Byzar - Background

Background

Founded in 1994 by Akin Adams, the earliest Byzar recordings were long-form textural soundscapes made with a 4-track cassette recording of multiple layers of heavily processed guitars, found objects and a badly damaged Farfisa organ. Adams played guitar in an experimental rock trio called S*A*M, worked as an engineer in a hip-hop & dancehall studio called "Midimation" with artists such as Mikey Dread and KRS-One, and co-hosted a weekly event called "The Abstrakt Lounge" featuring Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky at the "3 of Cups" basement lounge in New York's East Village in 1993.

DJ Spooky lived in the nearby Gas Station, a former gas station turned into a renegade sculpture garden in Alphabet City, and began hosting multimedia events called "Molecular", which attracted artists from the burgeoning Brooklyn dub scenes, DJ's, performance artists and installation designers, who would have free rein to transform the space with inflatables, video projections and various artistic efforts. Adams would provide sound equipment and organization help, and would often create electronic guitar soundscapes at one end of the garage space while Spooky mixed raw breakbeats at the other end.

Abstrakt Lounge and Molecular were part of a network of happenings and events, including the Abstrakt Wave, founded by Tim Sweet in a performance lounge called the RV on NYC's Lower East Side, where Adams began performing as an 'ambient DJ', playing the byzar soundscapes layered with other records and rudimentary beats. Other musicians, such as Manny Oquendo, who had been a Midimation client with the LES group "Hallucination Station", began jamming with Adams during his sets, and Byzar began to grow into a fluid collective. Miguel Lopez, who also worked as an engineer, offered after-hours studio time at Mike Thorne's "Stereo Society Studios", home of Softcell, and the Byzar began intensive studio experimentation.

Another regular performer & collaborator at Abstract Wave, composer and electric midi violinist Karthik Swaminathan, was referred by NYU classmate Lucy Walker, and he and Adams recorded their first collaboration together for Elliot Sharp's State of the Union compilation. As Byzar expanded, Karthik brought in jam collaborators & performance artists Laura Marie Williams and Karl Francke to add visual, performance and sonic elements to Byzar's live show.

Byzar was envisioned as an electronic improvisational experiment, and did not adhere to song structure or popular music formats. Live shows and studio recordings were entirely improvised, with a rotating line-up of "expressionists" playing various instruments and devices. Influenced by dub music, Byzar applied dub studio mixing techniques to their live performances, and varied atmospheric textures with polyrhythmic electronic dance music.