Q&A: With A Subdued Sense of Attention and Quiet, Sylo Releases New EP ‘blanket’
WITH HIS NEWEST EP, BLANKET — Sylo is bringing something new to the alt-R&B palette. As a body of work, blanket is dazzled with Sylo’s clean and sensual vocal execution, as well as an immersive production that is detail-oriented and refreshing. Featuring similar rhythmic runs and straightforward lyrics that shoot straight for your heart, the EP makes a perfect soundtrack for a cozy afternoon by a sun-drenched window.
Sylo is perfecting his craft for acoustic R&B with bright and woody guitar to accentuate his vocal on “AIR” and “Drop a Pin,” but blanket also features grooves that carry attitudes, with numbers like “Ginny.” Regardless of styles and tempos, the EP provides a smooth, meditative listen that feels serene and reflective.
Contrary to the peace featured on his newest EP, the Korean-Canadian artist has made quite the waves for himself in the past year. Between touring slots and collaborations with other promising acts including MICHELLE and Blair Lee, Sylo is striking the perfect balance when it comes to experimenting with production styles and building his artistic identity.
Blanket’s engulfing feeling of ease lands as a result of Sylo’s personal meditation and a reorientation of his artistic identity. A deductive result from about 20 initially written tracks, blanket packages a carefully selected collection of songs that captures feelings of freedom and acceptance.
Upon the EP release, Luna caught up with the artist on his journey of self-discovery, blanket, and all that it entails for his artistic pursuit at the moment. Read the interview below.
LUNA: What is a song you are currently obsessed with?
SYLO: Oh, that's a hard one. I don't know if it's basic of me, but I have “Kill Bill” stuck in my head. I don't even know how the verses go. I wouldn't even know if I would say I'm obsessed with the song, I’m more obsessed with just the chorus.
LUNA: How are you doing in general?
SYLO: I'm doing great. I'm super excited for the new year, 2023. It always feels different at the start of the year. Every year I say that to myself, but this year it feels really different because I'm definitely stepping into new boundaries, new territories as an artist, with the content that I'm putting out this year; how I'm going to be sharing myself more and how I'm in a place where I feel comfortable with sharing myself more.
LUNA: What's one thing that you would really like to focus on in this coming year, as an artist or as a person in general?
SYLO: For the last few years, especially in the last year — or cumulatively — I've been focusing more and more on getting things done and trying to better myself. Self-growth, spirituality, and meditation have always been important for me, but I think what my practices have taught me is that sometimes to just be is the way to go, to stop continually pursuing and trying. I think that's what I want to focus on this year, to just embrace the more beingness of my human being.
LUNA: Does that play into the overall feel of the EP?
SYLO: Yeah, I had a lot of songs that I wanted to include in the project. It was originally going to be an album because I just had a lot of songs. I thought maybe I could do a 12-song album and then maybe put out a 20-song deluxe thing. But a lot of them were very high energy, and this EP is very chill, very relaxed. I wanted to embody just a feeling of surrender, a feeling of forgiveness — to forgive myself for trying so hard and failing in my own head over and over, which was really hurting the creative process. I needed to reset myself and reorient. Where am I coming from? Where's the joy? Why am I sucking that joy out of the process? I had to step back. I even had points where I didn't touch music for months, basically — I would just meditate, sit in silence, and do a lot of self-inquiry. I wanted to really find myself again. I felt like I was lost in a lot of ways — my mind got so busy. This project really came from that place of, let me center myself, let me come from a place of balance, a place where it’s okay; let’s just be this again.
LUNA: There's a sense of quietness to the whole blanket project. It's not to do with volume or style. It feels quiet and it feels calm.
SYLO: Oh, for sure. I want the spaces in between [to be] the sounds of silence in between the notes, and [I want] melodies to be as important as what's being said and what's being played.
LUNA: I think the production is really special. There's a sense of ease to it. It's not necessarily stripped back because there's still a lot of layers, but I think it just feels easy. Do you want to talk a little bit more about production for this EP? I think it’s very different from the typical R&B or even alternative R&B sound.
SYLO: I guess it's a visceral reflection of where my practice has led me. It's led me to a place of always going about things as in a less-is-more attitude. Simple but powerful. You don't have to always have all the bells and whistles to make something powerful, you don't always have to have crazy moments. That definitely took a sense of maturity because I was an artist that was like, “I need to have the best production skills, I need to have the best writing, best melodies,” like, how do I make everything just different and cool? And there's nothing wrong with that, but also, less is more. Let's not be complicated. Let's have only four instruments that are the key players. You can hear all the instruments clearly; nothing's trying to trick you — it's all just there for you to experience. That's definitely the attitude that I wanted to go towards.
There's this interview that I watched with a producer for Kacey Musgraves. I love Kacey Musgraves. She really influenced me to step up my pen game in the last couple of years since I heard of her. There was this interview of her producer saying how they called her The Axe because she would come into sessions… the producers would have all these beautiful, layered productions, and she would come in there and go, “Nope, nope, nope, nope. Take this away, take that away. Just give me the guitar. Give me the piano. Give me the vocals.” I was like, “That's how I like to do things.”
What also helped me is that I love mixing, and I mix my own music as well. It just really caters to the way my brain works. I'm more of a mixer than a producer. I need more help with producing from friends and people that I work with because I just don't think in the most creative, expensive ways that I admire in my friends when they produce. But I do love mixing because all the parts are there. Everything that you need is there. It's just, how do you give it its right place — how do you give each instrument its right place so that it’s not getting in the way of the vocals but it's still rich and full?
LUNA: This is funny because one of my current obsessions is Tobias Dray’s “Maya.” I did my research just before this interview and found that you mixed the track.
SYLO: Yeah, I did mix that one, that was really fun.
LUNA: I also want to ask if you've put much thought into live shows for this project yet? Is there anything that you would do differently for live sets in terms of how you would convey the same kind of feelings that listeners would get from listening to it at home?
SYLO: It would be hard to get a full orchestra to play. Maybe one day I will have a special appearance or special performance that I can get a quartet or something to play with me. Other than that, I did have in mind to have less backing tracks for my live shows for this project. All my prior performances that I've done, we always have backing tracks for additional instruments because there's just not enough players. I really want to move towards a place where I can play everything with a four-piece, five-piece band. I want to go even more minimal in that sense with the next project that I'm working on. Because it's something beautiful with not playing against a metronome in your ear monitor — just playing it and letting the song breathe and go on the speed that it needs to live. I want to just be like, “Oh, today we feel like playing the song a little faster, or a little slower, a little more.” I want to have that openness with this project.
LUNA: That's so interesting because that is not the typical approach to R&B at all. I would love to see that live.
SYLO: Everything's coming together with the content that I want to start putting out. I'm starting to make YouTube videos … showing my process, showing me as a person, how I think, the trials and tribulations that I go through and the insights that I have. More than ever, it's the dawn of the AI age and VR; all this shit is taking us more digital, towards a virtual reality world. I think we're going to start valuing humaneness, human qualities, and human condition. I want to start embodying that through my music, through live performances, through using technology to the advantage of being more of a human being — not just being perceived as an artist that makes R&B music and does mixes. I want to be first and foremost Sylo, this person [who] is an open source, encyclopedia of whatever knowledge that I've gained throughout my life, and be able to share that knowledge so that other people can also go through their own self-actualization, their own transformations in an even shorter time.
LUNA: I'm gonna go through a few tracks and ask you your opinions on them, or just zone in on some specific moments. I like that the project opens with “Millions.” Instead of going through the whole track, what are the “feelings” talked about in the later half of the chorus?
SYLO: It's kind of a summary of what I'm trying to say in the verses. I wrote that at a time where I was [going through a] writer's block and scrutinizing everything that I was making. I was being too hard on myself. When I was writing that, I was getting so sick of continually hitting this wall where I would just bring myself down. Being the warrior spirit that I am, I was like, screw this, I want to feel like a kid again, I want to let myself be as imaginative as I was when I was five years old. I know that's possible because I get glimpses of that here and there. There's this feeling of this boundlessness where anything is possible — I want to feel that always. So why do I feel like this? Why do I feel so small and the walls are closing in? I realize I feel that way because life gives you the pressures — you need to do this, you need to make this much money, you need to have this car, you need to be able to have this kind of reputation, power — all this stuff that comes with being an adult [who’s] pursuing a career, [who’s] trying to get something and do something for themselves. Then I asked him the question, “Is it possible to live that way, like a kid with that openness and that imaginativeness?” So that's what I wrote about — what would it be like if I had millions and I just let my imagination go? And then in the chorus, I want to focus on that feeling of being free, being open, not being so future- and past-oriented, but present tense.
LUNA: “Drop a Pin” feels like trying to live that out in a realistic setting. How did that one come about?
SYLO: I had this sort of visualization in my head when I wrote that. I started writing that in the middle of COVID, when everything felt like the world was ending. And it has a little bit of a love perspective involved in it as well. It’s like, the world is ending, what do I have left that I can hold on to? That will always be my anchor. That's what I practice when I'm deep in meditation, which I'm slowly embodying more and more, from a moment-to-moment basis. If all the walls are crumbling down around us, heaven is here still. Heaven’s a place. It's a mindset. It's a state. It's not out there. It's not after we die. It's right now. It’s the love and the awareness that's having that openness.
LUNA: I need to think about that more — I think it would be helpful if I can start thinking in that mindset.
SYLO: There's nothing left when you exhaust every opinion and belief system that you can tell yourself, then eventually you have to let go of all that. There's no more safety, no more security that you're holding onto as a form of identity. Then the only things that are left are awareness and love. That lack of safety is scary because it's unknown; we might recognize the most toxic traits in ourselves, addictions, the people that we always hang out with or that we attract might not be healthy relationships. But that's still a comfort. It's a comfort that we hold on to because we're scared of the unknown. We're scared of what happens if we truly let go of that. When I started making this album in 2020, I was coming off a really unhealthy relationship. And I realized I was stuck in the same patterns, the same cycles, with the relationships that I choose to be in. I'm stuck in the same stories that I keep telling myself about who I am. And I'm so sick of it, I'm so tired of it because there's such a heaviness to it, I just want to — not in a suicidal way — but to just die and let go of all of it. All the songs that were going to be on the album were coming from this place where I was still holding on to those cycles, but then the songs that seep through to become blanket are the ones that [say], let's truly let go, let's truly move forward, let's truly leave that side of you behind.
LUNA: What’s your personal favorite track on the EP?
SYLO: “October.” I had probably the most cathartic experience with that one when I wrote it. I was in the cottage … the studio in Quebec, and the lyrics just came to me. I wasn't even looking for them — I just heard the guitar in the beginning and then more of the lyrics came through when we shortly went out to get groceries. The first time coming into the cottage, all the trees in the forest were green because it was the beginning of October. Then [when] we went to get our second round of groceries four or five days later, all those trees [were] turning red. I don't know, something about that just hit me so deeply. That song represents a feeling of anxiety and inquiring into what's the other side of anxiety. I think it embodies, in my opinion, the feeling of blanket the most. Just kind of an “everything's okay” feeling.
LUNA: I know that you technically had about 20 songs planned for the project and now we get this body of work instead. Is this a lead up to the complete body of work? The opening segment to this cathartic experience? Are we getting more?
SYLO: I think this is a good segue. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to become a better writer and become a better producer. I want to be able to precisely convey what I'm trying to say without sounding too diluted. I want to be able to say what needs to be said instead of trying to dig into everything all at once. But it is a good segue for me, because a lot of the music that I was making before wasn't true to how I wanted to really express myself. I saw myself in that R&B bubble that’s like, I need to make love songs, I need to have this kind of aesthetic and come off this way… But I want to build upon that and go much deeper. I'm definitely going to still make R&B music, but I'm going to do it on my own terms. I would definitely use subject matters around love and relationships, maybe as a metaphor sometimes, just [with] more layers to it… It’s hard to explain.
LUNA: One last question: What’s something you have planned out that you are looking forward to?
SYLO: I guess that would be putting out consistent YouTube videos. I just finished editing the first video. I'm definitely better spoken in the video because I've put time into writing down exactly what I wanted to say. So it's a good opener. It's a good, established message of what I want to convey for this project and the last few years that I went through.
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