Ryan

“When I was 21 I took a leap of faith and followed a girl to Berlin, I moved there with 400 dollars in my pocket and my guitar. I managed to land a self contained apartment through a friend and started busking.

I lived off playing music on the street for like two years, it was brutal. The only way I could make money properly was to play shows, so I booked myself a twenty show tour. It started in Berlin and ended up in the South of France, 9 countries, I sort of cut my teeth around Europe playing music like that.

I hung out in Berlin in Germany for a number of years, got introduced to the electronic music scene and I fell in love. I walked into a deep house club and as well as all these beautiful people, the music was amazing, the sound system was incredible.

Back in New Zealand, with my good friend Royce, we tried our best to emulate the European thing. The nightlife here was terrible, so we started throwing our own parties at his place. That has now evolved into a 500 person underground secret urban festival. People often come in costume, we encourage consent and harm reduction culture. So people come and have a really good time.

Those parties were a springboard for Beacon Bloom which is a multi genre live electronic group which we formed in 2018. It’s almost a collective working with videographers, photographers, and collaborators who we’ve recorded songs with all across the world. In Beacon Bloom we try to explore meta-modernism, which is the art movement that’s the current cultural edge. It’s this blend of sincerity and irony which hits harder than pure sincerity or pure detached irony – it mixes both together.

Another project is my Podcast – The Good Timeline Podcast. It’s mostly focused on the future of humanity and what we will become, looking at the core cultural values that will help us get into a better future. The future is going to be crazy, but there’s no reason to not have hope – humans have already had an intense history which we got through. Do what you can, don’t be paralyzed by fear of the future. The future is worth fighting for.

Primarily, I’m driven by the intersection of art and technology – and a little bit of ecology thrown in. We’re planting trees with every event we do. We’re partnered with Eden Projects, they plant trees in seven regions around the world.

My dad taught me guitar so it’s probably where the music thing started, I come from a musical family. Music is magic. It changes people’s behaviour, anything that changes people’s behaviour, implicitly is magic.”

– Ryan