This collaboration between DJMegan23 and Blue Rojo arrived at bypasss.com for mastering in December 2024, and my role was to take what they’d built in the studio and translate it into a mix that could translate consistently across all listening environments — clubs, headphones, mobile devices, streaming platforms, the full spectrum.
The track came in with a lot of energy and character already in place. What mastering required here was careful balancing: bringing clarity to the mid and high-frequency elements without losing the punch and low-end weight that gives the track its impact. I ran the mix through transparent linear-phase EQ, subtle multiband compression to control any problematic resonances, and a clean limiter chain to maintain headroom while ensuring the master could compete with contemporary releases on the same platforms.
The goal was to preserve the original production’s intent — that playful, high-energy aesthetic you can already hear in the track’s description — while ensuring it had the technical polish and consistency needed for distribution. Part of that work also involved checking the master across different reference systems to catch any translation issues before export.
This was a straightforward but essential part of the pipeline: the mastering stage where a track moves from the studio context into the world. By April 2025, “LO SIENTO +BLUE ROJO” was ready.

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The idea started with a simple but specific vision: take the DNA of early 2000s rap — Timbaland’s signature percussion, those stuttering hi-hats, the space and tension between kicks — and pull it somewhere darker. Not the polished, radio-ready version of that era. Something rawer, moodier, like that sound never made it out of the street.
Production began with building the beat from scratch around that reference point. Every texture was chosen deliberately — keeping the rhythmic blueprint of the era intact while warping the atmosphere into something that felt genuinely cold and modern. The goal was a track that could have existed in 2003 but clearly didn’t.
Recording sessions followed. Getting the vocal performance right was as important as the production — the delivery needed to carry the same weight as the instrumental. Multiple takes, fine-tuning in the booth until the voice sat inside the track, not just over it.
The final layer was the visual. The music video was built to complete the world the record created — the framing, the colour grade, every aesthetic choice made to match the dark, stripped-back energy of the track.
Start to finish: a fully collaborative project built around one idea — classic rap DNA, but colder.

alther is a five-track EP that took shape over the course of roughly fourteen months — from August 2024 through October 2025 — and every single element of it, from the first sound design session to the final artwork, was handled entirely by me.
The conceptual core of the project — a recollection of memories and feelings, all altered by the human mind, blurred and destroyed — dictated the production approach from day one. I wanted the sonic world of alther to feel inherently unstable, like recalling something you’re not sure actually happened the way you remember it. To achieve that, I leaned heavily into the aesthetics of daria core: its tendency to treat distortion, oversaturation, and tonal dissonance not as flaws but as emotional textures.
A significant part of the early sessions was dedicated to intensive sound design work — building custom patches, layering heavily processed samples, and sculpting sounds that felt simultaneously familiar and wrong. A lot of source material came from old video game soundtracks and cartoon scores: sounds that carry a very specific childhood imprint, which I then ran through various chains of pitch warping, bitcrushing, granular processing, and re-sampling until they became something unrecognisable yet emotionally loaded. That contrast — between something nostalgic at its root and something distorted and destabilising on the surface — was exactly the kind of psychological friction I was going for.

Beyond the music itself, I was also responsible for the visual identity of the release — cover art, overall aesthetic direction, everything. The goal was to keep the visual language consistent with the sonic one: something that feels like a glitched memory rather than a clean image.
alther was a fully self-contained project in every sense — produced, recorded, mixed, mastered, designed, and performed entirely by me, under the kydekoi name.