What's behind your artist name?

#1

Hey all,

I thought this would be a fun thread to talk about what goes on behind our artist names? I always found it interesting how diverse and out there some artist names are, and I’m often curious what the story is.

Jazzyspoon recently posted a long response regarding this question (maybe if he wants to cross post it here) and it got me wondering about all of yours.

In terms of mine, “city at worlds end”, well - it’s a bit of a funny story. When I started the project in 2005 I was looking around for all sorts of stuff. I knew I loved retro science fiction, and I knew I wanted to guide the project into some sort of narrative scifi universe.

A year prior, my old man took me to a random used book store, most of the soft cover used books were like 50 cents so I picked up quite a few. One of them was this:

cover-orig-11874

I love that book, it’s a great read. I ended up dropping the apostrophe as I wanted my music to be many “worlds” rather than just about one world’s end, so to speak.

Randomly enough, the same avatar I have today (I had no idea where it came from) happens to be a character race from “Dr. Who”. Weird, right? Yeah. Total coincidence. I just happened to keep the cyberman avatar forever because I thought it was cool.

And then I started getting a lot of random comments from people like “Oh man, a Dr. Who fan! That’s super rad!”.

Some years and a google search later, I found out that there is literally a novel set in the Dr. Who universe called “City at World’s End.” what the hell?

220px-City_at_World's_End

The books are totally unrelated. Somehow I happened to snag a Dr. Who avatar as the mainstay of my project, that also had a title that coincided with the a book from the same universe. Weird?

I still haven’t hardly seen more than an episode of Dr. Who to this day. I should probably watch it, given the completely estranged cosmic coincidence.

Anyhow, that’s my music moniker story. What’s yours?

#2

Random word generators are a staple in my bandnamemaking process

Then there’s the odd “I stole your song title, bro”

#3

My original name was Bx3. Taken from friends calling me Beastie Boy Baker(Baker being my last name). So I thought it would be neat to be called Bx3.

My current name is taken from a period of gaming in the early 2000’s where I decided I would sift through my comic cards and figure a neat name based of one of those names. That process was based around coming up with a game tag. I ended up seeing Cypher, which was a marvel superhero. Took out the ph for b and adding X, which is for Weapon X. I like them both but obviously no followers equals creativity changes as much as possible.

#4

I just got out of the navy, and was dating a chick that had dirty hippy friends. Because I am a different personality than the lazy do drugs all day type people she hung out with I was labeled a “bro”. My last name is Bergner so they combined the two and called me Brogner. It was a mocking type situation, and a pretty traumatic relationship/ time of my life (the girl I was with was literally crazy ex heroin user/ we did a bunch of hard drugs… compared to now I try to limit my drinking to a minimum)

Safe to safe my life turned out way better than hers and her friends still use hard drugs and don’t do anything productive, but they did introduce me to the EDM rave scene and went to EDC and a bunch of other festivals. I decided to keep the name but some people think it’s pronounced Brahg-ner, which I honestly like better than Bro - gner. But what ever.

Maybe if I become famous she will remember that name and then I can rub her price of shit nose in it… probably won’t happen but it gets me through the day sometimes

#5

Man, that’s an intense story! thanks for sharing though. How did you end up to this corner of the internet, may I ask? A humble IDMf discovery story is always fun.

Yeah I always pronounced your name “brawgnur” so, sorry that seems totally incorrect. haha.

For what it’s worth I always called @Vlantis “Vlanntiss” instead of “Vlawntiss” like it’s supposed to be. Hehe.

Everyone pronounces my username as “no-stroh-mer” but it’s really “naws-tro-mur”

Fun stuff. :slight_smile: <3

#6

Yeah I just find it easier to roll with what people call you, It “makes more sense” if everyone is calling you how they interpret your name then having to fight it. Why correct them, make it a controversial subject when you become famous (only the “true” fans know your original pronunciation) idk

And to answer your question I literally typed into google music forum 5 years ago and for better or for worse IDMF popped up.

How about you?

#7

I think I was just searching for IDM music really. Forums were big back when I joined in like 2010. It was gaining huge traction and I found it the perfect place to talk weird hybrid electronica.

Yeah with a name like yours, that just totally works out. Sometimes it happens like that. Unfortunately for me, my last name is “Kramer” - so I grew up surrounded by idiots that would literally say shit like “So are you related to the guy off Seinfeld?”

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

#8

That’s ridiculously awesome, haha. Very nice. Cool to hear how that came about man, thanks for sharing.

#9

I bet after they asked that question they had a look of gratification across their face… as if they were the only person to make that connection lol

#10

yeah you’ve envisioned it perfectly.

That’s how cringe it was. It’s like “Holy FUCK, you ARE the most clever person I know!”

:expressionless: :\ :frowning:

#11

Honestly it’s what I would do lol I’m only human after all

#12

I actually said the other day your name feels like a classical name, so F them.

Though if you corrected me and said BRO-gner, I’d have been, ok…Well that’s one of them dudes.

EDIT -

Honestly, I think the reason this forum gets or got a lot of it’s members, outside of the predictable styles of music was the community in comparsion with the search results.

Not sure if it is the same but this place shows(ed) up more readily over other places with simple EDM searches. Even though the idea for most of the releases and roots, i feel are based towards a direction outside of some of most of current LB posts.

I never came here to post bangers or look for them. But a lot of people run the gauntlet to post them, I guess. Or did.

#13

Deadmau5, then I Discovered vsnares, googled how to do vsanres drums and found idmf…my current username is an abbreviation of the name of a simple funny named programming language and my current artist moniker is literally three random letters I thought rolled off the tongue and sounded futuristic and 10 years later I figured out how to do vsnares style drums and how to replicate autechre’s gantz graf and its cousin vaetxh’s recursion tree and also ms beat me to the punch but anyways I’ve accomplished my musical goals i can move on now…

#14

So my forum name (used to be my artist name too) actually comes from an insult my own brother leveled at me. I talked about making music and how I’d do stuff different from other people for years until one of my friends handed me a DAW to shut me up. So I’m sitting there practicing, learning this stuff, I’m starting to tell people about what I’m doing. One day, I’m telling one of my friends about what it and my brother looks right at me and says “Whatever, no one’s ever going to pay attention to you anyways, you’ll only ever be white noise to them”.

I knew then and there I had to call myself that, and I worked under that name for three years. Of course, that’s a craptastic artist name (I’m white noise number 20-something on soundcloud). You give that name to anyone and ask them to google it and they’re going to get a wikipedia article on noise. So now I work under my given name because I think I am my own greatest asset and I should use that to the fullest. And also I couldn’t come up with anything better, though I probably should. Fun fact, I’ve never met any other Pingel, even in my own family, but there’s a lawyer named James Pingel who comes up if you try and google me. So that didn’t work out.

Oh, and the addendum to my brother insulting me is that he and the rest of my family have finally come around to me working on music (actually he told me the other day he thinks I have as good a shot as anyone to make it big), only took them 6 years. And also watching me play a prophet sold them a bit…

#15

Maybe it’s time for a revamp of my name. Since you said that about the name I have been thinking more and more about changing it, so thanks!! lol

#16

I like to tell people how I pronounce it when talking in real life or over an audio conversation, but I don’t care either way.

As for mine, a buddy in Jr. High said we should call our 4-track duo Vlantis, and it has stuck. I’m pretty sure he pulled the name out of a phone book and mispronounced it, anyway. :stuck_out_tongue:

#17

fidelium is latin for “faithful” in latin. my dad is a non-demonitional christian pastor, so I grew up in a church. I don’t have a god-fearing cell in my body, and I struggled with the idea of faith my whole life, so I wanted to reflect the uncomfortable and often damaging paradox of growing up in a setting that required you to practice faith even if you didn’t have it or understand it.

banewaker is a spoonerism of my actual name, wayne baker. also rhymes with: sane taker, chain breaker, rain maker, pain faker, mane shaker, etc. bane waker has been a nickname for most of my life by close friends.

I definitely don’t feel as connected with “fidelium” anymore and feel as one would with their own given first name now. I’m just called that around the music communities I’ve put time into and even when I’ve tried to change my artist name, that’s what people know me as so I haven’t pushed to do something else.

#18

Sweet thread idea Nos! (gamer habit, I always shorten names) So my moniker started actually with my logo. Back when I lived state-side I had a largish 57" DLP projection TV. It started to burn out over the years and developed a noticeable pattern in a yellowish tint in the middle, which is almost 1-1 what my logo is now. I drew it out and kept it, but at the time did not really have an inkling I would go into music production. The pic stuck with me though and when I started producing my first few track it came to mind. Having a logo and an idea of what I wanted to produce (techno-ish) I started looking for a name and the idea was this guy on my logo was a sort of traveling wanderer through space that peeked in on people through TVs and other electronics just to observe and understand. So that led to the name Creeper, which while taken by a band or two was not really actively used much, so I figured I could get away with it in the electronic music world.
The shortening to Creepr was actually not intentional, rather I created an account on IDMF with Creeper and I guess I used capslock or something when typing the password, but I could not get into it the 2nd day. So I made a new account: Creepr. I emailed an admin trying to get the other account unlocked, but never heard back, so I just stuck with the new name.
I have produced one track on the HDM label under Null:Divide for DnB stuff, and go by NovaCreep sometimes as well, which is a combi of my music handle and my gamer handle. For forums and stuff I will stick to Creepr though.

#19

My overly lengthy reply from my Watrmark album post:

"That silly ass, but somehow appropriate name I am stuck with story…

20+ years ago, when I would hand out some of my first solo tapes/CDs to people, I noticed I got a less desirable reaction to my music when people thought it was just me doing everything. Maybe it felt invasive to listen to one guys artistic output? Not sure, but the reactions were definitely different. So, in a sort of social experiment, I began inventing band members for my CD covers, all based on twists on my first name “Jason”.
J-bone played bass, Jason on vocals and guitars, Pepe (long story) on wind instruments, and Jazzyspoon on synths/drum machines/turntables/mixdown.
The reactions were noticeable enough to continue doing it for a long while, though those projects went under a lot of different names. For those that knew me well, it was a comfortable transition for Jazzyspoon to start doing solo work.

When I moved to Denver in 2001, I wanted a moniker that wouldn’t let people (and/or myself) take the music so seriously. “JA(zzy)S(po)ON” seemed ridiculous enough to let me explore multiple genres and I found it safely “googleable” and light in tone. 18 years later I still have it as my electronic music moniker, despite multiple people writing to me over the years to request that I change my moniker to something more menacing and misspelled like ‘Vort3x’ or ‘Symm^tech’ or something like that so that they can look cooler for liking it/writing it on their geometry notebook cover. I’m either too dumb and stubborn to change it or I actually have come to grips that it still keeps me approachable and open to experimentation. I might even like it.

My solo project that predates Jazzyspoon was and still is called “From Noise to Water” and it sounded too serious/pretentious for me to use as an electronic musician moniker and is a google search engine nightmare. So, I keep that name for my sloppy, less produced acoustic stuff. In fact, my actual “self release” label is called “from Noise to Water Productions”.

rant over."

#20

OK… why not…

When I joined the “pre-2018 fall” forum I used my actual name… because I didn’t have an “Artist Name,” In the mean time I was looking for an Avatar and decided to use some of my written (more classically oriented but with a twist) music from back in the 80’s. I asked my daughter (who is very graphic design savvy) to look through my old notebooks and pick something… There you have it.

@1roomstudio is not my “Artist Name” it’s the name of my studio … It took a long time to find something that felt/sounded right/good and wasn’t already “Googled-up” and still had some room to grow on InstaGram AND I could snag the Internet Domain! (Web Site coming soon? I dunno…). Insta had a soft porn handle spelled One_Room_Studio with only a few posts. I decided I could overwhelm that… never looked back. Some Real Estate stuff comes up on Google… but I’m OK with that… C’est la vie … non?

How did I find the forum? New to BandCamp and SoundCloud I was Googling how to broaden my reach to listeners. I read Blog by “Bass Gorilla” that suggested a handful of forums… IDMf was one of them. I lurked for a while and decided that even though EDM was NOT MY THING!!! I could tell there was a lot of experimentation going on here and that there would likely be a kindred spirit or two… I was pleasantly surprise at how civilized the space was (I really liked the whole “Thanks” and “Thanked” thing) and how so many members were welcoming and helpful.

I really like it here! :sunglasses: AND I have learned more than I could have ever imagined in a very short time… Still learning… overwhelmed with how much I don’t know… but appreciate being tolerated by the various Masters here.

THANK YOU IDMforum! :ghost: