Saturday 22 June 2019

Introducing:: Crimea's rave boy STICK


STICK was born in 1988, and is one of the names that will enter your scope from now on. Born in Crimea with full of energy & big passion for music, Alexander Chikalin (his real name) has started his music trip from a very young age. In the 5th grade at school, a neighbour gave him a tape recorder, and his first sounds were couple of oldskool rave tunes and a collection with tunes by The Prodigy.

After these, he started playing the guitar too, helping himself to develop his music ear and boost his passion for music. And at the end he hardly finished school.
"So I played in groups for a long time and walked with punks until 2010. That year I went to my first DNB party at Volna Club. There was lots of cool electronic tunes and I've inspired by the oldskool Prodigy vibes and decided to experiment on something like that. So in 2010 I started to write electronic music in Fruity Loops."

Alex can't hide his deep love to Breakbeat music, thus he got himself playing this genre under the name CJ VAlid around 8 years ago and in 2017 decided to move to Simferopol in where he has set up his STICK project.
"After writing 60 tracks, I've quited the CJ VAlid project and created the new STICK project that was originally focused on Breakcore/Jungle. I was very inspired by Venetian Snares and Aaron Spectre, so I recorded the albums "Downtown" (2017) and "EP Hello!" (2018). After this work I got myself a lot into synths.





At the moment, the Stick project is focusing and paying homage to the Oldskool Rave Breakbeat of the golden 90's. So, Alex has recently released two EPs which are available on his personal bandcamp page (link)

"This style is very fun and powerful. I really like to create it. Of course I want to record everything on analog synthesizers, but in the Crimea it's very difficult to get something like that, so I use VST such as Roland TB-303, TAL, JEM SX1000 and so on. I create everything in Ableton; in my opinion this is the best and easiest sequencer to use."

We're wishing the best of luck and success to this outstanding East coast machine.
Label managers and all within the scene, keep your eyes peeled for this energetic Nuskool trooper! We do believe that you will eventually...stick!

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