Today we’d like to introduce you to Niko Cerza.
Hi Niko, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Born 1992, I grew up in northeast PA in a small rural valley with a family that encouraged creativity – (particularly drawing/painting, my family doesn’t have many musicians)
I think I was 8 or 9 years old when I discovered I wanted to be a musician. I was at my cousin’s house for Christmas Eve, sitting in the basement watching my uncle Bob (RIP) play guitar. My cousin Joe came down and picked up his acoustic guitar, sat next to my uncle and just said “blackbird”. I remember it as this mesmerizingly beautiful acoustic duet of the old Beatles tune and it resonated so intensely through my soul that I knew definitively in that moment what i wanted to do with my time here. I harassed my parents for the rest of the night begging for them to get me a guitar, and right before we were about to leave, my uncle Bob came up the stairs with a dusty old guitar case that sent me on this path.
In middle school and high school, music defined my entire personality and the people i surrounded myself with. I would spend hours playing guitar with friends where we would barely speak words because the music said everything. I took a few guitar lessons here and there growing up, but mostly learned by ear and by being around people who were better than me. I like to say I’m “community taught” rather than self taught. I did have one brief but memorable teacher who showed me how to improvise rather than learning note-for-note; This approach really shaped my outlook on music, seeing it as an expressive language rather than a recited speech. Once i started to improvise on guitar, i no longer cared about learning songs that would impress people, i just wanted to find my voice and be a conduit for the music to flow through.
In college I started to meet and work with other artists, and started taking music more seriously. I formed a garage band with some of my best friends and began writing and recording my own original music in my college house. I had no idea what i was doing, I just knew i wanted to make it work. So i found an old usb microphone from a Rockband video game set, a Fisher Price keyboard, and recorded drums by banging on things around my room. I had no understanding of VSTs or DAWs so I simulated reverb by singing/playing multiple takes into the mic at different lengths and different positions in the rooms. The songs I recorded in that room are rough to put it gently, but they were tangible proof that I can do this.
By the start of my junior year in college I had changed my major 3 times and started to really feel the weight of my dissonance and the fear of molding myself into a person I never wanted to be. So i dropped out and, with the help of my family, moved across the country to Denver in spring of 2015. I found a working cover band that was looking for a lead guitarist, and within a few weeks was playing weekly at bars and events all over Colorado.
Electronic music had kind of always been around, but my interest peaked in 2016 when my girlfriend, now wife, took me to Sonic Bloom. It was my first real music festival experience, seeing artists like Tipper, Bonobo. Sunsquabi and Eoto really expanded my awareness of how far electronic music has come and how diverse it can be. It blew my mind wide open to the infinite realm of possibilities to be explored at the crossroads of music and technology. For the next few years I was fully immersed in the culture traveling all over the country to different shows and festivals. After cutting my teeth and grinding away to make it as an artist and working musician, it felt really good to just be a fan of music again for a while. It gave me the chance to study a new and unfamiliar landscape and reshape my artistic vision around the music.
In 2018 I was working at a Kava bar and met a customer who offered to install Ableton on my laptop using one of his licenses. I always wanted to know how those weird, mind bending, brain tickling sounds were made and jumped at the opportunity. I thought my years of experience as a guitarist would give me a huge leg up but quickly realized that wouldn’t be the case, at least not right away.
I met other producer friends on the internet and in person and realized there is a whole community of producers helping each other. I launched the Azrec project in late 2019 thinking it would be fun to get back out on a stage playing for people again – blissfully unaware that a pandemic would bring that dream to a screeching halt in a few short months. Since things opened back up I’ve played a few shows around Denver at venues like BlackBox and Larimer Lounge as well as some private events and house parties.
Recently I’ve been putting most of my effort into forging a new sound that honors the roots of my musical upbringing by incorporating improvisation and inviting chaos while utilizing the language of music to convey ineffable feelings.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Nope, and Its still unpaved.
I think a lot of artists, myself included, are currently struggling with the balance between expression and exposure. Just like news, it seems that bad music travels faster than good music in the engagement bait era, and its disheartening to see real artists, who actually stand for something, being overlooked constantly in favor of algorithmic trends.
Financial struggles are a big one. When i first moved here I had very little money and no car, just a bunch of music gear and a long board. And sometimes my only solution to get my gear to a gig was to carry it and ride my longboard – mind you this was all analog gear – Stage amp, Les Paul guitar, pedals. It had to weigh over 100 pounds.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Azrec was launched in 2019 to bring to life a vision of highly expressive and experimental electronic music with a pulse. I think of Azrec as a place rather than a persona and i treat my music as a functioning, breathing ecosystem that reacts to input and changes over time.
The current album I’m working on, I think, encapsulates this vision more effectively than anything I’ve done in the past. Utilizing some music theory, modern production tools and the wealth of knowledge bestowed upon me via the internet, it is actually surprisingly possible to animate theoretical ideas and embed narratives within a piece of electronic music.
I think the biggest thing that sets me apart from other artists is my motive. I think about everything that i make from the perspective that I’m already dead, and this is what I am leaving behind. I think we define our own purpose, and I’m interested in finding my own voice, and telling the unique, nuanced and complicated story that is my experience in material reality. “Art” to me isn’t a painting or a song, it the process of existing, connecting and feeling – the music is just a necessary byproduct of my existence.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
Yeah, I mean it feels like the music industry has been constantly changing around me since birth. I went from cassette players to CDs to iPod to streaming to whatever is next with AI. I think its fair to say were going to stay changing.
As far as shifts and trends go, I feel like we’re currently heading for a sort of modern grudge era. We’re already seeing a pretty widespread rejection of corporate sterility in art, and I think that growing resentment is driving people to embrace the more raw and imperfect authenticity of underground and independent artists. I think that as a culture, we’ve prioritized convenience above everything for a really long time, and the consequences of that are starting to materialize in ways that we don’t love.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/azrecmusic
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4nWOV5qZiUFNvQzBpN7kYw
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/azrecmusic
- Other: https://soundbetter.com/profiles/728030-niko-cerza
