There’s a line in The Artist’s Way that hit me harder than most things have in recent memory: “Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite — getting something down.” That one sentence flipped something inside me. It reminded me that art isn’t meant to be clever or perfect or performative. It’s meant to be honest. It’s meant to emerge from somewhere deeper — a place we rarely visit anymore. Especially now. Especially in the music industry, where honesty often gets repackaged into content, formatted into posts, chopped into clips, and compressed into something measurable. Something shareable. Something the algorithm can digest.
In 2025, the modern music industry doesn’t run on art — it runs on optics. It’s no longer just about sound. It’s about the frame around the sound. The rollout. The visuals. The engagement. The virality. The metrics. You’re not just an artist. You’re a full-time content strategist, part-time mental gymnast, part-time data analyst, and whatever’s left of you tries to squeeze in some creativity between all of that. Somewhere along the way, we’ve normalized the idea that making music also means performing your personality online, constantly maintaining a brand presence, and being in an endless loop of explanation. You’re explaining your process, your day, your struggles, your “why” — before you’ve even had time to understand it yourself. The art doesn’t have space to breathe. And neither do we.
What nobody tells you when you start making music is that the more success you have, the more you’re expected to document it. Reflect it. Monetize it. Market it. Share the journey, the behind-the-scenes, the gear list, the templates, the day-in-the-life vlog, the breakdown, the “which DAW do you use” replies. Your creative process becomes a feed. And if you’re not “sharing,” it’s like you don’t exist. You’re only as visible as your last upload. And if that upload didn’t perform — maybe you didn’t either. Maybe you’re slipping. Maybe you’re irrelevant. That’s the mindset this industry quietly installs in you. You start measuring your worth in views, followers, and likes. Not just your success. Your worth.
That’s the poison. The trap.
And I’ve felt it. Over and over. I’ve lived both sides of it — the quiet side, where you’re in a room with headphones on just chasing a feeling, and the loud side, where you’re trying to meet a release schedule, respond to DMs, send clips to blogs, time your drop for Friday, and cross-promote your story post while your song is still uploading. I’ve done the thing where a song means everything to me… until it gets 700 plays in a week and then I start questioning if it ever mattered at all. Not because it’s bad. But because the numbers didn’t reflect it. The world didn’t validate it.
That’s what The Artist’s Way helped me remember: that art doesn’t need validation to be real. It doesn’t need to go viral to be sacred. It only needs to be felt. But in order to feel something, you need silence. You need space. You need the courage to step out of the stream and back into yourself.
That’s why I created SYZRAW.
SYZRAW isn’t just a name or a rebrand. It’s a reclamation. It’s me unplugging from the machinery that says, “Stay optimized” and choosing to say, “Stay honest” instead. This project was born out of discomfort — not just with the industry, but with myself. I had spent years creating as CHENDA — a project rooted in melodic bass, future chill, and emotional storytelling. It was soft, expansive, cinematic. And it gave me everything. But inside, something started shifting. My feelings became heavier, sharper, harder to explain in just chords and vocal chops. I didn’t feel like resolving anymore. I felt like confronting. Like deconstructing. Like screaming.
The genres I was once rooted in — melodic dubstep, chill trap, future bass — started feeling too clean for what I needed to express. Too pretty. Too polished. So I started exploring the things that felt dangerous again. I found myself falling back into the underground. Into darker textures. Into UK garage, UK bass, early dubstep, cinematic trap, and broken, decayed Y2K aesthetics. I started designing sounds that felt like anxiety. Like overstimulation. Like heartbreak, but in pixels. That’s when I knew I wasn’t just switching sounds — I was switching systems. SYZRAW wasn’t about escape. It was about exposure.
But even in that sonic transformation, I felt the pressure to package it. To turn it into an aesthetic. A marketable shift. A “new era.” And I had to fight against that. Because this wasn’t some campaign — this was survival. This was me finding a new language when the old one stopped working.
What makes this even harder is the way social media lures you into measuring creative success. It’s subtle at first. You start uploading demos to see which one gets the most attention. You post teaser videos with hard cuts and big bass and flashy captions — not because that’s what you feel, but because you know that’s what gets clicks. Suddenly you’re not writing for yourself anymore. You’re writing for the algorithm. For the audience you imagine watching over your shoulder. You edit in fear of the skip. You produce with one eye on the platform. The voice in your head doesn’t say, “What feels true?” It says, “Will this hold attention for 7 seconds?”
And when that becomes your default, you lose the thing that made you start making art in the first place. The Artist’s Way calls this your inner artist — the part of you that’s still playful, intuitive, free. The part that makes without needing applause. Without needing it to “work.” When you lose that part, everything becomes labor. Everything becomes performance.
That’s why I’ve been trying to make my creative process sacred again. Not sacred in a religious sense. Sacred in a human one. I want to treat the act of making as an act of listening. Not a task to monetize. Not a strategy to optimize. But a ritual. A way to return to myself. That’s what SYZRAW is becoming — not a brand, but a spiritual practice. Every synth, every sound, every glitch is a kind of prayer. A kind of memory. A way to rebuild the part of me that gets fragmented every time I scroll too long or try to package my vulnerability into a carousel.
And yes, I still use social media. I still post. I’m not pretending I’m outside of this system. But I’m learning to use it on my terms. To post when I have something true to say — not just something to sell. I want the visuals to feel like fragments of a larger world. I want the sounds to feel like overheard thoughts. I want the audience to feel invited, not targeted. And most importantly, I want people to feel like they can rest inside the sound — like the music gives them space to breathe again.
The irony is that the most powerful art often doesn’t fit the current ecosystem. It doesn’t loop perfectly. It doesn’t frontload the drop. It doesn’t edit itself for maximum reach. But it lingers. It changes people. And I’d rather make something that changes ten people than something that entertains ten thousand for eight seconds. That’s what I’m chasing now — resonance over reach. Impact over impressions. Something that cuts through the noise because it’s not trying to be noise.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably tired too. Tired of the scroll. Tired of the pressure. Tired of turning your inner world into a piece of marketable media. Maybe you’re an artist. Or maybe you’re just a person who wants to feel something real again. Either way, I see you. And I want you to know that your worth is not tied to your visibility. Your art is not invalid because it didn’t go viral. Your intuition is still intact — even if it’s been quiet lately. You just have to get still enough to hear it again.
So this is my invitation — not just to listen to SYZRAW, but to create in your own way. Slowly. Imperfectly. Honestly. Whether it’s sound, words, movement, light — whatever your medium is, don’t abandon it just because it doesn’t perform. That’s not why you started. And that’s not why you’ll keep going.
Art isn’t supposed to be content. It’s supposed to be connection. And that starts with reconnecting to yourself.
SYZRAW is where I do that. Where I disappear from the metrics and reappear in the music. Where I remember that distortion can be beautiful. That noise can be necessary. That breaking down isn’t the end — it’s a beginning.
This isn’t just a project. It’s a portal. And you’re invited in.
