AUSTIN, TX – When Danila Kozyrev sits down to make a new song, he likes to think of what people might be listening to 20 years from now and make that. He makes music for the future, and his latest album “Big Thing” is the perfect introduction to his new-wave vibes and intriguing sounds.
The debut single from the album is a song called “Pretty Girl.” Inspired by his wife, Kyle, it’s a song that plays off the popular meme making the rounds in music circles known as “Girl World.” He calls it a love song to his wife, though created in such a way that anyone who listens to it will immediately be intrigued by the experimental sounds and styles he melds together to create something truly original.
“It’s a vapor wave,” Kozyrev said of the song. “It’s a washed out, shoegaze type of thing. I ran it through tape and did a bunch of stuff to it. I went through a lot of processed to get it to the sound I wanted. Most of my work is an experiment, and every song on this album is sonically different. It’s very ‘Internet,’ with a lot of glitch stuff and hyper-pop, kind of like a modern-day New Order or 100X.”
Kozyrev has had a strange and winding road into the music industry. Born in Gravesend, Brooklyn to Russian parents, he was abused by family members in ways that left him physically and emotionally scarred. He also attended Russian private schools, where he learned to read and write in Russian. His art classes included lessons about Elvis Presley and Van Gogh, which he learned about at the same time in life when he was introduced to Tupac. That’s when he first started experimenting with music, but it wasn’t until his mother joined a cult in Mexico and forced him to do DMT dozens of times that he truly began to use music as an outlet for his emotions. He spent the next six years making music constantly, and by age 22 he broke off from the Mexico cult and lived on the streets in LA for a couple of weeks before being arrested for breaking into a building under construction. It took two years for him to finally clear his name.
Today, Kozyrev enjoys painting and producing music. He has a piece in an auction in the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, and a backlog of albums that are quite good. He’s also now happily married and taps into his faith as a Christian for some of the songs that he writes.
“My sound is more of an ideology toward music that I have,” he said. “My music is breaking new grounds. I’m doing something new every time. I do weird things – like take apart tapes and put them on backwards and put them through Japanese 70s speakers that are antiquated to give it a weird sound. I do that because I’m pushing things forward in art. I don’t want to be stagnate. And because of that I believe I can express something that hasn’t been expressed before.”
To listen to Danila Kozyrev’s music, or to follow him on social media, please visit the following links:
https://open.spotify.com/track/1G8b3EW203BtNwvmNKRn2o?si=2d92d5fd02ff4763
Instagram: @tupacfan95
