It’s never easy for an artist who’s spent nearly a decade honing their craft to cope with the demands of fans; this is especially true in electronic music, when sticking to one style or genre of music can be crippling to an artist’s creativity. Such was the case for Arty, who began to fall out of love with the passion of producing a couple years ago.
As he wrote in a letter to fans on Facebook, the pressure from wanting to create what he wanted and to please his fans simultaneously created a rift in his creative process, and it became more of a job than a passion. And that wasn’t good anymore. But last year, he managed to find a foot hold and regained that innocent teenage love for production, leading to his first production as Alpha 9 in 7 years.
Read what Arty has to say below, and listen to “The Night is Ours.”
Hey everyone, Arty here and I wanna share some thoughts with you that I’ve been living with for a while now.
First, thanks to all of you for being with me in this amazing musical journey, I just realized it’s already been 9 years since I’m doing what I love the most and your support is the one of the few things that keeps me motivated and inspired,
I appreciate it so much and I always will!
But I also appreciate the desire to explore myself in different musical styles, trying something new and pushing this idea forward all the time. Since the beginning of my career I’ve always been saying that I don’t wanna stuck in one certain genre, and the reason is not because I don’t like it anymore. The real reason that is for me as an artist, listening, getting inspired and making as much diverse music as possible is one of the things that helps my creativity and keeps me from being stagnated as a musician…which is the worst.
That’s why at some point the music I was making has started to go further and further away from its original roots.
Some of you accepted it, some if you didn’t. Yet all of the records I made always came from my soul, whether it’s trance, dance or pop. Over these years I’ve been always listening to your feedback. You might think that for an artist it’s extremely easy to start ignoring his fans, their demands and just do what his heart or mind says.
Well, it’s not. And that’s where idea of discovering new sound clashes with listener’s voice and all of this happens in my head. “IN MY HEAD”, so don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about it. Your feedback and support was always with me throughout this journey, but when some of my records didn’t match your expectation, unconsciously I started to build this pressure on my shoulders and I started to compromise my music in an effort to make both me and my fans satisfied.
2016 was amazing year for me. It was a year of re-discovering myself as an artist and as a person as well, considering it took me a minute to get out of my album’s routine and its aftermath, which was close to a nightmare. But the freedom afterwards felt like nothing else. I didn’t feel myself so inspired and productive in a long time, and it was probably the first time I opened my eyes so wide. Closer to the end of last year I noticed how much my music was different from what I’ve done in the past, and I felt like I had been neglecting my long-time fans and it didn’t feel fair. And that’s how I came up with idea of bringing the Alpha 9 alias back. It gives me the freedom to not be bounded to a specific genre, allowing me to experiment and keep pushing my boundaries with Arty, while I can be as close as possible to my long-time fans using Alpha 9 moniker.
I remember myself as a 17 year old kid, running back home from university classes every day, absolutely blinded by just the idea of making music. No pressure from managers, labels or promoters, just pure passion. For the first time in a long time I feel like that kid again and I don’t feel this pressure anymore.
Also I wanna make it really clear, although Alpha 9 is still me, it’s a totally separate project from Arty, focused on totally different music. I’m taking Arty music further towards the dance scene, while Alpha 9 will be a progressive/trance oriented project, this applies to branding, releases and live sets.
Below is the link for my first track back as Alpha 9 “The Night is Ours” that came out today on Armind. As a sign of appreciation for your support, the first 1000 downloads on this link are free.
Image via Rukes.com