Byron The Aquarius interview: “I was messing around with synthesizers and experimenting with mushrooms, and just thinking about life”
From hip-hop to house music’s hippest
“I got inspired during the pandemic and got planning. I just felt it was time for me to do my own thing.” Byron Blaylock sits comfortably in his living room chair, radiating warmth as he generously shares his truths. It’s early evening in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, and he’s coming to the end of a balanced day working on his new label project and spending quality time with his loved ones. “I’ve been pretty chilled today. I Just took my family out and handled some stuff for my label, you know sending records off and stuff like that.”
Best-known by his Byron The Aquarius moniker, in recent years Blaylock has evolved into a luminous force beaming through house music’s motor city haze. Despite living in America’s Deep South, his dusty, jazz-soaked productions exhibit all the hallmarks of Detroit’s club-rooted lineage, and his glistening sounds have arrived via some of the city’s most revered imprints – including Theo Parrish’s Sound Signature, Kyle Hall’s Wild Oats, and Jeff Mills’ Axis.
Having also signed material to benchmark labels including Eglo, Shall Not Fade and Apron, among others, Byron recently set sail on a curatorial voyage of his own. His new label, Talknoise, was ushered into being via his own ‘Shroomz Guns & Roses Vol 1’ EP, with more work scheduled to arrive from both Byron and his closest musical cohorts in the coming months and years. “It’s something that I always wanted to do, I just had to wait for the perfect time to do it,” says Byron. “I built a lot of connections through the years, working with different labels and learning from the people that run them. Now I wanna present music from my friends, my circle. People in Atlanta. People who don’t have an outlet, I wanna give them a chance”
Byron’s sound is typified by free-flowing keys, astrally-charged chord progressions, and loose-limbed rhythm tracks. Considering his mesmerising keyboard virtuosity, it’s perhaps unsurprising that his musical journey began at a tender age. With his parents both based away from home on military duty, it was his grandparents who lit his precursory musical flame, enrolling him into classical piano classes when he was just six years old.
His grandfather often visited Germany and would return from each trip weighed down with newly purchased jazz, funk and soul records to add to his collection. “My introduction to music was listening to Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, George Duke, Bootsy Collins, Parliament, Sun Ra. You know, all the funky shit,” says Byron, before sitting up in his chair to elaborate on his Sun Ra connection. He gleefully recalls that the avant-garde jazz pioneer was a fellow Birmingham native, and that one of Ra’s music teachers had later schooled him in piano, too. “Lessons was free,” he says with delight. “Matter fact, Sun Ra is buried here. You can look that up!”
As Byron grew older, his impeccable musical foundation led to an evolutionary simpatico with vintage hip hop and blunted beats. Long before he began to make his presence felt in the house community, his keyboard prowess had caught the ears of producers working in the head-nodding realms of avant hip hop, and it was from these fertile grounds that his first appearances on wax would arrive. Collaborations with Flying Lotus, Onra, and Simon Muschinsky predate his adventures in four-to-the-floor, with each project landing between 2007 and 2008.
These exchanges were facilitated by the burgeoning social media phenomenon, a time that Blaylock feels was especially conducive to creative connectivity. “That was during the Myspace days. That was crazy. You had Sa-Ra Creative Partners, Benji B had the Deviation Show. It was easy for producers to connect and collab.” Spurred by the now-defunct AOL Aim technology, Byron would send parts and sketches to and fro between co-conspirators. He fondly reminisces on the construction of his The Big Payback project with Parisian beatsmith, Onra. “We checked each other’s music out and he was like ‘yo, this sounds dope,’ and I was like ‘let’s work on music’ and we started sending files back and forth. I just feel like that period was a real creative time for all producers, as far as networking and building.”
The exponential advances in communication technology notwithstanding, Byron feels that the early days of social networking were especially fruitful for up-and-coming creators, suggesting that access to industry big-hitters was more streamlined during that formative era. “Now, you can network but it’s different. It’s all about ‘who knows this person, who knows that person’. There’s more of a block. You can still get to the people, but it’s a little harder. It’s just a lot now. Everybody’s doing it! For me, starting my career during that time, I’d say it was easier. Meeting all these people, working with Flying Lotus, going up to Detroit and working with Eminem’s producer. It was easier to network with artists and producers.”
During Byron’s college years, his love of hip-hop drew him to the genre’s southern hub in nearby Atlanta. One fateful day, while skipping class, he ran into Bugz in the Attic’s Daz-I-Kue, the UK broken beat pioneer who was, by this time, based in the US city. Daz would later introduce Byron to a man who would not only serve as a mentor but forever change his musical trajectory. “Daz ended up connecting me with Kai Alce,” says Byron. “I was chilling in the club, sitting there with my headphones on, making music. Kai was like, ‘let me check this out’. He heard me on my keys and he was like ‘you sound good, man!’ He asked me what I got planned, and I told him ‘oh I gotta go back to school’. He was like, ‘man stay for the weekend’. He let me kick it at his spot, and, ever since then, he put me onto house music. He got me listening to all the Detroit greats, telling me how black music played a huge part in electronic music’s history.”
Before too long, Alce had invited Byron to lay down keys on a selection of his compositions. Schooling him in the deep house arts and helping him to finesse his evolving productions, it was Alce who helped initiate Blaylock’s Byron The Aquarius debut, co-producing his ‘High Life EP’ on Theo Parrish’s Sound Signature label. “Kai really helped me, man. I still let him know ‘thank you’. He really did a lot for me. He was like ‘I know you doin’ hip hop, but you have a whole different talent. He was saying there’s not a lot of young black youth in the States doing house music. All the pioneers are getting older, and we need young people like you to continue what we were doing.”
The United States boasts no shortage of vastly talented young artists, and while there are no signs of the creative well running dry, Byron feels the majority of his compatriot producers have their sights set on stylistic targets that are potentially far more lucrative than those of the dance underground. Pop, rock, R&B and commercial hip hop dominate the airwaves, and, perhaps naturally, it’s for these glittering dimensions that many would-be musicians aim. “A lot of people think more about the money. But it’s not always about the money: it’s about loving it and taking your time.”
Of course, there is still an abundance of creative beings born, bred, or based Stateside. The nation has given birth to countless esoteric musical forms over the years. Despite this, Byron, like so many of his peers and predecessors, notices a distinct difference in how these sounds are received by audiences on either side of the Atlantic. “In America, we have amazing music but we trash it, we throw it to the side. But I notice that in Europe, for some reason, y’all embrace it. Even when I play shows [in Europe] I be trippin’. People there really dance and connect with the music. Don’t get me wrong, the United States is great, especially if you go places like New York, and I feel like it’s getting better. But, it’s like Kai said: ‘it’s gonna take a lot of young people to keep it alive’. It’s just like jazz, you know what I mean?”
Dutifully playing his part in keeping the musical Chimaera aflame, Byron’s latest offering ‘Shrooms Guns & Roses’ features five expertly crafted subterranean pearls. From the alien synths of ‘Swondo?’ to the distorted bass funk of ‘Freaknik 92’; the proto-house swirls of ‘Miss Dat Girl’ to the nocturnal charge of ‘Lunar Organism’, the EP bursts with Detroit-inspired alchemy throughout. “That city has definitely been a huge influence on me, man. Even when I was doing the Onra stuff. I mean, I had a heavy connection with J Dilla. There’s just something about Detroit, man.”
Byron’s hip hop heritage receives a nod on the record, too, in the form of the swung beats and soul-drenched vocals of ‘Never Come Down’. As both the song and EP title suggest, there’s a distinctly hallucinatory message in the music, with the collection composed during a period of psilocybin-induced reflection. “I was going to Nashville, I was messing around with synthesizers and experimenting with mushrooms, and just thinking about life,” he says. “It put me in this experience where my mind kinda opened up. And that’s how I created that vibe.”
Though he’s always steered clear of the made-made varieties of mind-altering substances, Byron believes the organic nature of magic mushrooms sets them apart from their laboratory-manufactured counterparts. “Especially when you get in the nature. Where I am, in Ashville, we got lots of nature and trees and stuff. It’s crazy, it brings more of the colours out, and it opens your mind heavy. My friends that introduced me to it are the guys from Moog. Their factory is in Ashville. And that’s who I was kicking it with. Those guys who make those synthesisers, a lot of them are into mushrooms.”
He explains how his psychedelic musings informed his choice of wording for the EP title, with each object reflecting a triad of components he feels contribute to life’s finely poised equilibrium “The ‘Shrooms’ part is teaching about the earth, and just keeping that balance. Here in America, we got all these things going on with guns, all this hatred, so that’s where the ‘Guns’ part comes from. Then, ‘Roses’ are for peace and harmony. Even though all these things are happening, we have to create music that inspires us through the negative, turn the negative into positive.”
Projecting positivity appears to be what Byron is all about. After years spent honing his craft, absorbing ageless wisdom from musical masters, and getting to grips with the business end of the music world, his Talknoise project feels timely and auspicious. With a strong team behind him, he’s relishing the opportunity to funnel his energy into doing what he does best. “I waited until I had a strong team and good management. Now I can just focus on the music, creativity and plans, and my management handles everything else.” Though perhaps not all label owners will report plain sailing when it comes to day-to-day operations, Byron is characteristically relaxed about his early experiences in the role. “For me, it’s been a breeze. It’s actually been real peaceful.”
Turning to the future, Byron suggests his main thrust will be directed toward growing the label, “pushing good music, and staying creative.” A commitment to sharing his knowledge to motivate others is a recurring theme of our conversation – he exudes a genuine desire to spread light through music. And, as in the bygone Myspace days, social media once again provides the connective catalyst, with Byron taking great pleasure in creating Instagram clips to inspire his online community. “It’s not really about me, it’s about using that platform as an outlet to push other people to do the same thing.”
Finally, he shares some heartfelt words of encouragement for all those creative souls struggling to make their mark in the hyper-competitive music industry. “This music game can get stressful, but I guess it’s about not stopping. Even when you have things in life that get in the way, keep pursuing your dreams and keep doing it for a creative purpose. Do it because you love it.”
Patrizio Calavliere