On the Outside Looking In? Fog EP — Oh Cyrus Interview
On the cusp of releasing his first album, Cyrus Hardin (Oh Cyrus on all platforms) speaks with Gauchito Media about his debut conceptual EP “Fog”.
Oh Cyrus (a.k.a Cyrus Hardin), photo by Greg Pando Pöesz
“It was me coping”
In my first three months here at Savannah College of Art & Design (Atlanta), I’ve had the odd pleasure of meeting all sorts of characters. I’ve seen them mask themselves as Animators, Filmmakers (like myself), Art History Majors, Photographers, and all kinds of personas any dysfunctional being brave enough to consider themself an artist might take on to hide mad genius (or perhaps, to please parents). However, of all of us here at the loony bin, we like to call “Art School,” there is one individual who is practically unmissable. I am convinced that of the whole lot, no one is as versatile or -for that matter- as crazy as Cyrus Hardin, a local on the 5th floor.
On the latter one night, as the elevator doors opened wide to let somebody out on a stop before my floor, I heard an absolute cacophony of various instruments coming from the floor lobby. Intrigued, I slipped out of the metal box through a crack. There, I saw Cyrus for the first time, in a scene that perfectly summarizes him from an exterior POV; wearing a baggy pink sweater, long curly hair, a twisted grin across his face, and an aquatone blue Strat hanging from his neck as he directed a bass, a sax, and a keyboard to the tune of one of his original singles.
Oh Cyrus and his infamous Squier, photo by Greg Pando Pöesz
With time, I’ve had the luck to make him more than just an acquaintance; a great friend. So much so he’s had the humility to crawl out of his musical cave and grant me an interview on his most recently released project, “Fog”.
Walking into his room, one he shares with three other people, who have become constant listeners of his music and experimentation (not by choice), one can immediately feel his other-worldly influence reflected in the decoration: a fuzzy-green checkered carpet, instruments hung around like paintings on the walls, and a smell that can only be described as a cocktail of Monster Energy drinks and Marlboro Ice Blasts (Hardin’s cigarette of choice).
By this point, I meet Cyrus in the middle of the quirky living room where he’s placed, on a coffee table, his computer - a beat waiting for its creator to cead attention to it - and his signature inverted Akai MPK Mini (a midi-keyboard for non-gear heads out there). I’ve pierced his natural habitat. Watching him switch between Cyrus, the friend, and the artist was like watching a time-lapse of Gregor Samsa the night before he wakes up as an insect. It was here that I saw, for the first time, that Hardin is a walking contradiction. He is so blatantly himself while simultaneously existing in the in-betweens of his facade known as “Oh Cyrus,” producing a feral magnetism.
Before recording, I pre-gamed Cyrus on the nature of the interview, which would circle around listening to each track one by one with him, and ask questions afterward.
I began by commending him on the EP and pondered on the origin of its conception — “When I wrote the EP, I was unable to contact my family because of the hail during the storm (Hurricane Helene) (…) It ended up hitting Western North Carolina pretty badly, which is where my home is, so a lot of houses were destroyed, the roads were blocked and all of the telephone lines pretty much froze over. I couldn’t contact my girlfriend or any close family. It’s not like I could just drop school and all the work that I already had to do here. So I just had to try and find the motivation to —” He pauses, his eyes begin to water “ — to keep working, I guess.” It seemed as if it was Oh Cyrus speaking to me on behalf of Cyrus Hardin. He continued by breaking down the central analogy present within the record “(…) In the mountains where I come from, there’s fog every once in a while because you’re so high and it just envelops everything. To me, (the Fog) is a symbolization of just being right there in the moment and not being distracted by what’s surrounding you (…) I absolved the fog. I needed to focus on where I was and not have to see everything that was going on at home and worry.”
“Faded”, photo by Greg Pando Pöesz
To Cyrus, his EP “Fog” is a piece deeply rooted in remembrance, longing for normality in a very surreal situation “(…)I focused my time on just thinking about things that I loved about my home or experiences that I had there, and I made a couple of instrumentals based on those memories.” I pointed out that the 9-minute EP was 3/5 of instrumental tracks, “No words because I didn’t feel like they needed them. I was just trying to capture the moment.” Cyrus went on to assimilate different listings with moments. He elaborated on the second track, ‘COLD MIST,’ “which was me remembering when I took a shower with my girlfriend. And so you can hear running water, but it’s also where I live, it’s so cold. I can remember getting up in the morning, having to go to school, and it being foggy. But there’s like this cold mist. So it was kind of a play on the fog, but also this memory, and I was trying to attach myself to my home in any way that I could because I couldn’t connect myself.”
Feeling I had picked at him for long enough, and seeing how eager he was to get back to work, I wasted no time and started playing the record.
Oh Cyrus’ signature twisted smile, photo by Greg Pando Pöesz
“ENTER” — {31 seconds} A preamble (on a reverb/delay partnership) backed by a sound bath of synths.
“It’s very literal,” I commented, recalling his previous explanation. “Do you think you prioritize being straightforward rather than abstract in terms of lyrics?” I asked, “I think that the first song exists because only one real song in the EP has lyrics, right? I wanted to give context without having to add words to those songs. I thought if I had like a short intro, it would help put the listener in the mindset of what I was feeling, then you would be ready to experience the abstract nature of the works.”
I asked Cyrus, remaining on the topic of the impact of the choice in instruments, what genre he thought “Fog” fell under, “Maybe ‘Alternative’ or ‘Easy Listening’, I don’t know. It’s like it’s experimental,”
G: “Don’t you think it’s funny that you call it Easy Listening but it come from a ‘not so easy situation’?”
C: “Yeah. I guess it was me coping.”
“FOG” — {2:15} A track is a track I dub as a signature Oh Cyrus tune; fairy-like trills, a tender tremolo on lead guitar, a classic indie drum break, a voice that sings so softly that you’d think it was coming from you subconscious. The song sustains an immersion reminiscent of that of Steve Lacy or Mac DeMarco (two of Cyrus’ idols) in its economic lyrics and heavily touched-up instrumentals that seep “homemade”.
G: “How overarching would you consider the track to be in terms of lyrics?”
C: “I think this is very, in a sense, overarching. Personally, I can see how people could connect to it.”
G: “Were you thinking of an audience in the midst of making the record, or was it more of a “zeitgeist” product of the moment that you were going through?”
Cyrus sat back in silence for a second, in a moment of vulnerability he opened up about his original plans, “It was very much just an in-the-moment thing. I actually wasn’t planning on releasing it. It was actually one of my roommates and my girlfriend — who I was able to get back in contact with — who told me to put it out. The project is very passionate. I think there’s a clear personal vision because I wasn’t trying to think about it like it was an EP, but rather a statement on the hardship of the situation.”
C (cont’d): “Now I like to think of it as one experience that you just listen to and maybe you can put yourself in my shoes.”
“COLD MIST”, “WARM DEW”, and “EXIT”— {6:58} The accumulation of the EPs three instrumental tracks, in my opinion, display an immense accomplishment of musical literacy from a storytelling standpoint. Oh Cyrus, much like in his prologue, plunges us into a synth-based ‘Hero’s Journey’. “COLD MIST”, as mentioned by Cyrus, is like our ‘Ordinary World’, in which our surroundings are homely and nostalgic as if we were watching a storm rage on from the garden window of our childhood home. The sight is breathtaking, dreamlike, and innocent. As the track fades to black, we approach the ‘Inmost Cave’ in “WARM DEW”. Behind us (and I highly recommend listening to all of these with headphones) we hear the approaching storm thundering threateningly through a collection of mechanical strings, light lead synth work, eventually swallowing us. At this point, we are dead center in the middle of the cave, trapped inside a very dark area of our mind. The track heavily reminded me of something straight out of Aphex Twin’s discography. Finally, with its blaring light casting itself on our path back to our ‘Ordinary World’, our return home, the, very fittingly named, “EXIT” perfectly closes the album: like we came, with a choir of synths praising our coming. However, something has changed, like in the ‘Hero’s Journey’ we return to the ‘Ordinary World’ with some sort of reward, a lesson learned, or a change in heart, something that is so well embodied by the ambiance present within the song, once again exhibiting a superb mastery of the medium.
Finishing my listening experience in absolute awe I wondered what Cyrus wished for the ‘artistic’ listener now that “Fog” is out, and more precisely why he felt that said final product, regardless of duration, is being given to us as an Extended Play. Hardin expressed how he felt that music as of late has a certain industrial nature “(…) Like you have this many songs, this many features on your album or blah, blah. No one really puts out EPs anymore, at least not big artists. So, I feel like if anyone takes anything away from this is that they should try their own little experimental ideas. Just try out new ideas. We don’t get fun tiny little projects anymore.”
Oh Cyrus’ and his Mac DeMarco CD, photo by Greg Pando Pöesz
Cyrus went on to list a few artists who influenced his decision to transmit the story through the EP format. He particularly touched on Michael Sayer, speaking about his first EP “Bag O’ Junk” (2016). “It’s instrumental mostly. The last two songs have lyrics, but it’s like 4 songs, and (that format) I think, to me, just captures this moment in his life so well (…) they carry some sort of vibe. I can almost put myself in his shoes.” I asked Cyrus to elaborate on this last simile “To me, it’s like when a photographer takes a picture, right? And this is our formal views. When a photographer takes a picture, obviously it’s from his point of view (…) I think I’m sharing my auditorial point of view (…) You don’t exactly know what I’m experiencing, but I was feeling a certain way and this is my expression of said feeling, and the entire EP has that same feeling to me at least (…) I felt It belonged as a collection. It doesn’t have to just be a song (…) You have people like Charlie Byrd who would just record a live session and he’d release it unedited, raw.”
Agreeing, I asked him to name other artists who inspired the record. He name-dropped Tobacco, whose work is heavily characterized by the use of catchy samples and synthesizers. The latter, specifically, produced a sort of ‘dam-break’ that led Cyrus to tell me about synthesizer noise and his love for it “I heard it as a kid, and I don’t know where I heard it specifically, I can remember it in some of Lorde’s earlier songs. But like just hearing synthesizers, there’s something about the digital noise that I’ve always loved.”
It was the piano according to Cyrus, however, that introduced him to the world of music, “(…) I remember when I was a kid, I would sit at the piano and I would play notes until they sounded right together. (…) I was making chords but didn’t know any chord names. (…) I was just sitting there making songs on the piano. So my dad would tell me to stop making noise and I got a little keyboard for my room.”
I am devoted to the idea that the musical value present in “Fog” represents a wave of experimentation that is very common in Oh Cyrus’ discography. Suppose one is to listen to Oh Cyrus’ singles, which all predate this EP. In that case, they’ll find that all of them share a theme of challenging what the latter proposed, for example: “Burgeoning”, his first single, is probably the most different from the others in the sense that it is the only non-lyrical track before those that appear on “Fog”. Moreover, musically, it exhibits profound experimentation in the rhythmic section, with a kind of Latin influence, almost as if it were a song that represents Hardin’s first attempt to land his feet on the plain known as “released music”. The next track, “Melt” (a personal favorite of mine), is much more rooted in the aesthetics and conventionality of Indie Music displaying a heavier reliance on instrument, still maintaining, however, this same sort of Latin-styled beat we see in the previous single, this time in the form of a Bolero. The lyrics, additionally, are Cyrus’ first public display of utilizing, although arguably minimalistically, his heavily metaphoric prose. I believe this to be Cyrus’ first released track that is self-aware of its components. “Hunny Pie” is where there is a true deep-dive into the ‘Cyrusian’ lyricism, however being much more of a traditional Indie song musically. This last comment is by no means a ‘dig’, but rather a recognition of the track’s accomplishment to fully grasp the so-sought-after “Indie-Rock” tone. Finally, “Pretend” is the the jumble of all these factors, a perfect mixture of Oh Cyrus’ lyricism, the same love for the “indie formula” and a great sense of innovation. “Fog” is the perfect brainchild of all of these combined, with the most present of these factors being that of experimentation. Hardin is volatile and fearless, and this record, like everything he puts out, is so true to his identity, making him a prime example of the ideal indie artist.
The master at work, photo by Greg Pando Pöesz
Moving on from “Fog”, its influences, and a small dip into Cyrus’ childhood, like any corny journalist, I asked him what next endeavors we could expect from him, to which he revealed to me that he’s currently working on yet another conceptual piece, this time an album. “It’s almost done. I have all the instrumentals done. It’s called Liam.” I slipped into the conversation that he should consider granting Gauchito Media another interview once it’s done, to which he laughed. Not wanting to share too much about his upcoming solo work, he shares that he’s starting a label, also mentioning he’s already signed an artist, another SCAD local, Karma Dynasty. “Yeah, I met him at college and yeah, he’s got talent. I’m going to see if I can hone it.”
Nearing the end of my promised time with him, in complete admiration of his creative prowess and the juxtaposition between his down-to-earth style and his intense work habit, I wanted to know what he felt about the sense of accomplishment behind releasing a record, “It’s great. I’ve said this so many times to people, especially in the creative field (…) It’s so important for you to finish things, even if they don’t see the light of day. But finishing something, putting a stamp on something and being able to walk away from it, seeing it as a complete piece, is one of the most valuable things that you can do as a human because it it helps you move forward.”
“Is ‘Fog’ amazing? I know it’s certainly not the best I’m going to make in my life at all, and it’s certainly not one of the best EPs ever, I think it’s worth a listen-,” he grinned, “-but most importantly it was an idea that I was able to execute and finish, so I’ll take that to the grave.”