Self-taught electronic music producer, sound designer, and audio instructor, maybe yoan is a true creative powerhouse. Controlling every facet of his creative output with surgical precision—from intricate sound design and vocal tuning right through to the final club-ready master—his musical ecosystem spans several distinct projects. While yoanvox drives high-energy Bass and Tech House, thnx my god explores emotive Melodic House, PRAYGODZ delivers heavy-hitting EDM, and 8495im expands his sonic footprint even further, the maybe yoan alias was born out of a profound need to step into the spotlight and express the deeper, darker, and more vulnerable sides of his own human experience.
Finishing his latest track, ‘ABREACTION’, marked one of the most intense and vulnerable journeys of his life. Rooted in the emotional aftermath of a vivid dream about his late father, the production mirrors the raw process of loss. Its deep, atmospheric breakdowns and haunting vocals capture a fragile dream state, whilst the sudden shift into heavy UK Garage and Tech House energy represents the ultimate breaking point—a physical release of suppressed pain. By translating his personal grief into pure momentum for the dancefloor, maybe yoan has crafted a piece of sound design that offers listeners a space for their own catharsis.
Thank you so much for joining us today, maybe yoan! We sat down with him to discuss how he balances heavy club production with raw emotion, the technical art of psychoacoustics, and his vision for a fully immersive audio-visual live experience.
What initially drew you to launch maybe yoan, and how has this outlet allowed you to express parts of your human experience that your other projects couldn't?
“To be completely honest, maybe yoan wasn't launched as a strategic career move... it was born out of absolute necessity. For years, I’ve loved producing high-energy, club-focused tracks under aliases like thnx my god, yoanvox and PRAYGODZ. Those projects are incredible for channelling pure adrenaline, groove, and dancefloor impact. But they didn't leave room for the shadows. After losing my father, I found myself carrying a heavy, suffocating weight of grief, complex memories, and late-night overthinking.”
“I simply couldn't put those feelings into a standard dance anthem. I realised I needed a sanctuary... a sonic space where I didn't have to hide the vulnerability, the melancholy, or the darkness. Stepping into the spotlight with maybe yoan allowed me to finally express the messy, unfiltered parts of my human experience that my other projects couldn't hold. It gave me the freedom to explore what I call 'psychological contrast.' In this project, I can build a haunting, deeply fragile breakdown that represents the lingering pain of loss, and then completely shatter it with a heavy, aggressive UK Garage or Tech House drop that acts as a pure, physical release. It allowed me to stop just 'making beats' and start translating my actual soul into sound.”
Your latest track, ‘ABREACTION’, translates a deeply personal journey through grief into an explosive club anthem. How did you balance such a vulnerable emotional core with high-energy UK Garage and Tech House production?
“Well... The balance came from realising that grief isn't just a quiet, melancholic feeling—it is also chaotic, aggressive, and overwhelming. To me, the vulnerability and the high-energy production aren't competing with each other; they are two sides of the exact same emotion. The emotional core of ‘ABREACTION’—that fragile, atmospheric breakdown—represents the silent, internal weight of losing my father. It’s the lingering thoughts, the isolation, and the feeling of time standing still. But the word 'abreaction' in psychology literally means the sudden, physical release of a repressed emotion. You can't achieve that kind of release by staying quiet.”
“That’s why the UK Garage and Tech House elements had to be so unapologetic and heavy. The intricate, glitchy drum programming and the aggressive bass wobbles are the sonic equivalent of finally screaming after holding your breath for months. I balanced the track by leaning entirely into extreme contrast: I made the quiet moments as heartbreakingly intimate as possible, so that when the heavy club energy finally hits, it doesn't just make you want to dance... it forces you to physically let go.”
The transition between the breakdown and the drop in ‘ABREACTION’ marks a dramatic turning point. What was the technical and creative process behind engineering that specific moment of dynamic contrast?
“Good question... in same way, tutorial on making Neapolitan pizza. I guess it’s possible... I'm joking, of course. What I actually meant, was to make that specific transition hit as hard as it does, you have to treat it like a physical vacuum. The entire creative process was about pushing the dynamic contrast to its absolute breaking point. It’s not just about making the drop loud, not really... it’s about making the breakdown feel incredibly vast and fragile, and then suddenly sucking all the air out of the room. Technically, I engineered the breakdown to sit extremely wide in the stereo field. I stacked these lush, melancholic textures and vocals, washing them in massive reverb tails and using ‘Soothe2’ to keep the high frequencies silky and floating. I wanted the listener to feel completely suspended in that emotional space. But the real magic of that turning point happens in the millisecond before the downbeat.”
“I used surgical volume automation to abruptly choke out every single reverb tail, delay, and atmospheric frequency. It creates a jarring fraction of a second of absolute dead silence. You create a vacuum, and the brain physically anticipates the impact. When that UK Garage and Tech House drop finally slams in, I completely inverted the mix dynamics. Instead of wide and wet, the drop is dry, transient-heavy, and violently punchy. The basslines are aggressively driven through ‘FabFilter Saturn 2’ for analogue grit, and smashed with ‘Xfer OTT’ to bring out every aggressive detail right with ‘Izotope Trash2’ distortion. The kick and sub are pinned dead centre in mono, and I used extreme sidechaining with ‘Kickstart2’ to make sure the drums physically punch through the mix. Over the course of a few days, I realised... my enemy is the phase cancellation, I mean it happens when sound waves combine, causing their peaks to make some problems, but I solved this out.”
“In the end, for me, I just want to throw the listener from this vast, echoing dream state directly into a heavy, in-your-face wall of sound. Engineering that extreme technical shift from fragile space to raw transient power is exactly what makes the emotional 'abreaction' feel so visceral.”
You took a hiatus around 2021 to immerse yourself in advanced audio engineering. How did mastering the technical "science of sound" change your approach to turning complex emotions into physical frequencies?
“Prior to 2021, my production was purely rhythmic... I was sequencing grooves, not articulating emotion. But when I was confronted with the profound reality of grief after losing my father, I realized the absolute limitations of my sonic vocabulary. I was carrying this immense, chaotic psychological weight, and standard club arrangements simply couldn't hold it. I realized I wasn't sculpting feeling... I was just organizing noise. Taking a hiatus to master advanced audio engineering fundamentally rewired how I perceive music. I stopped thinking in terms of melody and started thinking in terms of psychoacoustics.”
“My internal dialogue shifted from 'does this sound good?' to 'how does this specific waveform manipulate the human nervous system?' When you understand the physics of audio, you eliminate the guesswork. If I need to emulate the suffocating nature of anxiety or the fragile isolation of a fading memory, I know exactly how to manipulate phase correlation, detune oscillators to induce micro-dissonance, and stretch a vocal to build precise psychological tension. Conversely, to trigger a true 'abreaction'—the violent, sudden release of suppressed grief—I know how to aggressively sculpt transients and push multiband compression to its absolute limit, ensuring the drop doesn't just reach the ear, but physically impacts the chest cavity.”
You’ve mentioned having a vault of unreleased material for maybe yoan—what new emotional territories or sonic hybridizations are you exploring in these upcoming tracks?
“Honestly, I’m currently spending an unhealthy amount of time trying to figure out exactly how to make a single hi-hat sound like a 3 AM existential crisis. That reminds me of the time someone asked me, “if I could put reverb on the bass.” At first, I thought it was silly, but over time I realized that people actually make mistakes or do things a bit differently to achieve unique results. Jokes aside, my hard drive is essentially a digital therapist's couch right now. If ‘ABREACTION’ was the initial, violent shock of releasing pent-up grief, the new material in the vault explores what happens after the dust settles. Emotionally, it's the late-night overthinking, the illusion of control, and that strange comfort you eventually find in chaos. Sonically, I’m pushing this idea of 'psychological contrast' to its absolute extreme.”
“I am exploring the hybridization of fragile, cinematic ambient music with the unapologetic, syncopated aggression of UK Garage and heavy Tech House. I’m taking highly vulnerable, organic elements like a soft piano or a whispered vocal... and completely mangling them through granular synthesis and heavy distortion until they physically mutate into driving basslines. The ultimate goal for these upcoming tracks is to create a space where people can process their deepest emotional baggage while simultaneously losing their minds on the dancefloor. It’s highly effective, it's cheaper than therapy, and honestly, the sound design is a lot better.”
Given your extensive background in visual art, how are you translating the dark, surgical energy of maybe yoan into a 360-degree audio-visual live club experience?
“Uffff... For me, sound and visual art have always been the exact same language. When I was designing for nightlife, I learned very quickly that what people see completely dictates how they process what they hear. But for the maybe yoan live experience, I don’t want giant LED screens flashing my logo. I want to build a physical, 360-degree manifestation of grief and release. I am treating the visual space the exact same way I treat my dynamic range in FL Studio—with extreme psychological contrast. During the atmospheric breakdowns, when the music represents that fragile, lingering memory of my father, the lighting will be almost suffocatingly minimal.”
“I want deep, isolating shadows, cinematic fog, and slow, ghostly textures. I want to pull the entire room into that intimate, lonely dream state. But when the 'abreaction' happens... when that heavy UK Garage and surgical Tech House drop suddenly slams into the room, the visual space has to shatter. I’m designing the lighting to mirror the exact transients of the sound design. We’re talking about sudden, blinding strobes, glitching typography, and aggressive, cold lighting that physically shocks the system. The ultimate goal of this audio-visual experience isn’t to put on a spectacle. It is to create a sensory vacuum. I want to build a dark, immersive room where people feel entirely safe to close their eyes, confront whatever heavy, unspoken emotions they are carrying, and physically release them into the strobe lights. It’s about collective catharsis...”
Operating across distinct aliases like yoanvox, thnx my god, and PRAYGODZ, how do you decide which project a new idea belongs to when starting a studio session?
“Seriously, I don’t sit in the studio, start messing around and wait for the track to tell me what it wants to be... I don’t believe in this way because we talked about feelings and emotions. I go into a session with a strict intent. For me, these aliases aren't just marketing tools... they are highly compartmentalised sonic architectures. I know exactly how to separate my genres, so I dictate where the idea belongs before I even open FL Studio. It’s all about my vision and mood. If my intent is to engineer raw, aggressive Bass House or Tech House aimed directly at the club, that strictly goes into the yoanvox folder. It's all about heavy transients, tight drums, and raw low-end groove.”
“If I want to design lush, evolving analogue textures and focus purely on Melodic House, I switch my brain entirely into the thnx my god architecture. If the goal is heavy, mainstage-ready EDM or Deep House, that is exclusively PRAYGODZ. And if I need to throw all the standard club rules out the window, mangle audio through granular synthesis, and explore that dark, melancholic 'psychological contrast' we talked about, that is the maybe yoan universe. Having these distinct projects allows me to be incredibly precise. I don't blur the lines. When I sit down to produce, I already know exactly which mask I'm wearing. Because I know exactly how to separate my genres, my plugin chains, my sound design choices, and my mixing decisions are completely locked in from minute one.”
Looking ahead at this active era of releases and live shows, what do you hope listeners take away when experiencing your music on the dancefloor?
“Ultimately, I don’t just want people to walk away saying they heard a good set or appreciated the mixdown. Not really my type. I got my own vision; I really want them to experience a physical and psychological reset. We all step onto the dancefloor carrying our own heavy, invisible frequencies—unspoken grief, tension, or the sheer weight of reality. The live experience I'm building is designed to intercept that.”
“By wrapping the most vulnerable, fragile human emotions in heavy, aggressive, uncompromising club production, I am trying to build a safe room for chaos. When that final track fades out and the lights come up, I want the listener to feel physically lighter. I hope they take away the realisation that it’s completely okay to let their guard down, to surrender to the contrast, and to let the sound system carry the weight they couldn't carry themselves. I want them to leave with the exact same thing that saved me... pure and unfiltered catharsis.”
Through combining mathematical precision in audio engineering with raw emotional honesty, maybe yoan proves that high-energy electronic music can serve as a powerful conduit for healing. By confronting dark, heavy human experiences head-on, his work creates a rare space where vulnerability and club culture meet to offer genuine relief.
As ‘ABREACTION’ makes its mark on dancefloors and live environments continue to take shape, maybe yoan stands as a testament to the transformative power of sound. Whether navigating loss or simply seeking release, listeners are invited to surrender to the contrast, step into the noise, and find their own catharsis within the frequency.
Be sure to follow maybe yoan on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud to stay updated on upcoming releases, live shows, and new music.
