Other people knew what it felt like to disappear, to regret it, to love people and still hurt them or to struggle to explain themselves afterwards. I think that was when I realised that something can be deeply private and still belong, emotionally, to many people.

_______________

Various friendships clearly shaped the emotional gravity of the project in different ways. How did those friends change your understanding of love, safety, fear and the power people can have over our emotional weather?

I think they taught me that love and safety are much more complicated than I once thought they were. The strange thing about feeling truly safe with someone is that it also makes you vulnerable. If somebody becomes important enough to make your world feel calmer simply by being there, suddenly their absence can affect you too. I learned that the people who make us feel safest can also frighten us the most, simply because suddenly there is something important enough to lose. Lisa, Lexi and Sara have all taught me different versions of that.

With Lisa, I think I learned the contradiction between safety and fear most intensely. She can make me feel incredibly safe, but because that safety matters so much to me, the possibility of losing it can become frightening very quickly. That taught me something uncomfortable about myself too, sometimes fear is not evidence that something is wrong. Sometimes it is simply evidence that I care very deeply.

Lexi taught me that love does not always have to speak exactly the same emotional language as I do. I can be quite intense, I am sure this interview has hidden that extremely well so far. But people can love you deeply without expressing it in precisely the way you would. Learning to recognise someone else’s language of loyalty instead of constantly translating it into my own has been important for me.

And Sara taught me a lot about calm. Some people do not need to fix your emotional weather or even fully understand every storm inside you. Sometimes their steadiness is enough. They stay in the room while it is raining.

But I think the biggest lesson has been that loving someone deeply does not make them responsible for regulating everything I feel. The album documents moments when I was not always very good at understanding that distinction. Other people can affect our emotional weather enormously, especially when we love them, but they cannot be expected to become our entire climate. Maybe that is what these friendships have taught me most, safety is not the absence of fear and love is not perfect emotional understanding. Sometimes it is simply knowing that you can be complicated, frightened, difficult or overwhelmed and there are still people willing to find their way back to you.

_______________

What Is Unseen Still Exists is such a powerful title with its ability to push back against the idea that only visible things matter. What did that phrase unlock for you when Lisa suggested it?

The funny thing is that Lisa did not actually invent the phrase. She just understood what it was before I did. I had been using a version of “What is unseen still exists” next to my name in an online status for quite a while. The idea goes back even further, to when I was younger and first came across Plato’s Theory of Forms. I became fascinated by the thought that something does not have to be physically visible in order to be real. That stayed with me. Feelings are like that. Love is like that. Grief, memory, hope, loneliness, friendship, none of those things have to be visible from the outside to completely shape a person’s life.

So I carried the phrase around without really thinking of it as anything more than a small personal statement. Then, when the idea of the album was already beginning to take shape, Lisa literally said, that phrase is your album title. And I had one of those slightly embarrassing moments where someone points out something that suddenly feels painfully obvious. She was completely right. Once she said it, the whole project clicked into place. I started seeing the album much more clearly as one connected idea rather than simply a collection of personal songs. Suddenly there was a thread running through everything, the emotions people do not see, the friendships outsiders cannot fully understand, the private battles nobody notices, the memories that still influence us even when the moment itself is long gone.

After that, I leaned into the concept much more deliberately. It became the red thread through the album. So I think what Lisa really unlocked was not the phrase itself. She unlocked my understanding of what I had already been writing. And yes, I did feel a little stupid that I had been carrying my own album title around next to my name for so long without noticing it.

_______________

You are approaching the end of your first year of medical school while also making music as Katie Noir. Do you feel that medicine and songwriting both come from the same desire to understand what hurts and make people feel less alone?

I think they probably do come from the same place, even though they look completely different from the outside. Medicine is very concrete. It asks you to study carefully, be precise, take responsibility and learn how to help someone in a way that is practical and real. Music is almost the opposite for me. It is instinctive, emotional and much harder to measure. But both require the same kind of attention, you have to look closely at another human being, or at yourself and resist the temptation to look away when something becomes difficult.

I think I have always been drawn to that question of how people can be helped, even if the answer takes completely different forms. With medicine, I am learning how to help with knowledge and with my hands. With music, I try to reach the parts of people that cannot really be touched that way. So maybe that is the balance I have accidentally created for myself, by day, I am learning how to help people with my hands. At night, I try to reach them with my words.

_______________

You remain anonymous, but the songs are always unflinchingly honest. What does the Katie Noir identity allow you to say that might feel too exposed if every part of your private life was placed under a spotlight?

Katie Noir gives me freedom, but if I am completely honest, anonymity is also self-protection. There is the artistic reason, of course. Because my face and private identity are not the centre of the project, I can be much more honest in the songs. I can write about fear, shame, friendship, attraction, mistakes and things I would probably say different or much more carefully if every lyric immediately became attached to my face.

But there is also a much less poetic reason, I am a medical student. My life is not only lectures and exams. There are days when I am in hospitals, around patients, learning how to enter spaces where somebody else may be frightened, vulnerable or in pain. In those moments, I do not want to walk into the room as “Katie Noir.” I want to be the medical student who is there to learn, listen and help.

If my face became widely recognisable, those two worlds could start colliding in ways I cannot fully control. A patient recognising me from a song, somebody filming me or people becoming interested in my private life while I am trying to work in a clinical environment would be uncomfortable for me, but more importantly, it could distract from a place that should never be about me.

So anonymity protects that separation. It also protects the people I write about. My songs can be deeply personal without requiring everyone connected to my life to become public with me. I know anonymity makes some parts of being an artist more difficult. Visibility would probably make promotion easier. But I would rather accept that disadvantage and keep a part of my life that still belongs only to me. Katie Noir is not a character I hide behind. She is genuinely me. I just want people to know my inner world before they know my face.

–

Connect with the artist on all major platforms via this link.

Interview by Amelia Vandergast

Paqx Interview: Meet the New Orleans Artist and SonicCritic Founder Building Fairer Sonic Ground from the Back Room

Posted on 13 August 2026
Paqx

Paqx comes to A&R Factory as an artist shaped by New Orleans in all its legacy, pressure, resilience and brutal economics. Across this interview, the independent artist, producer and SonicCritic founder opened up about spending six years performing and recording in one of America’s most musically loaded cities, the early loss of credits that changed how he thought about trust, and why going solo gave him space to rebuild on his own terms. He also reflects on his biomedical engineering background, the thin veil between science and songwriting, and the deeper purpose behind SonicCritic, a direct-to-fan platform created to help artists keep more of what they earn.

Before the founder, though, there is Paqx, the music lover: someone happiest in the background, still trying to give something honest back to the scene that built him.

Welcome to A&R Factory, Paqx. It’s brilliant to have you with us to talk about New Orleans, your music, the hard lessons behind SonicCritic and what it means to build something fairer from inside the scene.

You have spent six years performing and recording in New Orleans, which is one of the richest music cities in the world, but also a very hard place to survive as a working artist. What did the city teach you that no classroom or online tutorial ever could?

New Orleans has not only taught me but also built who I am. Everything I bring to the musical world was learned through teachers, resilience, joy, pain and love. Creativity is shown every day in this beautiful city.

Before music became your full-time focus, you trained as a biomedical engineer at Louisiana Tech. Do you think that scientific background affects the way you build songs, produce records or solve creative problems?

Yeah, you’re right. Science and art are blended in this field. It took me a while to see it, but solving creative and technical problems in any field requires both sides of the brain. But when writing or recording songs, my mind is a world away from science!

You have described losing credits early in your career after contributing creatively to songs without split sheets in place. How did that experience change the way you think about ownership, trust and protecting your work?

The trust is how the music business really is. It instilled in me a desire to change it. I’m not too much fond of owning a piece of music, but more creating something I can give the world. It’s not mine once it’s released, and I believe we as artists should be compensated fairly for our contributions, which is why I built SonicCritic to protect our work.

When your work disappeared from the record, did it make you more guarded as a collaborator, or did it sharpen your sense of what a healthier creative relationship should look like?

I think so. I never got the chance to collaborate on another big-name project since that night, so I decided to release solo. I knew I’d have more creative control, and it would buy me time to figure the whole thing out.

New Orleans is built on community, performance and musical inheritance, but artists everywhere are still battling brutal economics. What have you seen firsthand about how musicians actually get paid, or pushed out, in a city with such deep cultural value?

New Orleans is known as a very hospitable city. We don’t push people out. It is very competitive, and you have to hustle. The brutal economics that artists face is real. I’ve lived it. I built SonicCritic for the next artist that shouldn’t have to go through what I went through.

Before people meet you as the founder of SonicCritic, what do you want them to understand about Paqx as an artist, producer and person inside the music?

I just want them to enjoy the music. The greatest gift I can bring the music world is my appreciation. I work best in the background. I’m just a person who really enjoys music.

You built SonicCritic solo after teaching yourself software, and the platform pays artists 88% of net subscription revenue. What was the moment where you realised you were not only frustrated with streaming economics, but ready to build an alternative yourself?

Three months ago I said to myself, “Isn’t it time for a new music streaming service that actually pays artists?” I had built the base feature of the platform; a music critic that analyzes any song in 8 dimensions, live at soniccritic.ai. When it gained some attention, I realized I could take it further.

Now that you are both a working artist releasing music and someone creating a direct-to-fan platform, has SonicCritic changed how you think about your own catalogue, your listeners and the kind of music you want to make next?

Absolutely, it’s changed how I approach my entire identity as Paqx. I’ll have a more direct connection to my fans and better music will flow.

–

Connect with Paqx via Instagram.

Interview by Amelia Vandergast

Connor Fischetti Interview: The Heart, Humour and Human Spark Behind the Band

Posted on 8 August 2026

Connor Fischetti makes music with the kind of warmth that reminds you why bands still matter. In this A&R Factory interview, he opens up about the value of real musicianship in an era increasingly shaped by shortcuts, how technology can support artists without replacing the human feeling behind a song, and how his self-titled album grew once it reached the hands of a full band. There is plenty of soul in the conversation too, from the awkward sweetness of early romance in Don’t Let Me to the influence of Jeff Buckley, Prince, Blur and Bruno Mars on his sound. Fischetti also talks about winning over East Lansing crowds, trusting yourself more than the internet, and making shows that give people a reason to step outside their own heads for a while.

Your band has positioned itself as a staunch rejection of AI music and soulless electro pop. What finally made you think, “Right, we need to put real musicianship back at the center of this”?

I think over the years, modern musicians have gotten better, faster, more precise, and it’s resulted in an era where musicians are inspired by programmed music and electronic pop. I think there’s something amazing about how we’re at the start of a new era, which is a large return to bands with musicians with distinct styles, playing simple parts, or very complicated ones, but as tightly as possible.

Where do you draw the line between technology serving musicians in the studio and technology replacing the human being behind the song?

I think that technology has always served a purpose in terms of creating new styles and modes of musical expression, but the main goal of any piece of technology used in musical production should be as a tool, not as a substitute for human expression. Otherwise it stops being art, at least in my opinion.

Your self-titled album became the foundation for the full band. How did those songs change once you placed them in the hands of musicians with their own personalities and ideas?

I have versions and recordings of the band playing live, and the fluidity of the structures, the improvisation on certain vamps, and the engagement and energy with the musicians can all be felt. I’d love to release those someday.

Don’t Let Me captures the cringe of early romance with incredible honesty. Did one painfully awkward memory inspire it, and did any lyric feel especially exposing to write?

It felt like it was written from a combination of experiences, where early flirting and intrigue put you in such a place of vulnerability. In my way, it felt like I was reflecting back on my first few years in college.

Your live set places Jeff Buckley, Prince, Blur and Bruno Mars beside your original material. What do those cover choices reveal about your musical DNA?

I mean, there’s clearly a soulful connection and link between all of them. These are artists that have always been known for being great frontmen, innovators, and prolific writers, players, and instrumentalists. I take cues from all of them in different ways, a lot having to do with sound selection, mixing and production choices, and vocal and songwriting inspirations.

You built a strong reputation around East Lansing through musicianship and soul-driven sound. What have those local audiences taught you about winning over a room?

This has taught me that people love an elaborate and entertaining show designed to capture their attention and distract them from their lives for an hour or more!

Your album tackles situationships, sex, depression, and emotional turmoil with a cheeky Timberlake-esque wink. If you could make one impression on people dealing with the mess of contemporary reality, what would it be?

That people need to trust themselves more than the internet when making decisions in their lives, because even when they make the wrong choices, at least they’re actually learning the lessons. You also do a much better job at learning what it is you’re seeking from friendships, relationships, casual partners, etc.

Thanks for giving me these fun questions!

–

Stream latest singles on Spotify & connect with the artist on Instagram. 

Interview by Amelia Vandergast

oO5 Dynasty Interview: Inside the Haunted Architecture of Ghost Wav

Posted on 8 July 2026

In a rare exclusive interview, oO5 Dynasty, the creative alias of Jamel Marshall Pearson, opened the door to Ghost Wav with the rare clarity of an artist building a genre from lived history, memory and self-defined philosophy. Across this expansive interview, he traces the roots of the sound through early productions, family legacy, filmic atmosphere, dance, design, archiving and the tools that helped shape his musical language. The conversation moves through originality, preservation, creative ownership and the refusal to let algorithms flatten art into disposable repetition.

What follows is a manifesto for independent thought, emotional movement and a future where Ghost Wav grows through contribution rather than imitation.

Question 1

A&R Factory asked:
Ghost Wav is being positioned as a standalone genre rather than a loose sound or aesthetic. What was the first moment where you realised this had its own identity, rules and future?

Ghost Wav Wasn’t Created Overnight. I Had Been Chasing It for More Than 20 Years.

There are moments in life when your past suddenly begins making sense.

I’ve been experiencing that lately.

Every day, driving to and from work, I listen to my old productions. Records I made nearly twenty years ago with artists like Legend of New York, Pody, A.O. Baker, Gemstar, Arlis Michaels, and collaborations featuring Staxx Paper.

Most people probably haven’t heard these songs in years.

But I have.

I listen to them faithfully because they represent something much deeper than nostalgia.

They represent discovery.

As I replay those records today, I don’t hear old beats.

I hear the beginning of Ghost Wav.

## Before I Had a Name for It

Back then, I didn’t know music theory the way I do today.

I wasn’t thinking about pivot-chord modulation.

I wasn’t intentionally writing songs that ascended and descended emotionally.

I wasn’t thinking about cinematic movement as a philosophy.

I simply kept trying.

Every beat was another experiment.

Every song was another question.

Every recording session was another opportunity to discover something I didn’t know yesterday.

Looking back now, I realize something incredible.

I wasn’t trying to copy anyone.

I was following emotion.

That made all the difference.

## Trying Is One of Humanity’s Greatest Superpowers

People often believe creativity begins after enough tutorials.

I don’t.

Some of the most important work I’ve ever created came before I understood why it worked.

I had very little experience.

Very little formal understanding.

But I had curiosity.

I kept experimenting.

I kept building.

I kept failing.

Then trying again.

There’s something extraordinary about what happens when a human being focuses completely on one problem without worrying about everyone’s opinions.

That process teaches lessons no tutorial can.

## Listening With Twenty Years of Experience

Today I hear those records differently.

I hear melodies reaching for places I didn’t yet understand.

I hear arrangements trying to move instead of remaining static.

I hear atmosphere.

I hear emotion.

Most importantly…

I hear movement.

Not movement because I knew the theory.

Movement because that’s what felt right.

Ghost Wav didn’t suddenly appear in 2020.

The seeds were already there years earlier.

I simply hadn’t discovered the language to explain what I was hearing.

## The Artists Made Me Believe Even More

One thing continues to amaze me.

The artists sounded different on my productions.

Legend’s flow felt more natural.

The records breathed differently.

The music seemed to invite performances instead of forcing them.

Those same artists could rap over traditional boom bap, trap, drill, or downloaded industry instrumentals.

But something happened when they stepped onto my productions.

The songs became conversations instead of performances.

Looking back, I think it’s because the music itself was already telling a story before the vocals ever arrived.

## Ghost Wav Is the Evolution of That Discovery

Today I no longer depend on samples to create movement.

Now I can compose it.

I can change keys naturally.

I can guide emotion from one section to another.

I can layer orchestration.

I can build atmosphere through texture.

I can use reverb as an emotional instrument instead of just an effect.

I can shape space itself.

Everything I admired in great records—the movement, the tension, the release, the unexpected turns—I now understand well enough to build intentionally.

Ghost Wav isn’t replacing who I was.

It’s revealing who I was becoming all along.

## Looking Back Is Sometimes the Greatest Teacher

People often think progress only comes from looking forward.

Sometimes it comes from looking backward.

Listening to those old productions reminded me that my instincts were leading me long before my knowledge caught up.

That’s one of the greatest gifts experience gives you.

You begin understanding the younger version of yourself.

You stop judging your early work.

Instead, you appreciate its honesty.

You realize that your vision existed before your vocabulary.

## Ghost Wav Is More Than a Genre

People may hear Ghost Wav as a new genre of music.

I hear something different.

I hear twenty years of unanswered questions finally finding answers.

I hear every late night producing.

Every recording session.

Every artist.

Every melody.

Every mistake.

Every experiment.

Every moment I simply tried.

Ghost Wav isn’t just a sound.

It’s the destination my music had been walking toward long before I knew its name.

Sometimes your greatest creation isn’t something you invent overnight.

Sometimes it’s something you’ve been building your entire life without realizing it.

And one day…

You finally hear it.

“Ghost Wav isn’t a composition system. It’s a creative philosophy with a musical foundation.”
— oO5 Dynasty

 

Question 2

A&R Factory asked:
You describe Ghost Wav as combining cinematic atmosphere with groove and movement. How do you balance the filmic, almost world-building side of the sound with the physical pull that makes people want to move?

Ghost Wav Isn’t About Balancing Genres. It’s About Understanding What Each Genre Leaves Behind.

When people first hear Ghost Wav, they often ask the same question.

“How do you balance cinematic atmosphere with groove and movement?”

The truth is…

I don’t.

That question assumes I’m trying to combine two existing worlds and find a middle ground between them.

I’m not.

Ghost Wav was never created by balancing genres.

It was created by understanding them deeply enough to know what they were missing.

Every Genre Already Has Its Strengths

Hip-hop already has groove.

Reggae understands rhythm in a way few genres ever will.

Film scores have mastered atmosphere.

Cinematic music understands psychology.

Classical music understands harmony.

None of those things needed me to reinvent them.

They already existed.

The question wasn’t how to balance them.

The question was:

What happens when you remove the limitations each genre has?

That question changed everything.

Hip-Hop Taught Me Movement Through Rhythm

I grew up around hip-hop.

I grew up around reggae.

I danced.

I produced.

I performed.

I watched what music did to people.

When a beat drops…

People move.

When the groove locks in…

People stop thinking and start feeling.

Hip-hop has always understood physical movement.

But after years of producing, I noticed something.

Many songs became trapped inside their first loop.

The groove stayed.

The emotion didn’t always evolve.

The body of the song remained relatively static.

That wasn’t a criticism.

It was simply an observation.

I wanted music to keep moving emotionally the same way dancers move physically.

Cinema Taught Me Psychological Movement

Then there were movies.

I’ve always loved films.

Not just the stories.

The sound.

The silence.

The atmosphere.

Sometimes a sound happens before you even see what’s coming.

Sometimes one distant texture changes your emotional state before a single character speaks.

Film composers understand something incredible.

Music can move your emotions without saying a word.

That fascinated me.

But cinematic music often serves the picture.

It isn’t usually built around groove.

It creates atmosphere beautifully.

It doesn’t always invite your body to move.

Ghost Wav Began With Subtraction

This is where Ghost Wav started.

Not by adding everything together.

By subtracting.

I asked myself:

What if I removed stagnation from hip-hop?

What if I removed the lack of groove from cinematic music?

What if movement itself became the foundation?

Ghost Wav wasn’t built by combining genres.

It was built by removing the walls that kept those genres from reaching each other.

Music Theory Opened the Door

Once I understood that movement was the destination, I needed a way to create it intentionally.

That’s when music theory became essential.

Learning pivot-chord modulation changed everything.

Instead of remaining in one emotional space, I could guide a song naturally from one key to another.

A section could ascend.

Another could descend.

A major key could become a minor key.

A chorus could feel like it was lifting into the sky.

A verse could quietly fall back to earth.

Every four or eight bars, the emotional landscape could change without feeling forced.

The music itself began traveling.

That’s what Ghost Wav is.

A journey.

Movement Exists Beyond Melody

Movement isn’t only harmonic.

It’s spatial.

Most producers understand panning from left to right.

I became fascinated with another dimension.

Front to back.

What I think of as north and south.

Reverb stacking became one of the ways I explored that space.

Instead of simply making sounds “wet,” I began placing them at different emotional distances.

Some instruments feel close enough to touch.

Others sound like they’re echoing from the horizon.

Sometimes a texture appears once in an entire song and never returns.

Not because it needs repetition.

Because it only exists to move the listener emotionally at that exact moment.

Every sound has a purpose.

The Instrumental Should Already Tell a Story

One philosophy guides everything I create.

The instrumental should already be telling a story before the artist ever begins singing or rapping.

When vocals finally arrive, they shouldn’t create the story.

They should continue one that already exists.

That’s why Ghost Wav doesn’t feel like a collection of loops.

It feels like traveling through scenes.

Each section reveals another piece of the journey.

Ghost Wav Is About Human Emotion

People sometimes assume Ghost Wav is defined by cinematic textures.

Or reverb.

Or modulation.

Or orchestration.

Those are tools.

The real foundation is movement.

Psychological movement.

Emotional movement.

Physical movement.

Ghost Wav asks one simple question throughout every composition:

How can this next moment make the listener feel something different from the last?

When every section answers that question…

The song begins to float.

Like a ghost.

Not because it’s haunting.

But because it’s always moving.

Never standing still.

“Marketing Shows Possibilities. Research Reveals Purpose.”
— oO5 Dynasty

 

Question 3

A&R Factory asked:
Your creative background stretches across production, recording, filmmaking, design, choreography and content creation. How much of Ghost Wav comes from seeing music as something visual, physical and architectural at the same time?

Ghost Wav Was Already Inside Me. My Life Simply Gave It a Voice.

One of my favorite questions people ask is how my background in production, recording, filmmaking, design, choreography, and entertainment shaped Ghost Wav.

I like the question because it goes deeper than asking what software I use or what inspires a particular song.

It asks something much bigger.

How does a lifetime become a genre?

For me, the answer is surprisingly simple.

Ghost Wav didn’t come from looking outward.

It came from looking inward.

Your Genre Might Already Be Inside You

One thing I’ve tried to encourage creators to do throughout my career is to stop looking for themselves in other people’s work.

Today, we’re surrounded by tutorials, algorithms, trends, and social media telling us what successful music should sound like.

People spend years studying existing genres.

Very few spend time studying themselves.

That’s backwards.

Hip-hop isn’t my genre.

I love it.

I grew up with it.

I’ve produced it.

I’ve danced to it.

I’ve lived it.

But I didn’t create it.

The same is true for cinematic music.

I love film scores.

I love the way they manipulate emotion.

I love how they create atmosphere before a single word is spoken.

But I didn’t create that either.

Ghost Wav came from asking a different question.

What does my own life sound like?

Every Experience Leaves a Fingerprint

People often think inspiration comes from listening to more music.

Sometimes it comes from paying attention to your own life.

Everything I experienced found its way into Ghost Wav.

Music production.

Recording sessions.

Songwriting.

Graphic design.

Filmmaking.

Dance.

Graffiti.

Photography.

Watching movies.

Listening to background scores that many people never even notice.

Even the way I watch a film is different.

Some people leave the theater talking about the actors.

Some leave talking about the story.

I often leave thinking about a sound that lasted three seconds.

A distant texture.

A subtle melody.

A single musical phrase that completely changed the emotional weight of a scene.

Those moments stay with me.

Eventually they became part of my music.

Ghost Wav Existed Before It Had a Name

One realization changed everything for me.

Ghost Wav didn’t suddenly appear when I named it.

It was already inside me.

Looking back at productions I made in the early 2000s, I can hear it.

Not perfectly.

Not fully developed.

But it’s there.

The emotional movement.

The atmosphere.

The desire to escape repetition.

The instinct to let music evolve instead of remaining static.

At the time I didn’t understand why I kept chasing those ideas.

I had no theory.

No terminology.

No philosophy.

I was simply following instinct.

Years later I finally understood what those instincts had been trying to teach me.

Creativity Is an Organic Process

People sometimes ask me which skill influenced Ghost Wav the most.

Was it dancing?

Producing?

Film?

Design?

Music theory?

The honest answer is…

All of them.

And none of them individually.

Ghost Wav wasn’t built by selecting one discipline over another.

It emerged naturally from the totality of my life.

Every experience contributed something.

Every mistake contributed something.

Every success contributed something.

Every late-night studio session.

Every conversation.

Every performance.

Every experiment.

It all accumulated until one day I finally recognized the pattern.

Protecting My Own Voice

Throughout my career I was fortunate enough to work with talented artists and spend time around people who had already achieved remarkable success.

Those experiences taught me a great deal.

But one lesson mattered more than any other.

Never lose your own voice.

It’s easy to spend your life chasing the next trend.

Boom bap.

Trap.

Drill.

Afrobeats.

Whatever dominates the moment.

There’s nothing wrong with appreciating those genres.

The danger comes when they replace your own identity.

I never wanted to become someone else’s echo.

I wanted to discover what was uniquely mine.

Ghost Wav became the result of that decision.

What If Everyone Looked Within?

Sometimes I wonder what music would sound like if more people stopped trying to fit into existing categories.

What if every creator spent less time asking,

“What’s popular?”

and more time asking,

“What already exists inside me?”

Maybe we’d discover genres that don’t exist yet.

Maybe we’d hear sounds no one has imagined.

Maybe music would continue evolving instead of repeating itself.

That’s one of the reasons I openly share the philosophy behind Ghost Wav.

Not because I want people to copy it.

Quite the opposite.

I hope it encourages people to discover something that’s uniquely theirs.

Ghost Wav Is My Life in Musical Form

When people hear Ghost Wav, they’re hearing more than a style of music.

They’re hearing decades of experiences converging into one creative language.

Dance.

Film.

Design.

Architecture.

Psychology.

Production.

Emotion.

Curiosity.

Persistence.

None of those things existed separately inside me.

They always belonged together.

I just needed enough years, enough failures, enough victories, and enough understanding to recognize the language they had been speaking all along.

Ghost Wav wasn’t something I invented by looking at the world.

It was something I discovered by finally listening to myself.

“A foundation should support imagination, not limit it.”
— oO5 Dynasty

 

Question 4

A&R Factory asked:
Before oO5 Dynasty, there was Legacy, Legendary Team and a whole earlier era of work. What did that chapter teach you about discipline, authorship and protecting your own creative language?

Before I Became oO5 Dynasty, I Learned How to Help Someone Else Build a Dream

People often ask me what my years as Legacy and my time with Legendary Team taught me.

Most expect me to talk about the music industry.

The truth is…

The greatest lesson wasn’t about music.

It was about becoming useful.

I Didn’t Start With Talent

When people look at me today, they see someone who produces music, writes songs, builds websites, designs graphics, creates videos, researches music theory, and documents history.

It can look like those skills simply appeared.

They didn’t.

I started with almost nothing.

My twin brother, Tywan Mitchell Pearson—known professionally as Legend of New York—already knew what he wanted.

He wanted to become a recording artist.

He spent countless hours writing lyrics, developing his craft, and chasing his dream.

I looked at that and asked myself a different question.

How can I help?

That single question changed my life.

Every Problem Became an Opportunity to Learn

If Legend needed beats…

I learned how to make beats.

If he needed artwork…

I learned Photoshop.

If he needed a website…

I learned HTML and CSS.

If he needed someone to understand contracts…

I studied business.

If I needed a deeper understanding of the recording industry…

I enrolled at the Institute of Audio Research in New York City.

Every challenge became another skill.

Not because I wanted to collect talents.

Because I wanted to remove obstacles.

Looking back, I realize I wasn’t just helping build Legendary Team.

I was building myself.

Legacy Was Given to Me

One thing many people don’t know is that I didn’t choose the name Legacy.

Legend gave it to me.

Because he was Legend, he looked at me one day and said,

“Your name should be Legacy.”

At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate what that meant.

Years later, I understood something important.

Not every part of your story is chosen by you.

Some opportunities find you.

Some names find you.

Some responsibilities find you.

Life isn’t only about creating your own path.

Sometimes it’s about how you respond to the path that’s placed in front of you.

Consistency Built Everything

People often ask what the secret is.

There wasn’t one.

I simply showed up.

Every day.

I made another beat.

Designed another graphic.

Built another webpage.

Went to another recording session.

Took another photograph.

Learned another lesson.

Most of those early beats were probably terrible.

Most people will never hear them.

But they served their purpose.

Every bad beat taught me something the next beat needed.

Progress wasn’t glamorous.

It was repetitive.

Being Present Was an Education

Even when I wasn’t the featured artist…

I was there.

Even when I wasn’t the lead producer…

I was there.

Even when I wasn’t speaking…

I was listening.

Recording sessions became classrooms.

Conversations became education.

Watching professionals work became part of my training.

Sometimes the greatest lesson isn’t being the person in the spotlight.

Sometimes it’s simply being in the room long enough to understand how greatness is built.

Legendary Team Became My University

People often think education only happens inside schools.

For me, Legendary Team was another kind of university.

Working alongside artists.

Producing records.

Filming.

Designing.

Traveling.

Problem-solving.

Building.

Failing.

Trying again.

Those experiences taught me things no textbook ever could.

By the time people started recognizing my work, they were seeing the result of thousands of invisible hours.

Legacy Built oO5 Dynasty

People sometimes separate my past from my present.

I don’t.

Legacy didn’t disappear.

Legacy evolved.

Without those years…

There would be no Ghost Wav.

There would be no documentaries.

No websites.

No archives.

No production philosophy.

No oO5 Dynasty.

Everything I create today stands on foundations that were built years earlier.

Becoming the Ultimate Human Being

One philosophy has guided me throughout my life.

I never wanted to become the best at one thing.

I wanted to become the best version of myself.

Every new skill became another tool.

Photography.

Music production.

Graphic design.

Filmmaking.

Dance.

Web development.

Business.

Writing.

Research.

None of those disciplines compete with one another.

Together, they make me a more complete creator.

They allow me to contribute wherever I’m needed.

Success Isn’t Just About Yourself

Looking back, I don’t think Legacy was only preparing me for a career.

It was preparing me for a philosophy.

Helping someone else taught me how to help myself.

Building a team taught me how to build a vision.

Learning one skill taught me how to learn anything.

The music industry showed me success.

It also showed me disappointment.

It showed me loyalty.

It showed me betrayal.

It showed me creativity.

It showed me imitation.

Every experience became another layer of understanding.

Today, people know me as oO5 Dynasty.

They see Ghost Wav.

They see the music.

They see the philosophy.

But none of those things appeared overnight.

Before there was oO5 Dynasty…

There was Legacy.

And Legacy taught me that the greatest investment you can ever make isn’t into a trend, a platform, or even a career.

It’s into becoming the kind of person who can keep growing, no matter what life asks of you next.

“If everyone creates identical Ghost Wav… then Ghost Wav has failed.”
— oO5 Dynasty

 

Question 5

A&R Factory asked:
You’ve been releasing archival productions, including songs produced for Legend of NY. What does preservation mean to you in a culture that keeps pushing artists to chase the next trend instead of documenting what already mattered?

I Didn’t Start Documenting My Work Because I Wanted Fame. I Started Because I Learned What It Feels Like to Lose History.

People often ask why I’ve spent so much time archiving my music, documenting my work, and preserving projects that many creators would have left behind years ago.

The answer has very little to do with music.

It has everything to do with history.

Following Is Human Nature

I don’t believe people wake up one morning and consciously decide to become followers.

I think it happens naturally.

From the day we’re born, we’re taught by someone else.

Our parents teach us how to walk.

How to speak.

How to read.

How to understand the world.

Following is one of the first things we ever learn.

As adults, that instinct often continues.

Only now we’re following trends.

Following algorithms.

Following influencers.

Following whatever everyone else is doing.

Most people aren’t trying to lose themselves.

They’re simply repeating what they’ve always been taught.

Then, for some people, something changes.

It’s almost like waking up.

You suddenly step outside the crowd and realize…

“I’ve been following everyone else’s path instead of discovering my own.”

That realization changes everything.

I Never Planned to Build an Archive

People sometimes assume I always intended to preserve everything I created.

I didn’t.

I simply never wanted to throw it away.

Old hard drives.

Music sessions.

Photos.

Videos.

Graphics.

Projects.

They stayed with me because getting rid of them never felt right.

I wasn’t building an archive.

I was simply holding onto pieces of my life.

Years later, I realized those pieces had become history.

Losing My Mother Changed the Way I Value Memory

When I was a child, my mother passed away.

Afterward, much of what we had in our home disappeared.

Photographs.

Personal belongings.

Memories captured in physical form.

Gone.

Some relatives later found and shared a few photographs with us.

Without them, many moments would have existed only in memory.

That experience stayed with me.

I don’t think I understood it at the time.

But looking back now, I believe it quietly shaped the way I treat everything I create.

I learned early that once history disappears…

Sometimes it never comes back.

The Internet Taught Me Another Lesson

Years later I began speaking publicly about creativity, originality, and what I eventually called the Copy and Clone Generation.

As those conversations grew, people naturally asked questions about my own history.

“Where’s your proof?”

“What have you done?”

“Where’s the evidence?”

At first, I wasn’t bothered.

Because I knew what I had lived.

But then I realized something important.

If your work isn’t documented…

To the outside world, it might as well not exist.

That wasn’t a painful realization.

It was an educational one.

I had spent years producing records.

Designing.

Filming.

Building websites.

Creating graphics.

Working behind the scenes.

Helping artists.

But because much of it had never been publicly documented, people couldn’t see it.

Not because it wasn’t real.

Because it wasn’t preserved where others could discover it.

A Digital Museum

That realization completely changed my philosophy.

I no longer wanted to simply create.

I wanted to preserve.

That’s when the idea of building a digital museum emerged.

Not a museum about fame.

A museum about evidence.

A place where music…

Photography…

Design…

Dance…

Film…

Writing…

Ghost Wav…

And every chapter of my creative life could exist together.

Not because I need validation.

Because history deserves preservation.

Trends Eventually Disappear

One reason I never became interested in chasing trends is because trends have expiration dates.

Today’s viral sound becomes tomorrow’s forgotten algorithm.

History works differently.

History compounds.

The more accurately it’s documented…

The more valuable it becomes.

I’d rather spend twenty years building something people can study than twenty days building something people scroll past.

Documentation Is an Act of Respect

Today, I don’t archive my work because I believe every project is perfect.

I archive it because every project represents a moment that can never happen again.

Every song.

Every photograph.

Every interview.

Every website.

Every documentary.

Every experiment.

Together they tell a story that no single project ever could.

That’s why I continue documenting.

Not because I’m chasing trends.

Not because I’m chasing fame.

But because I finally understand something I learned many years ago.

When history is lost…

Part of us disappears with it.

When history is preserved…

Future generations can still hear our voice.

 

Question 6

A&R Factory asked:
The idea of structured digital archives, websites, publications and media platforms feels central to what you’re building. Are you thinking of Ghost Wav as a music genre, a historical record, a creative institution, or all of those at once?

Ghost Wav Isn’t a Rulebook. It’s a Foundation for Human Creativity.

One question I often receive is whether Ghost Wav is becoming more than a musical genre.

People ask about the websites.

The documentation.

The articles.

The archives.

The diagrams.

The philosophy.

Sometimes they assume I’m trying to create a rigid structure around Ghost Wav.

The truth is…

I’m trying to do the opposite.

Every Structure Needs a Foundation

I believe every meaningful creation needs a foundation.

Ghost Wav is no different.

That foundation isn’t a specific instrument.

It isn’t a specific tempo.

It isn’t a specific chord progression.

It isn’t even a specific sound.

The foundation is movement.

Movement through harmony.

Movement through emotion.

Movement through psychology.

Movement through the body of the song.

That’s why I talk about pivot-chord modulation, key changes, emotional transitions, ascending, descending, texture, atmosphere, rhythm, and groove.

Those ideas aren’t rules.

They’re ways of encouraging music to keep evolving instead of standing still.

Everything Beyond That Belongs to the Creator

Once the foundation exists…

The rest belongs to you.

Maybe your Ghost Wav begins with a piano.

Someone else’s begins with a violin.

Another producer starts with field recordings.

Another begins with an acapella voice.

Someone else may begin with artificial intelligence before transforming it into something deeply personal.

None of those approaches automatically make or break Ghost Wav.

Because Ghost Wav doesn’t begin with the tool.

It begins with the person using it.

Documentation Doesn’t Define Ghost Wav

People sometimes look at my websites, articles, and archives and assume they’re part of Ghost Wav itself.

They’re not.

They’re documentation.

They’re simply the tools available in today’s world.

If the internet didn’t exist…

I’d be writing everything in notebooks.

Drawing diagrams by hand.

Publishing books instead of websites.

The medium would change.

The philosophy wouldn’t.

Ghost Wav doesn’t exist because of websites.

The websites exist because Ghost Wav already exists.

Freedom Is Part of the Design

One reason I believe Ghost Wav has so much potential is because it refuses to force everyone toward the same destination.

A producer in Brazil won’t hear Ghost Wav exactly the way I do.

Neither will someone in Japan.

Or Australia.

Or Chile.

Or New York.

And I don’t want them to.

Every person carries different experiences.

Different emotions.

Different cultures.

Different stories.

Why should every Ghost Wav composition sound identical?

It shouldn’t.

Even Ghosts Are Experienced Differently

I’ve always loved the symbolism behind the name Ghost Wav.

Ask ten people what a ghost looks like…

You’ll probably hear ten different answers.

Some imagine a glowing white figure.

Others imagine something transparent.

Some imagine a glitch.

Some don’t see anything at all.

They simply feel a presence.

A cold breeze.

A shift in atmosphere.

Ghost Wav works the same way.

The experience matters more than the appearance.

My Goal Isn’t to Create Followers

One thing has remained consistent throughout my entire creative journey.

I’m not interested in creating followers.

I’m interested in helping people discover themselves.

That’s why I encourage musicians to look inward instead of outward.

Ghost Wav isn’t asking people to imitate me.

It’s asking them to understand themselves deeply enough that something original begins to emerge.

If everyone creates identical Ghost Wav…

Then Ghost Wav has failed.

A Living Culture

People sometimes ask whether Ghost Wav is simply a genre.

I think it’s capable of becoming something much larger.

Not because I control it.

Because I don’t.

A culture grows when people contribute their own experiences.

Their own interpretations.

Their own emotions.

Their own perspectives.

Ghost Wav has room for all of that.

The foundation remains.

Everything else continues evolving.

The Invisible Architecture

When people ask me what Ghost Wav really is…

I don’t think about websites.

I don’t think about articles.

I don’t think about archives.

I think about a feeling.

A vibration.

A piece of music that refuses to remain emotionally still.

Something that moves.

Something that breathes.

Something that changes.

Just enough to make the listener feel like they’re traveling instead of simply listening.

The documentation simply explains the philosophy.

The music is where Ghost Wav truly exists.

And that’s exactly where I believe it should stay.

 

Question 7

A&R Factory asked:
You’re currently using the Roland FA-06 and MPC Live to create original Ghost Wav compositions. What do those tools give you that software alone can’t, especially when you’re trying to build something with its own signature DNA?

Ghost Wav Didn’t Come From Expensive Gear. It Came From Understanding My Tools.

One question I’ve been asked is why I continue creating Ghost Wav with a Roland FA-06 workstation and an MPC Live.

Most people expect me to answer by talking about hardware.

That’s not really the answer.

The answer is understanding.

The Tool Was Never the Destination

For years, I watched people argue about equipment.

Which sampler is better.

Which workstation sounds better.

Which plugins are better.

Which company makes the best keyboard.

Eventually I stopped asking those questions.

Instead, I asked something much simpler.

“What is this tool actually designed to do?”

That single question changed my entire creative process.

Marketing Shows Possibilities

Research Reveals Purpose

Modern music technology is surrounded by incredible marketing.

Beautiful videos.

Finger drumming.

Flashy demonstrations.

Influencers.

Product launches.

Endless feature lists.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that.

But marketing teaches you what a company wants you to see.

Research teaches you what the tool actually is.

I became fascinated with understanding the inner architecture of the instruments I already owned.

How they processed sound.

How they handled sampling.

How they layered instruments.

How reverb actually behaved.

How pre-delay affected emotional space.

How stereo width changed perception.

The more I understood the tools…

The more they disappeared.

My Roland FA-06 Waited Patiently

One of the biggest lessons in my journey came from a keyboard that spent years sitting in the corner of my room.

My Roland FA-06 collected dust.

I even have photographs of it sitting there untouched.

At one point I cleaned it until it looked exactly the way it had the day I opened the box.

Then something changed.

Instead of seeing it as another keyboard…

I began seeing it as an orchestra waiting to be explored.

That’s when Ghost Wav truly accelerated.

Building My Own Musical DNA

I stopped searching for someone else’s sounds.

I began building my own.

My own layered strings.

My own trumpet sections.

My own orchestral textures.

My own studio sets.

Names like…

oO5 Elven Forest

oO5 Trumpets

These weren’t presets.

They became part of my own musical language.

Every sound carried a purpose.

Every layer became another color on my palette.

Eventually I realized something beautiful.

I wasn’t collecting sounds.

I was building a vocabulary.

Then the MPC Found Its True Purpose

Around the same time, I stopped asking the MPC to become something it wasn’t.

Modern technology often encourages us to use every feature simply because it exists.

I chose a different approach.

I allowed the MPC to excel at what made it legendary.

Sampling.

Performance.

Capture.

Workflow.

The workstation remained the workstation.

The sampler remained the sampler.

Instead of forcing both machines to become identical…

I allowed each one to become exceptional at its own job.

That’s when the workflow finally clicked.

Understanding Creates Freedom

Once I understood the foundation…

Everything became possible.

An entire composition could grow from one string section.

Every four or eight bars the harmony could evolve.

Pivot-chord modulation could move the emotion.

A piano could enter.

Then disappear.

A choir could quietly emerge.

An eagle could begin in the left speaker…

Travel across the stereo field…

Fade into the distance…

While layers of carefully controlled reverb pushed it farther toward the horizon.

Those aren’t effects for the sake of effects.

They’re movement.

Every decision serves the journey.

Ghost Wav Lives Beyond the Equipment

People sometimes assume Ghost Wav exists because of specific instruments.

I don’t believe that.

If tomorrow I lost every piece of equipment I own…

Ghost Wav would still exist.

Because Ghost Wav doesn’t live inside the hardware.

It lives inside understanding.

The instruments simply help me express it.

Respect the Tool. Discover Yourself.

If there’s one lesson my creative journey has taught me, it’s this.

Respect your tools enough to understand them.

Respect the people who built them.

Learn why they exist.

Learn what they’re actually good at.

Then…

Forget about the equipment.

Bring yourself into the music.

Because no workstation…

No sampler…

No synthesizer…

No software…

Can create your identity for you.

Only you can do that.

The tools simply help reveal what was already waiting inside.

 

Question 8

A&R Factory asked:
In an era dominated by algorithms, imitation and disposable trends, your work places huge value on originality, independent thinking and intellectual property. What does the long-term Ghost Wav ecosystem look like once the releases, archives, visuals and documentation all start speaking to each other?

Ghost Wav Doesn’t Belong to Me. It Belongs to Everyone Who Builds Upon It.

One of the most fascinating questions I’ve been asked is about the future of Ghost Wav.

People want to know what the long-term ecosystem looks like.

The websites.

The archives.

The music.

The culture.

The community.

The truth is…

I can’t answer that question.

And I don’t think I’m supposed to.

A Creator Doesn’t Own the Future

I know where Ghost Wav began.

I know why I created it.

I understand its foundation.

But I don’t know what Ghost Wav will ultimately become.

Because that part no longer belongs only to me.

Every person who experiences Ghost Wav will see something different.

Every producer will hear different possibilities.

Every songwriter will tell different stories.

Every culture will contribute different emotions.

That’s exactly how it should be.

A Foundation Shouldn’t Become a Cage

Everything in our world is built around structure.

Schools.

Governments.

Jobs.

Laws.

Organizations.

Most systems teach people where they are allowed to go.

Ghost Wav asks a different question.

“Where haven’t you gone yet?”

The foundation exists.

Movement.

Emotion.

Growth.

Psychology.

Originality.

Everything beyond that is exploration.

Ghost Wav Encourages Discovery

I’m not interested in telling another producer which chord progression they must use.

Or which instrument they should begin with.

Or which emotion they should express.

Ghost Wav begins with one simple idea.

Bring yourself into the music.

If your journey leads somewhere unexpected…

Go there.

If your imagination finds a sound no one has heard before…

Follow it.

That’s not breaking Ghost Wav.

That’s fulfilling it.

One Song Can Contain Many Songs

One realization changed the way I compose.

Most songs revolve around one primary musical identity.

Ghost Wav doesn’t have to.

An introduction can become its own world.

A verse can introduce another.

A chorus can completely transform the emotional landscape.

A bridge can reveal something entirely unexpected.

By the end of a single composition…

You haven’t simply repeated one great loop.

You’ve explored multiple musical worlds connected by one emotional journey.

Sometimes I think about it this way.

A truly successful Ghost Wav composition doesn’t contain one song.

It contains many songs living together.

Each section could inspire an entirely different creation.

Each loop could become its own record.

That’s one reason Ghost Wav feels so alive to me.

Every section has its own identity.

The Possibilities Continue Expanding

Because Ghost Wav is built around movement rather than limitation…

Its possibilities continue expanding.

Films.

Television.

Video games.

Commercials.

Background scores.

Orchestral performances.

Hip-hop.

Reggae.

Music that hasn’t even been named yet.

Every new creator adds another possibility.

Every new interpretation expands the language.

That’s how living cultures evolve.

My Goal Was Never Control

Some founders want complete ownership over everything their creation becomes.

I don’t.

If Ghost Wav depends entirely on me forever…

Then I haven’t created something living.

I’ve created something fragile.

I’d much rather see Ghost Wav become something people continue exploring long after my own journey is finished.

Not because they copied me.

Because they discovered themselves.

Ghost Wav Belongs to Everyone

People often call me the founder of Ghost Wav.

That’s true.

History should accurately remember where it began.

But history shouldn’t stop there.

Ghost Wav doesn’t become meaningful because I continue speaking.

It becomes meaningful because other people eventually have something meaningful to say through it.

That’s the future I’m excited about.

Not ownership.

Contribution.

Not imitation.

Discovery.

Not repetition.

Evolution.

Ghost Wav began with one person’s imagination.

Its future belongs to everyone willing to bring their own.

Closing Remarks

Thank you again for creating questions that encouraged reflection rather than promotion. This interview became an opportunity to define Ghost Wav not only as a genre, but as a creative philosophy with a musical foundation. I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to share my story.

Respectfully,

oO5 Dynasty
Jamel Marshall Pearson

Maya D Interview: Meet Brazil’s Pop Icon Fuelling Empowerment Through Poolside Glamour

Posted on 2 July 2026

In this A&R Factory interview, the independent artist, Maya D, opens up about the confidence, feminine power and self-ownership behind her June 26 single, ‘Pool Party in BOLD’, explaining how the title became a declaration of taking up space without apology. She also talks self-producing as a way of protecting emotional intention in her music, how the Maya Verse has become a world of glamour, vulnerability and transformation, and the strategy required to grow an international audience while handling the business side alone.

From sync ambitions in fashion, film, television and brand campaigns to music that feels built for main-character moments, Maya D’s ambition is as big as her talent.


1- The title Pool Party in BOLD drips with attitude. What did that phrase unlock for you creatively?

For me, “bold” isn’t just a visual choice—it’s a state of mind. The title unlocked this idea of taking up space without asking for permission. A pool party is usually associated with fun and freedom, but adding “in BOLD” transformed it into a declaration. It became less about a place and more about an attitude. Everything that followed—the lyrics, the production, the visuals—had to carry that same fearless energy.

2- The single explores confidence, feminine power and self-ownership. Was there a specific moment where you knew the track had to feel unapologetic rather than polished into something safer?

Very early on. I realized that if I softened the message, the song would lose its purpose. Confidence isn’t always quiet or perfectly composed—it can be playful, bold, even a little provocative. I wanted the track to celebrate women who know who they are and aren’t interested in shrinking themselves to make others comfortable.

3- You wrote and produced Pool Party in BOLD independently, which gives the release a real sense of ownership. How does self-producing change the way you protect the emotion and identity of a song?

Producing my own music allows me to protect the emotional core of every song. There’s no need to translate my vision or compromise on details that might seem small but completely change the feeling. Every sound, every pause, every texture serves the story I’m trying to tell. That level of creative freedom is incredibly important to me.

4- The Maya Verse feels like a huge part of your artistic vision. What does that world look like in your head before it becomes music, visuals and storytelling?

It usually begins with a feeling rather than a melody. I imagine colors, textures, lighting, movement, even the emotional atmosphere before I hear the music. The Maya Verse is where glamour meets vulnerability, where confidence and introspection exist at the same time. Every song becomes another room inside that universe.

5- You’ve spoken about transformation, glamour and emotional authenticity as key parts of what you’re creating. How do you keep the glamorous side from losing the very human feeling underneath it?

Because the glamour is never the destination—it’s the language. The emotion always comes first. I love beautiful visuals and cinematic worlds, but they only matter if they’re carrying something honest underneath. I think people connect with authenticity long before they connect with aesthetics.

6- Pool Party in BOLD feels built for people stepping fully into their own energy. What do you hope listeners feel in their bodies when the track hits properly?

I hope they feel permission. Permission to take up space, to move differently, to walk into a room with confidence instead of apology. I want it to feel like that moment where you stop overthinking and simply own who you are.

7- As an independent artist building an international audience, what have you learned about keeping your project ambitious while still handling the practical pressure behind the scenes?

I’ve learned that ambition needs structure. As an independent artist, you’re constantly balancing creativity with business decisions, marketing, planning, and long-term strategy. It can be overwhelming, but I’ve realized that consistency is often more powerful than speed. Every release becomes another brick in the world I’m building.

8- You’ve mentioned future sync opportunities in fashion, film, television and brand campaigns. Where could you most vividly imagine Pool Party in BOLD living outside the streaming world?

I immediately imagine fashion campaigns, luxury beauty brands, runway shows, and scenes where confidence is the story. I could also see it in films or series during those defining moments when a character finally chooses themselves. I love creating music that doesn’t just accompany visuals—it elevates them.

–

Stream Pool Party in BOLD on all available platforms via this link.

Interview by Amelia Vandergast

Jus NBL Interview: Meet the Philly Hip-Hop Firestarter Bouncing Between Sonic Cinema and Basement-Built Defiance

Posted on 2 July 2026

Jus NBL talks about hip-hop like someone building his own pantheon, not disposable singles. In this A&R Factory interview, the Philadelphia artist opens up about the basement studio environment that taught him authenticity early, the evolution from Jus a Preview to Fine Wine, and why he thinks of his albums as “sonic movies”. He reflects on Miles Davis, 2Pac and Prince as forces that pushed him towards risk, structure and emotional range, while also unpacking the difference between chasing circus-like fame and becoming a prestige artist with lasting work. From writing, rapping and engineering alone in the studio to rejecting cliché and protecting peace, Jus NBL lays out a serious vision for the kind of hip-hop he wants to leave behind.

Welcome to A&R Factory, Jus NBL, we’re excited to have you here as you keep pushing Philly hip-hop beyond its history with cinematic storytelling and self-directed artistic vision. 

We’d love to talk about the albums and songs you’ve released, plus the vision behind them. When you look across your catalogue now, which release feels like the clearest statement of who Jus NBL really is?

I think all of them, to be honest, because it’s a constant evolution of a human being. Also, I’m multifaceted, so all of it is me, just different sides.

Jus a preview is just, you know, a preview of what I’m capable of

Fine Wine is when I really started to understand how to structure an album from top to bottom. I did well with Jus a Preview, but I really honed it in with that album from there; it’s been the evolution but as I learn more I will keep going.

Growing up in Philadelphia, with a basement studio in your home where different artists came through to record, must have shaped how you understood music early on. What did that environment teach you about hip-hop before you were even making your own mark?

To always stay authentic no matter what! Don’t copy others; do your own thing.

Your music often feels built like a scene, with images, mood and meaning sitting inside the bars. When you’re writing, do you think more like a rapper, a storyteller or an engineer arranging the whole picture?

Engineer arranging the whole picture 4sure because I’m coming up with the skit if that’s needed in the song the hook how the verses tie into the hook also I make sure I have the right production goes with the lyrics it’s a lot to it if I gotta bring other voices into the track whether I gotta do it but change my voice thru effects whatever I have a big picture mindset to the music I already out grew that mindset of just spitting bars I told myself I wanna be one of the greatest overall hiphop artists that has ever walked in the genre that means the songwriting/Song Making, album making mindset that is truly memorable.

You’ve cited Miles Davis, 2Pac and Prince as major influences, which says a lot about ambition, risk and emotional range. What did each of those artists teach you about refusing to sound boxed in?

They taught me to go my own way and keep evolving because one thing you never wanna do is make cliche stuff Miles Davis has the perfect quote he said “Don’t play what’s there play what’s not there” a lot of creatives mess themselves up trying to recreate what’s already there, at first it can be hard because we are wired to reject something different but if you keep fighting it pays off a lot then you allow other ppl to be more authentic in different ways outside of the music you make ppl feel like they are not alone in this world also Miles showed me how to really put an album together from listen to Miles Ahead , Agharta , In a silent way etc a lot of his albums have a beginning to end like a film because he was heavily into the late romantic and modernist composers like Ernest Bloch ravel Stravinsky Bartok. I myself started studying them and other musicians from different genres even more after studying miles.

Tracks like City Of Hate, Fine Wine and Imagine show different sides of your writing. How do you decide which emotional temperature a song needs before you start shaping the final version?

The production just speaks to you it tells you what to say how to say it. Whenever I usually hear a beat tbh the music is being channeled thru me.

As someone who raps, writes and engineers, you have more control over the full sound than a lot of artists. Does that freedom make it easier to protect the original idea, or does it make you even more ruthless with yourself?

Yes it makes it much easier because I’m always in the studio by myself when you’re alone that’s when the best ideas come because like I said it’s being channeled thru you . Usually when I hear a beat I start writing almost immediately not out of rushing but because I hear it immediately what I need to say I’m not just tryna flex all of this technical brilliance but actually having alot of artistic imagination for my music that’s more important because with technical brilliance you make robot music just saying or doing stuff that’s already been done to death.

You also mentioned how you’re moving forward at this stage in your career. What feels different about your mindset now compared with the artist you were when you first started releasing music?

 At first I had like warped idea of what me eventually becoming famous is for my music, I didn’t realize it’s two sides to the art/entertainment world one I call the circus where you stay in drama controversy etc then the most your known for is a hot single or 2 I call that reality tv type famous then it’s another type of fame for the prestige artist who may only cause controversy for the music itself but outside of that lives a much more peaceful life make more money because they make hit albums music that’s more innovative eclectic. I came to the conclusion it’s much better to be the prestige artist you know? I would rather my music be more exclusive than try to appeal to everybody a lot of ppl lose themselves trying to get ppl to like them or appeal to so many ppl , I can make the same if not more money than my reality tv type famous artist doing concert halls for 2 months out the year and doing a few festivals because the audience is more invested than the other side while keeping my peace and focusing on what really matters.

When people finish listening to a Jus NBL project, what do you want them to understand about your story, your city and the kind of hip-hop you’re trying to leave behind?

That I am a pure artist who wants to keep pushing myself forward with my music never settling for the status quo, always in a constant disagreement with almost everything because the way everything is now came from ppl being in disagreement with how things were before that you know? Also, I just wanna keep making what I call “Sonic Movies” for my music I been structuring my albums like that for a while; as time goes on, I will only get better.

–
Stream Jus NBL on Apple Music.

Interview by Amelia Vandergast