#46

I’ve never used my real name on a release mainly because Mohammed Ashraf is such a generic name where I come from (Egypt) and in most countries around it. Another thing is that I like making music that falls under different genres (ambient, drone, electronic, shoegaze…etc.) and I feel that if I release an album of a certain genre under my own name, I will be defined by that genre, which I am not comfortable with. The last reason for which I choose not to use my name is seeing how people react to anything that sounds remotely Arab or Muslim (it might be all in my head though).

So far, I have used Pie Are Squared for everything I’ve released. It’s a fun name that I don’t feel infers a certain sound so it gives me freedom to do whatever I want. However, I think I am going to retain Pie Are Squared for ambient/drone and then create Piers Q. Red for electronica and RedSquareShapes for my shoegaze/post-rock stuff. I settled on those 2 names because they sound similar to the original name so everything remains connected to each other in one way or another.

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#47

I recently started using Unknown Known (well, I’ve put things on soundcloud under that name for a couple years, but only recently started making something like an effort to, like, have other people hear the music I’ve put on soundcloud, etc.).

I like that it’s a little bit of a subversion of that Donald Rumsfeld line, and the formalist in me is delighted to have filled in the fourth quadrant of that framework. I’m interested in generative processes, and the name also tries to get at the result of chaining a few simple things together for unexpected results.

I also played some things on a friend’s car stereo and one of his reactions was “Oh, that’s actually your name, I thought it was just filling in ‘Unknown Artist!’” Which I hadn’t really though through, but I love as a bit of an evocation of random mp3 imports into Itunes getting tagged as “unknown artist.”

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#48

I’m going to release a track I produced. I want to release this under the same name as I’ve been using as internet/forum name for the last 15 years. But since I’m not a native English speaker I have no idea how this name is experienced by people that are native.
It’s my name Shiftr … I’ve chosen this name some 20 years ago after looking for a name and mainly just liking the letters and the sound of it. Also for me it’s a kind of abbreviation of shifter. It has some feeling of movement in it for me. But i’ve also been told once (by a native English speaker) that if you delete one letter you have something completely different.
So what feel or connotation does my forum name have for you? Is it positive or negative? Something completely different?

#49

my long running moniker is hyena, it comes from my writing tag (yen) to which i added h and a some 16 years ago because i was almost 100% producing music with samples, so the idea of a scavenging animal sounded pretty good. now its a bit strange because i’m vegan since 10 years, so a vegan scavenger i suppose :smiley:
i also use my real name for stuff that doesn’t fit into the hyena aesthetics that built up during the years (breakcore,industrial,drone,noise,mainly darkside music) so that i’m free to express other feelings and ideas.

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#50

I used and still use some nick only for specific projects, ie KHN’SHS is my one man band, drone only, solo project. Everything else come from my own name and nothing else
To be completly honest I found nick or battle names boring these days

#51

this is a really interesting topic for me because i actually do everything via an alias. i’ve invented a person and that person is who i am when i begin to write music. it is a way of defining my musical self and separating that part of me from the self people see day to day. for me, säde mikkonen is the peace and the serenity i feel when im engrossed in writing music. säde mikkonen is the purest form of my creative self. im considering inventing a different person soon to take on a different project. i don’t like to associate my real self with my music, but instead allow my music to exist on someone else’s shoulders. säde mikkonen is not my name, but i am säde mikkonen.

inventing this person (their life story, where they were born, their age, etc) was a very fun project for me. it was very rewarding because for the longest time i felt that my real name was too tied to my music/a specific style and i felt like i wasn’t allowed to write the music i really wanted to anymore. becoming säde opened up a slew of avenues for me. the name was tied to no indicated style or person that had an audience to cater a specific sound to. i was free from what creatively constricted me for so many years; my name.

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#52

I also feel movement in your forum name and don’t believe there’s any need to worry what would happen if you changed a letter. I like it. (I’m a native English speaker in the USA.)

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#53

20 characters of thanks a lot!

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#54

My username looks like leetspeak but it started off as what my first name would be if I was a droid. I guess there should probably be a dash in there somewhere.

#55

augh, just writing to say that i don’t fully agree with myself from 5 years ago… this topic has much more nuance.

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#56

About 10 years ago I was experimenting with Markov chains and created the name “chalkwalk” which became the username for an email account I’d use when expecting to receive spam. Somehow, despite my intention, over the following 5 years I started getting more spam on my main account and less on my spam account, so their roles reversed. When it came to sharing music I just went with it. I concluded that it’s not actually very natural to say (the two ks) so I’ve been considering alternatives but not committed to any. In fact I have a document of about 30 ‘play on words’ names derived from chalkwalk (e.g limestone-roll), some of which feel better to say but I’ve not committed to one so here we are.

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#57

Back in the Myspace Music days and prior to my first laptop being stolen during a burglary years ago, I was starting to work on some acoustic-guitar-processed-through-amp-simulators-in-GarageBand stuff under the name AVRA. Avra was just a more metal-looking take on the word “aura” that I’d used in various usernames in my late teens / early 20s as I was interested in all sorts of paranormal and metaphysical stuff when I was younger. Otherwise, I just used the short form Chris Elmore instead of the full Christopher.

I’ve thought about doing a few related projects under the names “Hiding” and “Seeking” as I’m fond as gerunds as names, but so far, the only thing I’ve done with either of those alias was a remix for my friends, a place both wonderful and strange. Hiding was intended to be layered looping experiments to find hidden sounds among the combinations of sound sources, and Seeking was intended to be a sort of R&B-inspired project with Holy Other, The Sight Below, GAS, Burial, and The Weeknd as reference points for the sound.

After almost ending my life at the end of 2014 and deciding to take my mental health more seriously, I stopped using the short-form Chris and began using the full Christopher Elmore as my name on various art and music projects. As the majority of my work since 2014 has revolved around personal themes regarding my mental health and continued life, I felt that my own name fit better than coming up with a new alias for myself. The only other “alias” I use at this point is “C.A.V.E.” or “CAVE,” which is simply my first, middle, and last initials with the V from my mother’s maiden name and grandmother’s married name added to honor my maternal side of my family.

CAVE-xxx is the catalog numbering system I’ve been using on my digital releases since dissolving my Editions Black & Blue private label.

#58

I’ve been performing and producing with the moniker ‘Bauer’ for awhile. I’m aware that there are other groups (and a sporting good company) using the same name, but the world is a big place.

I found it (as well as one other group name ‘Sohm’) on a list of underwater abyssal plains. I wanted something that related to an ‘impossible’ but not fictitious location.

I don’t really think of narrative when I write, just the feeling of being in a place or environment (or the inverse case where your psychological state influences your experience of a location). I think someone coined that psychogeography (Bachelard?).

Anyway, I found out later it also means ‘farmer’ or similar in German and that’s fine too.

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#59

My initials are NET. Stylised as the word ‘net’ allows various connotations that will differ from person to person. For me - liking spiders among other invertebrates - it led to the playful private metaphor of a net (a web) catching detritus, textures (i.e. samples or other musical materials) in the wind. The wind of the creative continuum! It’s an appealing, immersive idea that I suppose makes me feel closer to the ‘organic’ contexts and microcosms that I find inspiring.

Moreover I think net is a lovely word, short and aesthetically pleasing. Its online ubiquity as a technical term makes it funny to use as well. Sadly net.net was taken.

image
Relevant photo from a few years back.

There was another Net in the 1990s, with whom I’ve no affiliation at all, with a couple of lovely leftfield ambientish electronic albums.

For now I can see myself using Net for pretty much everything I am likely to go on to make. One exception is the Finnish pseudonym Lääkäri Kyy (lit. Doctor Adder, a reference to the K.W. Jeter pulp sci-fi novel). I’ve done very little with that but I’m definitely not finished.

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