ENGL Focus de Mars : To Those Unaware & Elegize Music
- Mathilde
- 14 mars 2024
- 9 min de lecture
As you know (or not ! We won’t blame you), MoshMind was born to share our passion for the Metal universe and for Music in general.
Always in the spirit of sharing our passion, we are keen to introduce our audience to young artists and projects that in our eyes, are worth seeing and deserve a spotlight.
This is how this article was born, a collaborative work between our team and the artists to offer you interactive and lively content.
In this episode, we will show you not one, but the beautiful collaboration between two artists.
Focus on To Those Unaware and Elegize Music !
What could be better than presentations as a starting point ?
We gave the floor to these two artists to introduce themselves and their project.
Thank you for taking the time for this interview. We greatly appreciate it!
My name is Rob and I’m from the United States, and have been around music all my life. Growing up, my family had a long history of performing Tejano—otherwise known as Tex-Mex—music across the US. I was too young to be involved in the family band, but growing up alongside it influenced my passion for conveying emotion through music.
In high school I gravitated toward the newly budding screamo/emo sound popularized by bands such as “The Used.” I was so inspired by the sound I formed a number of bands as a lead singer / screamer, before eventually moving away from vocals to play guitar, which I found came much more naturally to me.
Finding little success in the band scene I transitioned to my first solo project. With almost no knowledge of music production I found it difficult to bring my vision of metal x electronica to life. I was undeterred however, and after a number of years toiling with production and struggling to find my niche, I was surprised to settle on hip hop. I found hip hop reinvigorated my love of writing while also allowing me to finish tracks with less overall production work.
For my current project, “To Those Unaware,” I released my EP “Unfamiliar” in late 2022. I wanted to go back to basics and focus on the lyrics and their message. The EP showcases my love of storytelling supplemented by a more down to earth beat style. After collaborating with Elegize, my style began to gravitate once more. It had circled back toward rock yielding a more rock / rap hip hop delivery along with clean, rock-centric singing vocals. This ultimately resulted in our most recent collaborative effort, “Caissa.”
Elegize:
Thanks for having us share our story!
I'm from the Netherlands and everything I do music related, I do under the artist name 'Elegize'. Ever since I was little, I've liked to come up with melodies and turn them into midi sounds. First just pressing keys on a synthesizer, followed by writing midi notes in Guitar Pro, to eventually use professional music software. As years went on I started looking into the production side of music. Instead of having fun melodies, I wanted to be able to write actual songs with studio quality, though they were always instrumental. It's been since 3 to 4 years ago that I started to work with vocalist to release music that's accessible to a bigger audience. So that's the point where I am at now. Being able to tell a story through music, vocals and lyrics.
Thank you very much for this very touching presentation that reflects your projects.Your stories are very compelling and start at a very early point in your respective lives. But, we have a question, MoshMind is still wondering what are the meanings and beliefs behind a stage name? We ask this question in interviews almost systematically !
To Those Unaware:
The name I chose conveys my hope that my lyrics could find a way to connect with someone; whether that means to simply provoke a thought, or that a line could take a deeper, more personal meaning with them. I approached “To Those Unaware” as if I was writing a letter to a person I’ve never met.
“To: Those Unaware.”
Elegize:
When I started releasing music about 13 years back, I needed to come up with a name that would stick and also relate to the music I make. I always felt like music about grief and sadness were the emotions that moved me the most. Even though I never wrote lyrics and used vocals when I started, I always kept those topics in mind when composing. Like I was writing an Elegy. That led to the verb Elegize. Which is short, but also sounds unique. I've been using that name ever since and it became a part of me.
Your projects make these explanations even more interesting, thank you for them. By digging a little on the stage names, we realize very often that these have a great meaning and are really the showcase of all the work and people standing behind a project. Speaking of it, can you tell us about your music ? How your story started, how some artists may have influenced you, we want to know everything !
Elegize:
In the early 2000's I listened to a lot of pop-punk music. As the years went on, I gradually went on to listen to heavier music. Like from punk to emo and from nu-metal to metalcore. Though I never classify my own music as metal, it definitely has a lot of influences. I like to have catchy songs, but also add some heavy power to it.
It's funny really, even though a lot of my music is in the rock genre, a lot of my inspiration also comes from somewhere else. I used to play a lot of video games back in the day and the soundtrack in those games was always very important to me. One game that sticks out for me is Final Fantasy X. I really like the story and the music was absolutely amazing. It inspired me to write a lot of music.
Besides that, I always have a soft spot for songs from the 80's or music with the same vibe. It has this nostalgic feel which sparks creativity for me.
To Those Unaware:
My influences span a wide range of genres. I grew up on country music and learned to appreciate certain artists and how they expressed emotion through their music. Upon discovering screamo, it showed me an even deeper way to convey meaning. My early screamo influences are: The Used, From First to Last, Chidos, and other similar artists that came out around that time. As the genre evolved I leaned more into the Post-Hardcore subset which to me combines the beautiful dynamic of the singing / screaming that “screamo” provided, along with the darker, heavier instrumental sound of the “hardcore” genre. Some of my current favorite post-hardcore bands right now are: I Prevail, Caskets, Until I Wake, Famous Last Words, Thousand Below, and Myka Relocate. I know genre lines are blurred more than ever nowadays, but to me “post-hardcore” is the most accurate descriptor I can use for my favorite overall sound.
To Those Unaware:
My ultimate goal is for my lyrics to elicit an emotional response from a listener. Whether it’s a welling in their chest or relating a phrase to a powerful memory. I’d love to find that my writing was able to move someone in that way.
Elegize:
I just hope that people will hear my music and be moved by it. Another great thing would be if my music would spark someone else's creativity to create something of their own. If someone just bobs their head or taps their foot to my music, I'd be happy.
Thank you for these very detailed answers, we greatly appreciate meeting artists with such noble and friendly claims. After all, music is also an element of sharing, a means of universal expression and your speeches reflect this state of mind very well !
However, we are also here to present these two artists, including their music, so to give you a more concrete example, To Those Unaware and Elegize offered us to work together on the analysis and history of their recent collaboration on their title “Caissa”.
We asked them to present their collaboration through this title. We again, thank them for giving us some of their time.
Elegize:
Caïssa is a nu-metal song with strong rock and rap elements. It's a back and forth between energetic verses and a catchy chorus. Just listen to it once and it will be stuck in your head!
To Those Unaware:
Elegize summed up the track perfectly. I’d just like to say it’s available on all major streaming platforms:
Elegize:
While composing this song, I had this scene from a childhood cartoon in my head. It was about a chess piece who comes to life at night, but was willing to give up living to be able to see the sunrise once. This sad but beautiful premise stuck with me. I sent the instrumental song with vocal melody to Rob together with the story I had in mind. He really liked that story and wrote the lyrics around that. I immediately liked what he wrote and it really took off rather fast from there.
To Those Unaware:
When Elegize came to me with the concept I was immediately interested. I watched the episode and studied the main scene that he wanted Caissa (We hadn’t settled on a name yet.) to convey. It was an interesting writing challenge, but beyond the lyrics, I love the emotional weight the instrumental brought. The instrumental combined with our dual vocals really brought something special to the table. I’m extremely proud of the end result.
Your work is highly appreciated. Indeed, we noticed that it's not your first collaboration, how did you get together musically ? Is this announcement indicating any future projects ?
To Those Unaware:
A few months after releasing my EP I was kind of lost musically. I was happy with the release, but my inspiration in general had waned. I was trying to decide where I wanted to go next when on a whim started looking into collabs. In a lot of ways I’m not a traditional hip hop artist and that made it a challenge to find someone that I meshed with musically. I stumbled upon one of Elegize’s tracks in a feedback thread on reddit and was impressed with the sound and production quality. I looked into his other releases and found mostly rock tracks, but no hip hop. I heard potential in his sound for a rock / rap based collaboration but wasn’t sure what would come of it. I reached out with the idea and the rest is history.
Elegize:
That’s correct. I checked out Rob’s music when he reached out to me. It was quite different to the vocalists I worked with previously, but that was a reason for me to be really excited to do something new. That eventually led to our song 'Underworld', which turned into a great song. So much so that we decided to follow it up with another heavy rock song, which is Caïssa.
As you could understand, Elegize and To Those Unaware are two artists to look forward to this year ! Indeed these two are not left behind :
To Those Unaware:
I’m going to focus more on collabs. I love the back and forth creativity that collaborations bring to the table. I’m also making a conscious effort to expand outside my comfort zone, which I feel will make me a better writer and musician. Right now I have 3 tracks I’m working on: a hip hop collaboration, an acoustic (clean singing vocals) collaboration, and a solo hip hop track. That being said, working with Elegize has been a great experience, and I hope we can continue our collaborative efforts in the future and beyond.
Elegize:
For me, it is to finally release a song where I do all the vocals myself! I have been exercising and working on it a lot since the end of last year, so I'm really excited to let everybody hear my first solo vocal track. I'm also not done with Rob yet, we are already planning on new music for the near future !
With these beautiful words, it is thus time to conclude our time together. We thank you for this collaboration with MoshMind, having the opportunity to know you and your project gave us a new perspective on your work, and we think that it’ll also be the case for our readers.
We leave you the reins of the article one last time, so if you have something to claim or just a little word of the end, it’s up to you !
Elegize:
I just want to do a major shoutout to all the artists that I have collaborated with. They helped me create some amazing songs and I've learned so much from all of them on a vocal production level. Besides that, keep an eye on my socials. I'm always busy with one or more tracks that I can't wait to share with everybody. Thanks again to MoshMind for giving us a platform and sharing our music!
To Those Unaware:
Please check out my Instagram: @tothose.unaware (https://www.instagram.com/tothose.unaware/) I regularly post snippets of what I’m working on along with lyrical concepts, releases, or anything else relevant to my music.
Aside from that, I’d like to thank MoshMind and Mat specifically for the opportunity to talk about our music!
We can only wish you the best for this year! Thank you for playing the game of this collaborative article. This allowed us to discover you more precisely than a simple interview.
Thank you, dear reader, for following this episode. If you liked this article please let us know and share it !
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