Filius

I mean, the easiest version is sadboi bedroom producer. Pouring emotions into the computer, synthetic pop coming out the other side. That’s the shorthand. With my music, I like seeing what happens when you push something very human through something that isn’t. You feed it all this raw stuff, and some of it sticks, like residue. I have this idea that I come back to — whether any of these complex feelings stay in there? Some of it must stick around in the circuitry, you know? That’s probably where it sits right now. Boy, synthetic, emotional.

I think it started with listening before anything else. Not even music, just sound. My parents always tell this story: I used to press my ear against my mum’s cheek while she was eating, just to hear it properly. Different vegetables sounded different. Broccoli was the best. Really crisp! That stayed. I’ve always been a bit fixated on how things sound up close.
I started piano when I was about five (this Asian stereotype is real lmao). But I never really stuck to the way it was meant to be taught. I’d play things back by ear instead of reading properly, which didn’t go down well with my teacher. I think they wanted accuracy, and I was more interested in following my intuition and shifting things slightly to see what happened. That’s probably where it tipped for me. The pattern of me listening, then changing. Then everything else just rolled from being chronically on YouTube and discovering FL Studio. I don’t remember deciding, this is what I want to do. It was more that I fell in love with that process.

I feel like moving to London and having your frontal lobe developing really changes the way you view everything (laughs). I never stopped making music in this period; it just never made it out of the hard drive. I moved to London a couple years ago, and it shifted things. In Austria, I was working almost entirely on my own. Here it’s different. You’re still in your bedroom at 3am, but there’s more friction around you. You’re surrounded by so many artists, subcultures, communities, and opinions. You play something for people whose taste you trust, and they don’t react, or they question one small part of it, and that stays with you. It makes you more exact.
A lot of that time went into unlearning habits I didn’t realise I had. Things that sounded finished but weren’t really mine. I started producing everything myself, partly out of necessity, partly because I wanted to understand why something held or fell apart. Same with vocals, recording, re-recording, working out what actually sounds authentic to me instead of just good. Now it feels different. Not easier, but more defined. The tracks relate to each other. There’s a logic to it. Before it was just individual pieces. Now it feels like a body of work.

It was deliberate. I knew there was a transition in place in terms of the context and approach to my music, so I wanted to take my time and fully explore my new tools before I released anything. Moving changed the conditions more than anything. I was DJing, getting a residency at iconic queer venue Dalston Superstore, and at the same time modelling. I ended up on sets for Nike, dancing in artificial rain for hours, everything controlled down to the smallest detail. There was a campaign for Shygirl, a fellow electronic artist whom I had really admired for years. Working on different sets of this scale, I learnt how much gets refined or cut before anything reaches the audience. Being around that shifts your sense of what’s finished. You start noticing what actually holds up under pressure. It fed back into the music quite directly. The gap people see now isn’t really a gap. It’s the process.

They move at completely different speeds, and I think I need both. London feels very immediate. A lot of my time here has been tied to playing out. The rooms are small; the crowd is right there. You play something, and within seconds you know whether it’s connecting. It makes everything more physical, less theoretical. Vienna is almost the opposite. I’ve played in much larger, more historic spaces there, sometimes venues that are literal castles. Sound travels differently, and you’re not getting that same immediate reaction back. It gives you more space, but also more responsibility to shape what you’re doing without relying on the crowd to guide you. That difference feeds into how I work when I’m not playing and I’m moving between those two states all the time.

Playing regularly, you start to pick up on things you wouldn’t notice otherwise. Not just big reactions, but smaller shifts in the room. When people start drifting, when they lean back in, when something unexpected resets everything. I remember seeing Peggy Gou at O-der Klub, and what stayed with me wasn’t any one track; it was how controlled everything felt. She could hold a track longer than you expect and still keep people locked in. That made me think differently about pacing.
That carries into the music as well. Early on I was more focused on what works immediately. Now I’m more interested in sprinkling in elements of surprise. What I enjoy most about being behind the decks is that balance between control and risk. You’re guiding the room, but you’re also reacting to it in real time. Introducing something that makes people hesitate for a second, that slight WTF is this? When that clicks and the room goes off, that’s when I’ve done my job right.

Nightlife has a way of stripping things back. When you’re in those spaces regularly, you realise pretty quickly that people can tell when something is trying too hard to please everyone. Different rooms demand different things, but the ones that really work tend to have a very clear identity. They’re not adjusting themselves constantly. I think being around that made me less interested in covering ground and more interested in narrowing things down. Early on I was pulling from a lot of different genres, just trying things out. That was necessary. But over time it became more about what to leave out. What actually feels like mine, and what doesn’t. So, the influence goes beyond music. It’s more about how you position yourself. Not trying to meet every expectation, but being clear enough that people either connect with it or they don’t. It’s not about pleasing all crowds in 2026!!!

It came in quite organically. I started out just building a portfolio and saying yes to things that felt aligned, even if they were small. Those early projects are where you actually learn how these environments function, how a set runs, how people communicate, and where you fit within it. Over time that led to being invited into bigger ones. I’ve shot with Rankin a few times now, which was quite surreal considering I’d been aware of his work from a really young age, watching him on Germany’s Next Top Model. It was great schooling. To be honest I’ve been so lucky in terms of the people I’ve been around. Mura Masa and SG Lewis are some of my favourite musicians, and having worked with them on music videos, I learned so much about how performance translates on camera. But also, so many NDAs were signed for upcoming things, so more of that in the future, actually!!

First of all, thank you so much; that’s really kind! I see it as one connected thing, but with a clear centre. Music is always the starting point. Most of it still happens very privately, in a bedroom. But even at that stage it doesn’t feel isolated. I’m usually already picturing where that sound lives. Not in a literal sense, but the kind of environment it belongs to and how it should feel to be inside it. That’s where the other parts come in. Fashion, visuals, and the spaces I’m playing in are ways of making that internal world more tangible. Not decoration, more like translation. I see myself as a musician first, but not only in the sense of just making tracks. It’s more about building a space around the music that feels consistent, where everything is coming from the same place.

I like the idea that machines aren’t as neutral as we think they are. When something glitches, I don’t hear it as a mistake. It feels more like something raw slipping through, a moment where the system doesn’t fully contain itself. That’s usually the part I end up keeping. A perfect imperfection is very controlled in a way. It’s not about things breaking completely; it’s about holding them right at the point where they almost do.
You can hear the tension between something precise and something slightly unstable. I like to think of it as the machine showing a bit too much. Not in a dramatic way, more like a small leak. Something you weren’t meant to hear. Sometimes it’s almost like the machine is crying a little.

I’d love for the listener to move and to be moved. If someone steps into my music and just moves, that’s one layer. But if they also feel that slight weight underneath, that sense that something’s pressing against the surface, then it’s working. There’s a lot of emotion stored in this electronic music, so hopefully that resonates on multiple levels.

I like the idea of releasing things one by one first, letting people enter the world through different doors, rather than explaining the whole thing too neatly. I’ve got some singles planned, but I don’t really think of it as just a singles project. There are too many songs now that feel connected — same emotional weather, same little universe. Some are more bedroom sadbois, some are more club-facing, and some sit somewhere between the two. But they all come from the same place. So yes, there’s definitely a wider project pending.

I don’t really feel like I belong to one specific corner of it. I sit somewhere in-between a producer and a pop artist but also between private and public. My space probably leans inward. A bit of a sadboi computer at the club. Music that wants to be social but still feels like it’s coming from a very private place. There’s definitely a group of artists right now who sit in that space, where the production is in the same hands as the performer. If there’s a dinner table for that, then yeah, assign me a seat somewhere between Underscores, Sam Gellaitry and PinkPantheress.

That there’s no such thing as too many vocal layers. I want it to feel like fifteen versions of me are all trying to say the same thing at once and none of them fully agree. It’s very that. Ariana, what are you doing here?