A rare interview with the quietly influential wizard of astral, ancient, kind-of-ambient music.
The Berlin-based DJ and producer Shy — a.k.a. Caveman LSD a.k.a. DJ Paradise a.k.a. Final POV a.k.a. Ryan Fall a.k.a. uon — and, nowadays, best known as Special Guest DJ, is sitting in his apartment mulling over the Ming Dynasty. Specifically, he’s thinking about an engraving — “Stroking the sword while lamenting the social realities” — by Shen Qianqiu, a poet and government official who died thirteen centuries ago. “It shows that not many things have changed,” he says, laughing, before immediately upending that stasis: “It’s a several-times re-translated version of what it originally could have meant. The simplified Chinese translation means ‘the sword hurts the world.’”
Spend enough time looking at the cover for Our Fantasy Complex, Shy’s first LP under his new handle, and you’ll find a reproduction of that piece, cast in a deep blue and nearly hidden by silver-Sharpie scrawlings. Here, too, it’s recast: Ming-dynasty meditations shoved on top of something you might find stuck to the back of his laptop. But this sort of transposition is hardly new for Shy. He’s spent years moving across oceans and building up an ever-expanding Rolodex of handles, styles, and collaborators.
In conversation, Shy is affable and quick to laugh, armed with an encyclopedia of dance-music idioms and armfuls of disarming anecdotes. He’s also a bit self-effacing, more likely to point towards his peers than himself. But it’s worth putting it straight, even if he might not do the same. Over the years, Shy has become a critical figure in contemporary sort-of-ambient music, with a sprawling catalogue defined less by a stylistic throughline than his meandering approach to electronic production.
3XL, his latest label, started as a “merging” of his previous three efforts (bblisss; Experiences Ltd.; and xpq?). It has blossomed into a catalogue boasting all manner of sludged-up electronics: naemi’s dream-ambient opus Dust Devil; available on computers and Dylan Kerr’s brain-scrambling Slice Split; xphresh’s xephon, a hotly-tipped ambient-breaks EP; and leagues more besides.
“Legibility is not a huge concern of mine,” Shy says, smiling.
Before donning a handle, Shy was a kid growing up in Traverse City, going to grindcore shows and practicing photography. “When I was 16,” he remembers, “I was really into Flickr, and there was a witch-house-y thing going on: a school of people making an unreal world. Then I started smoking weed, and I was like, ‘Fuck that.’” That’s when his art got “really weird.” He’d dig through old Blogspots for “weirdo midwest electronics” with no identifying information, listening to Oneohtrix Point Never and diving down photographic rabbit holes.
All the while, Shy was regularly hitting up hardcore shows, experiencing music as a communal and physical thing — an idea that directly ties to his interest in dance material all these years later. “The ecstasy that people would reach when they’d move together in the pit… something about everybody moving together led to playing club music,” he says. “It wasn’t a Trent-kicking-a-girl-in-the-face type beat. People were actually taking care of each other.” His earliest music was informed by these histories: a “one-off show” as part of a “project” called Gay Lies. “It was really inspired by Suicide and Sewn Leather,” he says. “Fucked-up, distorted sounds, and yelping.” Then, with a laugh: “I never played music like that again.”
Shy went to Columbia College, in Chicago, to study film, dropping out after a semester, but not before getting into video art. Thinking back, he refers specifically to Vivian Dick’s Staten Island, a “no-wave sci-fi” film from 1978 which features music you might hear, sampled and screwed, on Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1.
After spending a few years “fucking around with pirated FruityLoops,” Shy fell in with Terry Radio, a “diy internet public radio station” with deep roots in electronic music traditions. The station’s early years featured key figures behind Lillerne Tapes (Gabe Holcombe), West Mineral Ltd (Huerco S.), and 3XL (Shy), three labels working to push kind-of-ambient music into the future. It featured a murderer’s row of dancefloor-adjacent psychedelia besides: Ulla; Opheliaxz; Pontiac Streator. Thanks to Terry Radio, Shy was suddenly DJing, for the first time, as uon. “That was the genesis,” he says.
Throughout our conversation, Shy returns to the importance of community. Whether it’s hardcore shows, radio stations, or longform jam sessions with roommates, he makes it sound as though he’s spent the past decade exploring his music through both platonic and romantic relationships. He dated naemi, another Terry alumnus, for “seven or eight years,” and met the rest of Terry through them; now, he’s in several groups with Ben Bondy, his current partner and flatmate. He frames 3XL as a project informed principally by friendships: “‘Label A&R’ isn’t really my vibe,” he says.
The Terry Radio family tree has spread its branches across the globe. Huerco S. has gone from gauzy ambient music to kitchen-sink rave ballista to stripped-back tech-house; Ulla’s had a hand in projects ranging from impressionistic electroacoustic music to out-and-out cybergrind. Shy has gone wider still. As part of Ghostride the Drift, he had a hand in some of the 2010s’ strongest dub techno; recently, he’s tended towards DJing outré dubstep records; a few years ago, he helped push high-octane IDM ever further into the red with Critical Amnesia. (Of the latter, “it’s fucking un-DJable and confusing,” Shy says approvingly.)
Our Fantasy Complex is perhaps his most ambitious solo statement yet, a forty-minute slab of scorched-earth “ambient” music where drums hit with disorienting weight and every synth sounds twisted within an inch of its life. “The Sword and the Fool” bears out its title’s astral implications by way of a world-weary drone, and “Crux Remix” is just as stomach-churning. “How Long Can I Burn?” is the centerpiece: by length alone, it’s nearly half the record, and by far the most bruising thing here, a bad trip made worse thanks to gut-punch kick drums and bass that threatens to swallow the whole thing up. At its best, the LP recalls Actress’s 2014 masterwork Ghettoville: smoked-out, depressive, and oddly beautiful, full of beats purpose-built for empty rooms.
And still, Shy can’t escape his past. The title of Our Fantasy Complex mirrors a now-disappeared EP he released as uon ten years ago. Where that release operates in three distinct modes — cyborgian techno, dial-up glitch, and ear-massage ambient — this one smothers all three approaches in fog.
“I feel like there’s some element of anger and rage in parts of the record,” Shy says, citing “Gaza, America, [and] the military-industrial complex.” He produced “How Long Can I Burn” partly in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza: “How long can I be angry?” he asks during our chat, laying each word out with precision. “There’s also a sort of romance to it. There’s another meaning I won’t go into,” he says opaquely. For Shy, obfuscation is an end rather than a means.
Near the end of our conversation, we’re back to ancient history. This time, Shy’s thinking about Hurrian Hymn No. 6, a Mesopotamian hymn to the divine wife of a moon deity. At present, it is the oldest known piece of written music in existence. Two years ago — or roughly thirty-four centuries later, depending on when you start counting — Shy used it as the foundation for “H6 Remix,” drenching the melody in reverb and, somehow, underlining the original piece’s holiness in the process.
“I thought it was savage to remix that,” he laughs. “Culture and ideas are constantly being resampled — I’m interested in the ways that people intentionally obfuscate that, and I’m also interested in citing my sources. Club music is a pretty modern interpolation of something that’s existed for millennia; trance-states of drums and vocalizations have existed throughout pretty much all cultures.”
Maybe, then, this ancient Mesopotamian hymn is something of a skeleton key: this is Shy both subsuming himself in a broader artistic tradition and putting his own stamp on it, disappearing and integrating at the same time. Maybe it’s about deep-fried ambient music; maybe it’s about disorienting rave tools; maybe it’s about field recordings and voice memos. But maybe the specifics don’t matter in the least.
Consider his latest handle after years of trying on new monikers like outfits. “Special Guest DJ” is both a rave-flyer joke and a shunting of identity, a gesture towards the people around him rather than himself. Shy — one of the most quietly influential figures in contemporary electronic music — encompasses his ethos with a smile: “I thought it would be savage to be the footnote.”