Byzar

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Byzar was one of the most prolific yet obscure New York City Illbient projects, active from the mid to late 1990s. They were regular performers and participants of the Soundlab collective.

The core band members were:

Acoustyk aka Manny Oqeundo aka MegMan
Karttyk aka Kit Krash aka Karthik Swaminathan
One Love Lucy aka Lucy Walker
Quantyk aka A.K. Atoms aka Akin Adams aka Alpha K
Ylyptyk aka Miguel Diaz de Lopez
Laura Marie Williams
Elektryk aka Hector Becerra

The group also included occasional participation from DJ Spooky, Good Time Karl and Marc Ribot, Ras Mesinai and Micah Gaugh.

In the 1990s Byzar provided support for the New York City shows of The Orb, Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, and was a charter member of the Soundlab happenings, playing sets with Vernon Reid, Alec Empire, DJ Krush and others.

Byzar toured Europe, doing a NYC-themed "end of the century" TV special on French Television (M6), playing at London's ICA and St. Matthews' Church in Brixton, and playing Der Volksbuhne in Berlin.

The debut album, Gaiatronyk vs. The Cheap Robots, received many critical citations as an influential and groundbreaking work, and gained significant exposure internationally, including a suitably avant-garde video for "Phylyx", directed by band member Lucy Walker, which debuted on MTV's Amp.

Byzar collaborated with multimedia artist Mariko Mori on a piece which was featured in the Venice Biennial.

Byzar developed a “technorganic” praxis for audio production, harmonizing the vital instincts of live musicianship with the transformative potential of digital technology. The album’s rhythmic programming metaphorically explores genetic theory: “phenotypes” (audible sound events) of certain rhythms are combined with the “genotypes” (rhythmic event sequences) of others, creating new hybrids further manipulated in real time during the recording and mixing process, creating arguably one of the strangest and most uncompromisingly different records ever made.

Many of the soundscapes were created using antiquated state-of-the-art technololgy, such as the modular analog synthesizer featured in Softcell's "Tainted Love" and the once-mighty Synclavier, a digital recording system based on a mainframe, which could record at 100Khz in the 80's. Byzar used this to record several ethnic instruments and then replay them at half-speed, creating glitch & alias-free soundscapes.

The late John Peel once played the 12" record "Beings from the B'yond Wythyn" at two different speeds, and liked it both ways. Byzar intentionally designed their vinyl releases for play at different speeds.

The Byzar crew, under the guise of "Def Star", created a white-label only soundclash called "Darth Vader vs. The Sugar Plum Fairies" in February of 1997, remixing the Imperial March to a mutant hip-hop beat, then blending Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairies; this record was also given personally to John Peel, who played it on his show several times. DJ Spooky used this as a backing track for Rakim's "Paid in Full" lyrics on recent mixtapes.

Mostly dormant as a physical collective, Byzar has been developing a new virtual release, titled "Polykronyk 13:20". Featuring an exciting new rhythmic aesthetic of constant transformation, the album will be available for download through Byzar's myspace portal, coinciding with the 10-year anniversary of "Gaiatronyk vs. The cheap robots".