Introducing RYNB
Hi All,
I'm Ryan, or RYNB, nice to 'e-meet' you! Right, that's enough of the nauseating corporate facade… Jack and the team have very kindly given me the opportunity to write a few bits for MP3 about music, the scene and anything else I can sneak past their exacting editorial standards. Exciting times! Just like starting a new job, it's part and parcel to get the awkward introduction phase out of the way so you know a little bit about me, my background and why I'm (un)qualified to waffle on. I thought I'd do a whistlestop tour of how my DJing/music journey began and how it's evolved since, here goes…
I started getting involved in DJing through my uni's DJ society (shoutout Poppy, Dan & Sam) while I was at Aston Uni and took on being the president in my final year. People talking about canon events can be a bit cringeworthy, but if you'll allow me one that was definitely it as pretty much any and every experience I've had related to DJing and the broader scene since can be traced back to this. During that year, I met a bunch of people who've since become great mates, DJ'd my first 'proper' events and probably knocked a few percentage points off my final year uni marks.
After uni, it was back to my hometown and into the real world: jobs, taxes and the chilling realisation that 7:00 actually occurs twice a day. Despite the responsibilities of being a semi-functioning adult coming to the fore, I still kept up with DJing and music and occasionally ventured back to Brum to catch up with mates who were still studying (and so I could briefly relive the glory of a uni night out.) Through a mixture of DJ competitions and getting the odd call up from promoters and friends, I was really lucky to get opportunities to DJ in Birmingham at clubs like Suki10c, PST, The Mill (now XOYO Birmingham), Mama Roux's & Lab11 despite no longer living in the city.
The next step for me was dipping my toe into the world of producing and record labels. In the midst of the pandemic in 2020, a good friend Toby got me on board to help run a label called 'Killa Sounds'. We wanted to showcase the more musical and nuanced side of dance music and its debut release was my pretty janky DnB bootleg of Ariana Grande's "God Is A Woman". Fortunately for the discography's sake, it was onwards and upwards from there! Toby/BIAST put out some of his own far superior DnB and we signed some unbelievable tracks from Rubix, Eliotskii, Noppo, Charis, & Moose - all of whom are still putting out amazing music to this day.
I'm really proud of how we ran the label and despite it now being dormant, it's something I look back on with real fondness. Similarly to my uni's DJ Society, it was a really important part of shaping my interest in music and meeting a load of great people.
After Killa Sounds phased out, I wasn't sure where I wanted to go next. It was difficult to close that chapter knowing how much time, effort and money Toby and I had put into building that brand and platform, but truthfully we both ran out of steam to meet the demands of keeping that label running and engaging its audience especially when we were building our respective adult lives in different parts of the country, with neither of us being particularly close to a city or scene where that can be done more organically.
Despite the label drawing to a close, I carried on working on production and was still doing semi-regular DJ sets in Birmingham for DnB Collective and played their "Invasion" show at Lab11 each year. I also played a good chunk of sets closer to home thanks to a bunch of independent promoters and friends whom I'm really thankful for!
Over that time, I'd predominantly become associated with Drum & Bass, both in terms of DJing and producing. My preference within that sound was jungle and liquid, but the DnB scene became awash with more aggressive, jump-up sounds. That left me a bit bewildered. I was playing these huge DnB Collective shows, that so many people would be chomping at the bit to play at, but was trying to find a compromise between the music I liked and what the crowd had come to expect. I really struggled to reconcile this and thought that I was falling out of love with the scene and electronic music altogether.
I decided to take the pressure off myself a little bit and be prepared to be a bit more self-indulgent:
- I'm going to engage with the scene on my terms
- I'm going to play and make the music that I want to, not what the crowd wants to hear
- I'm going to engage with DJing, music and the scene in my way and be entirely transparent about it
Officially, DJ, producer and writer are the three strings to the bow. I still DJ as and when I'm called upon by promoters who know and trust me, I produce sporadically, most recently a DnB/Jungle two-tracker on Fragrance Sounds, and I write about DJing, music and the surrounding culture. I'm delighted to be able to contribute to a really engaged, well-informed and pleasant community that Jack and co. have built with MP3 Records! Can't wait to get stuck into writing about the people, sounds and spaces that I admire and get inspired by. See you in the next one!