ShaManiac Melodic Techno

Melodic Techno artist. Composer. Producer. Live act. Singer. Based in Barcelona. That's the elevator answer.

The longer answer is messier and probably better.

I've loved Melodic Techno since before I knew what to call it. EDM, house, techno, progressive, the whole spectrum — but Melodic Techno specifically has always had this almost unreasonable power over me. Whenever things fell apart, and they fell apart a lot over the years, I'd lock the door, turn the volume up, and within minutes something would shift. Hope again. Energy again. The raw capacity to keep going. No book ever did that for me. No conversation. No therapy. Sound did. The miracle hasn't worn off, and at this point I don't think it ever will.

So that became the thing. Not really a career choice. More like: this is the tool that worked when nothing else did, so I'm going to learn how to build it from the inside out.

About 2019 — something landed that year that I just couldn't metabolize. From the outside nothing was missing. Apartment, income, skills, relationships, all still intact. But inside, some structure had collapsed, and it took seven stubborn years of slow work to rebuild. I didn't just rebuild. I rebuilt better. If I was going to start over, I wanted to start over as a more honest human.

That's when the real inquiry began. Unconditional. No shortcuts. No spiritual bypass. Buddhist philosophy, not as aesthetic but as operating system. Neuroscience as the grammar. The kind of thinkers who refuse easy answers. Predictive processing. Trauma theory. Default Mode Network suppression. Absorption theory. Śūnyatā and pratītyasamutpāda if you want to get technical — the idea that nothing has a fixed self, that everything arises in dependence on everything else, which turns out to be both scary and incredibly freeing once you actually sit with it. Determinism in the Sapolsky sense, which sounds bleak on paper and actually makes you kinder in practice. (Neuroscience still has me. Ask me anything.)

Melodic Techno was the soundtrack of that rebuild. Literally. Specifically. And not vaguely — specific artists, specific sets, specific moments.

Anyma for the emotional arcs and the way a single synth can carry an entire narrative arc by itself, without lyrics, without explanation. Miss Monique for the forward motion, the patience of a set that knows exactly where it's going and refuses to arrive early. Artbat for texture and that specific weight, that density of sound that hits in the chest before it hits in the ears. Tale of Us and the whole Afterlife universe for cinematic scale, for the idea that a DJ set can be a film. Boris Brejcha behind that mask of his, doing something no one else in the genre is doing and daring you to look away. Monolink for the shamanic pull of voice plus guitar plus drum machine, for proving that electronic music doesn't have to choose between machine and flesh.

Lane 8 and Ben Böhmer for the cinematic, emotional side — for reminding the whole scene that tenderness is not a weakness. Solomun for the patience of a set that takes its time, that refuses to be rushed by anyone. Korolova for the motion, for the energy that doesn't apologize. Massano for the darkness done right. Kevin de Vries for the restraint. Adam Beyer when I need something harder, something that doesn't pretend. Argy. Cassian for the Melodic House that wants to become Melodic Techno and almost gets there. Cercle as a whole aesthetic proposition — what a stage can be when it refuses to be a stage, when it just becomes the place where music meets landscape meets humans.

I don't sound like any of them. I sound like what happens when you spend years inside all of them and then live through things you wouldn't wish on anyone, and come out the other side still wanting to dance.

About the music itself — mostly Melodic Techno. 122 to 128 BPM, which is where the body seems to want to live. Phrygian and minor modes almost exclusively, because those are honest about where we actually are emotionally, most of the time, and pretending otherwise is a small lie I'm not interested in telling.

Sometimes Melodic House when the breath wants to be slower and the room wants to open up. Sometimes Latin EDM, because Barcelona leaks into everything eventually and I've stopped resisting. Sometimes a pop hook that refuses to leave me alone and I've learned to just let those ones through. And in very quiet hours — Spanish ballads. Voice, guitar, nowhere to hide. Those don't get released as much. Those are mostly for me. But they inform everything else, which is how it should be.

Somewhere in there I learned African percussion. The origin of every rhythm we now take for granted in house and techno. Djembe. The shamanic drum. Hand-percussion patterns that predate everything we now call modern electronic music by thousands of years. If you're a Melodic Techno artist and you don't know where the kick-pattern comes from, you're building on a floor you can't see, and eventually that floor breaks. So I learned. Slowly. Badly at first. Then less badly. Then — finally — with some actual understanding of why the hand goes where it goes.

As for voice — I carved out a singing voice the way Michelangelo carved David: slowly, stubbornly, one honest strike at a time. Years of it. Vocal chains in Ableton. Waves Tune Real Time, not to make the voice perfect but to make it coherent. OVox when I want the voice to stop being mine and start being something else, something spectral, something that arrives from elsewhere. I still wouldn't call myself a great singer. I'd call myself a singer who has finally stopped lying with his voice, and that turns out to be more useful than technical perfection. Technical perfection is cheap now. Honest sound is rare.

About the name — ShaManiac. Shaman plus maniac. The shaman isn't a costume — it's the oldest job description humans have. The one who goes to the edge of the tribe, meets whatever is there, sits with it, and brings something back that helps everyone else. The maniac is the honesty that the edge is always a little too far, that you always come back slightly bent, that anyone who says they came back unchanged probably didn't go. Put them together and you get roughly what I'm trying to do in every live set. Go to the edge. Bring something back. Don't pretend the trip didn't cost anything.

The mask is the concept. Everyone wears one. At work. Online. In family dinners. Sometimes even alone with ourselves, speaking in the voice we think we're supposed to have instead of the one we actually have. Performing a curated version of ourselves all day long without noticing we're doing it, and then wondering why we feel so tired.

In the live show, at a certain moment, mine falls. That's the invitation. Yours can fall too. Just for the length of a set. Just for one night. And if we feel deep resonance together during that window, a tribe forms — briefly, but really — and something in the room rearranges. That still feels like a miracle to me and probably always will.

No gimmick. No fashion statement. Just: here's what masks do to us, here's what it feels like when one comes off, here's the frequency that makes it possible.

No dogma. No political agenda. No goal except this one — to help us see ourselves, each other, and whatever it is that moves through us when the music is doing its job, a little more clearly. Through Melodic Techno built with care and obsessive attention to every transient. Through Melodic House when the tempo asks for it. Through live vocals when a song needs a human to carry it instead of a machine. Through whatever the moment actually needs.

I don't chase trends. The work is rooted in the tensions, contradictions, and quiet beauty of being alive — and in the strange, specific way humans feel their way toward each other when the room is right and the sound is honest.

About the tribe — if you've ever put on Melodic Techno after a terrible day and come out of it a slightly better version of yourself, you already know what this is. You're already part of it. The music is just the signal. The tribe is the thing that forms around it, and that's the part that actually matters.

We don't chase TikTok virality. We don't pretend things are simpler than they are. We don't confuse stimulation with meaning. We show up. We feel. We recognize each other across a crowded room without ever having spoken. We leave slightly lighter than we came. That's the whole deal, and it turns out that's a lot.

One last thing — Melodic Techno is not background music. It's a signal. A frequency the body catches before the mind does. The music enters through the sternum, not the ears. Beats pulse. Textures move. Pressure gathers. Space opens. Motion returns. Form dissolves. Then it breathes again. And if you show up to a live set in the right state — tired, open, honest, slightly cracked — something in you rearranges quietly and doesn't go back to exactly where it was before. That's not marketing language. That's just what the genre does at its best, and I've been on the receiving end of that miracle enough times to know it's real.

That's the whole point. That's what I'm trying to build. That's what the music is for.

This is not the music you want.

It's the music you need.

Drop your mask.

Feel the love.