The Welsh-Greek producer on the synths and effects behind his high-energy tunes
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Talking Shop | Who??
Alex Tsiridis has been cooking up future-facing dance music for well over a decade, both under the moniker Rhyw and as one half of production duo Cassegrain, but he was firmly planted on our collective radar by last year’s superb Honey Badger EP, a quartet of mutated club constructions fronted by a dizzying title track that was equal parts brain-frying belter and percussive experimentation exercise.
Mister Melt, the Welsh-Greek producer and DJ’s latest EP, affirms his place as one of dance music’s most imaginative artists. Engine Track is a 200mph speedrun through feverish, squelchy techno, fittingly laced with vroom-vroom F1 samples; Wolf Town feels like a successor to Honey Badger with its rapid-fire percussion; while Spritz and Mister Melt find Rhyw breaking out some of the freakiest effects processing we’ve heard all year. It’s an electrifying listen, and the pulse is so relentless that you barely get a chance to stop and admire the producer’s expert, detail-oriented ear for timbre, texture and sound design.
We caught up with Rhyw to find out more about his truly unique approach to music-making.
When did you start making music, and how did you first get started?
“I got into electronic music from a very young age, listening to rave tapes and buying CD singles from age nine, but actually making stuff was kind of an accident. I was 14 and was trying out demos of games for PS1 and one of them was [music-making game] Music. I got pretty hooked and bought the next one, Music 2000.
“It was basically building blocks, making tracks out of samples, from entire hooks to single notes, perc hits, etc. So this basically blocked an entire world of gaming for me. I got into Fruity Loops after that, followed by Reason, Ableton and eventually buying hardware years later.”
Tell us about your studio/set-up?
“I rent a space in Alt-Treptow in East Berlin. I’ve been there for eight years or so by now and feel very fortunate to be there. It’s quite a big room on the fourth floor of what I’m pretty sure was an old school. I have a decent amount of hardware at this point but not loads and I never got involved with modular stuff. I’m by no means a gearhead so I don’t buy new stuff that often and tend to minimise my setup and switch something up for each production cycle.
“I spend a lot of time editing and doing versions of versions, recording multiple takes so I like the source of the sound to be reasonably straight forward. Like, I know I’m gonna get burnt out each time, so I’d rather that didn’t happen in the first stage, if that makes sense.
“The past few years I’ve been using a lot more plugins than I used to, I think due to the nature of my music changing, more
