Roy Blues is the alias of Ryan D’Sylva, an emerging dance and electronic producer from Melbourne, Australia. Originally trained as a drummer, D’Sylva still lends his drumming skills to a number of Australian acts, including fellow producers Roland Tings and LucianBlomkamp.
D’Sylva started creating his own music under the Roy Blues moniker after fortuitously laying his hands on the Roland Juno 60 while visiting a studio in Los Angeles. “I became addicted to that tangible feeling of manipulating sound waves, he says. “In turn I saved up the cash for my first synthesizer and started to make music under the name Roy Blues.”
Borne out of experimentation with a range of instruments and synths — The Juno 60, Roland RE-201 Space Echo and a Moog — these tracks have an exploratory feel, bending and shifting as they progress with a liquid quality. “The music on this release flowed pretty naturally whenever I was sat in front of these instruments” he says.
D’Sylva sketched out the material for his first release sporadically throughout daily life: during downtime at a café, the time spent waiting for a train, in the dark after late nights out when he couldn't sleep. “My favourite place to write is at airports whilst in transit,” he says. “It was something about planes taking off and landing landing, seeing people all on their own individual journeys. In fact the last track on the release ‘Fin’ was written whilst I was flying through the Australian sky, amid the most pristine clouds.”
His debut release, Pyramid, is a worthy introduction to the musical world of Roy Blues. The EP’s title track is a standout — pulsating melodies drift in and out of focus, buoyed with an air of house, and grounded with an undercurrent of textural rhythm. It’s three dimensional electronic music, both evocative and effective in its simplicity. “Lotus” is lighter on its feet, as tiny vapors of organic sounds give way to a steady building synth cut. Album closer “Fin” slows the pace to driftier territory, closing with a beatless meditation, woozy and introspective.
Recorded and mixed in D’Sylva’s modest but beloved home studio in Melbourne, D’Sylva’s material eventually reached the ears of Cascine, who will be releasing the EP on their singles imprint CSCN. Roy Blues’s Pyramid EP is out June 28 on CSCN.