Denver-based American-Pakistani producer and DJ Siyab Khan, who records and performs under the moniker Formula None, got into psytrance (or psychedelic trance) by listening to acts like Liquid Soul, Ace Ventura and Astrix.
“I was just blown away by the level of detail in this music,” Khan says. "It was not cookie-cutter at all. You could tell that they spent a lot of time on these tracks. I listened to them on really detailed headphones. I could just hear all these different sounds going left and right, and it was so much more intricate than what I was normally used to. And I guess the music also kind of put me in a totally different mindset and kind of just opened my mind a little bit more.”
Psytrance music, also known as psychedelic trance, is based around high-tempo riffs and repetition, which can bring some listeners into trance-like states. While the electronic subgenre isn’t as huge in the United States as it is in Europe, South America and parts of Asia, Khan is hoping to grow the psytrance scene across the U.S. and introduce newer generations of fans of electronic music to the sound, particularly with his new single, “Armaan.”
Khan, the son of Pakistani immigrants, collaborated with the popular Pakistani band Khumariyaan on the track, which will be released in the months to come. Khan’s goal with “Armaan” is to introduce Pakistan to more electronic music while maintaining the roots of the culture.
“I see this as hopefully a gateway for them to be introduced to the kind of music...the new generation is looking for,” Khan says. “The whole idea behind the track was to combine the old style of Pakistani music with a more modern take on electronic music and see if we can get those two things combined, based on my background and their background.”
Khan says the track is different from anything he’s released in the past. While he says “Armaan” isn’t necessarily psytrance, since the tempo is a bit slower, it’s a bit more experimental, but influenced by psytrance.
He and the band worked remotely from two different countries, chatting via WhatsApp and sending ideas back and forth. Khan used Khumariyaan’s individual stems, mixed them into what he’d been working on, lined them up with the beat and added reverb and delay.
Thanks to the internet, musicians, particularly over the past year, have been able to collaborate remotely, and Khan thinks music has been transformed as players of different genres work together.
“We're taking things that are really nontraditional that you wouldn't expect to be put together,” Khan says. “I think that's really cool. It's kind of introducing this new wave of collaboration. So, I think people are just trying to see what works now and what they can do. It's like there's a lot of really cool ethnic instruments out there that people have never heard of that I think would work really well, and a lot of stuff that's a little bit more modern.”
This kind of collaboration falls in line with Khan’s alias, Formula None.
“I don't want to subscribe to a particular formula within making music,” Khan says. “I kind of want to experiment a little bit more and go outside of what people would normally expect to hear from my own music.”
Collaborating with Khumariyaan got him out of his own comfort zone.
“This is the first time I've ever worked with world instruments,” Khan says. “I'm not a musician or anything like that, and I never had any musical training when I was younger. So for me to work with instruments was totally new. And that's kind of the mindset I had going into this, was to experiment a little bit. Keep the same influence from psytrance, but do something a little bit different.”
For more information, visit Formula None online.