Hello, I’m Summer Kulcsar with Radio UTD, and I’m here with Dreamish. Could you please introduce yourself and your music?
Hi, I’m Dreamish, also known as Bryce. I’m 18 years old and I make a kind of a blend of 90s electronic music, mainly jungle and house, and pop music.

How did you get started in music?
It’s kind of weird. My whole life, I really wanted to be an illustrator or an animator. Growing up, I wanted to work for Pixar as the long goal. But when I was 11 or 12 in sixth grade, I wrote a song with a guitar I had just gotten, and I learned really basic chords, and I wrote a song, and I was like, “Oh wait, this is fun! I think I like this more than drawing.” And we had a friend who owned a recording studio, so they took me there to record it. So that was kind of the start of the love of everything.

So, you would say you’ve always had an artistic soul; it just shifted from drawing to music?
Absolutely. I’ve always had an urge to create, you know?

What inspires your sound?
Oh man! There’s, there’s a lot of things. My mom was really 80’s new wave and modern pop, so I grew up with a lot of like B-52s, Depeche Mode. On my dad’s side, I heard a lot of like, jazz and classic rock, so a lot of The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Miles Davis. So that was kind of my early introduction to the world of music. As I’ve gotten older, I really like Aphex Twin, and this guy Squarepusher that I really, really like. I mean, I’m still a big Miles Davis fan. I love jazz too. There’s just a lot of things.

You took inspiration from what you heard growing up and put it into electronic form.
Yeah, I’d say so. I had a teacher in sophomore year, my art teacher. His name was Mr. Thompson, and he introduced me to electronic music officially, and that was really the real start of like, the love affair that I have with electronic music.

How do you approach creating a new track?
I’m pretty spontaneous, you know? I like to start with a drum beat that I like. I listen to a lot of ’60s funk, I love James Brown and Winstons, and there’s a lot of these great funk acts with awesome drum parts. Kool and the Gang is one. So I’ll start with either a drum loop or I’ll sit at my keyboard and I’ll just kinda bang out a chord progression, and I let it take me from there. It’s not a very concrete process; it’s just kinda like I’ll have an idea and be like “Quick! Get it down!”

Does any other media inspire you to start creating?
Oh, totally. I’m a movie guy. I feel like, in a weird way, visuals in a movie really inspire where I wanna go with music sometimes. I really like striking cinematography. So like, Stanley Kubrick’s a big one for me. In “2001”, how everything is so open, and I guess out in the air, for lack of a better word. I really wanna make tracks that have that sort of wide surrounding view sense of sound.

I definitely hear that in your music! I really like your track “aquamarine” from your album “student driver” that came out back in ‘22, I believe. It has that spacey, all-encompassing vibe that you were talking about.
Yes. Thank you, I do love that track.

That’s also in another single that I like from you called “The Fall”. The electronics help with making that atmosphere.
Oh, my. Wow, we’re digging deep!

You’re dreamish, I have to know!
Oh my goodne- Nardwuar!

On another note, what inspires your songwriting?
Oh man. Well, again, since I’m so instrumental-minded, I’ll get a beat down first, then it usually just starts off as like a straight electronic song that I was working on, and then I’m like “Ok, maybe I can take out a few of these elements and replace them with vocals.” I’ll hum a melody like I guess, for example, my song “desire”. I made that beat for a week and a half. The vocal track was “nuan nuan nuaaaaan nuan nuan nuaaaaan nuan naun.” I’ll do that, then be like “Okay. What words can I fit in these syllables?” And more often than not, they end up being like either really corny love songs or really corny breakup songs. I can’t write about anything else.

That’s definitely present in many of your tracks. The heartbreak lyrics. It’s very moody!
Yes. And I’m not a very heartbroken person either. It’s just easy to write about.

Speaking of heartbreak, your latest single, “Nobody’s Perfect”, is another breakup song. That fits into your pattern as well.
Oh, absolutely. That song was so fun because I had been listening to this amazing song by Jaco Pastorius called “Portrait of Tracy,” and the melody and chords really stuck out to me. I interpolated that at first and crafted that beat. Again, it was one of those that was a straight electronic track for a while, and I had all of that guitar in the outro. My friend onlytimid-we had worked on a song before called “Broken Hearts” and I was like, “I can really see him doing good on this.” So, I messaged him and asked if he wanted to write a verse for the second half and maybe I’ll take something from your verse and try to make a new first verse out of that. And he said absolutely, and he wrote his whole verse, you know, “I don’t know my feelings are certain. I hope they’re not closing the curtains,” and I really liked that. There was this one line where he was like, “I ain’t always had a lot on my plate,” and I latched on to that. I wrote the first chorus with, “Don’t ask if I’m ok, I don’t know what I’ll say,” and it ends off with, “Imma keep on working till I have a lot on my plate,” so it was more of a response-

So like a full circle moment.
Yeah.

Another song that you had a collaboration on was “No Second Chances” with Marnie Rain. How do you approach making songs with other artists?
Well, I mean, it really depends. So with “No Second Chances” with Marnie, I had written that song, and I had sung it, and I really did not like how my vocals sounded on that. I thought that a woman’s singing voice would be better. I knew Marnie from high school. She had graduated a year before me, and I knew she was a singer, and I had heard her stuff on her Instagram, so I went out on a limb and asked if she wanted to record the vocals for it, and she was like, “Absolutely.” Not only did I think her vocals would be better, but I thought the song worked better from a female perspective, in a way. Which is not a way I’ve ever written before, so I kinda just went in and tweaked the lyrics to be, like, as weird as it sounds, a lesbian relationship that was going wrong.

There’s nothing weird about a lesbian relationship!
No, I know! It’s not like that, it’s not weird! No, I’m an ally! It also made the song more relatable to Marnie because she’s lesbian, and I think that helped elevate her performance in a sense. She just did fantastic on that song. With onlytimid, all of my collaborations with him were born out of the DJ club in high school. We were DJing pep rallies, football games, and we built a bond over that. I admired his music because I thought he had such a great voice and a really nice style of writing. I made “Broken Hearts” and the first verse, and I was like, “Dude, I need you to come get on this.” That was how we established a working relationship, and now if we need each other’s help, or want each other on a song, it’ll just be a quick text.

How has your music evolved since the DJ club?
I’ve had so many experiences that have grown not only how I make music, but how I listen. It started with DJ club and meeting everybody in it. It was my first, not my first exposure to music unlike what I was listening it, but my first time hearing why they liked the music that I wasn’t necessarily the biggest fan of and that opened my mind a lot. It encouraged me ot go out and listen to stuff I wouldn’t normally listen to. Around the same time as when DJ club was starting, I got an internship at a recording studio in Dallas called The Kitchen under an amazing engineer named Alex Beane. For the first six month I sat on artist sessions and watched them work and I was fascinated by the whole ordeal. I showed him a song I was working on and he encouraged me to bring it into the studio to work on it. He walked me through a single I made called “In My Mind.” The techniques he showed me and how he got the sound he thought I wanted was just monumental for my process. We had a working relationship up until my latest album. He featured on a song called “Pipe Dreams” that was born out of a bed. I told him I could make him a really good pop instrumental and he told me, “Really? You only make electronic music,” and I was like, “Watch.” I gave that to him and he wrote the lyrics night of. It was a real fast process getting that song done. I think I’ve grown more confident in myself since DJ club because I’m more willing to do something and not worry about if people are gonna like it. At the end of the day, it’s what I like and it’s inspired by what I listen to. If I’m the only one who likes it, I’m the only one who likes it. But, I’m super thankful that’s not the case.

On your Instagram account, which is,
Drmsh4luv

You’ve recently posted about a live performance you did. How does performing live influence your music?
My first experience doing live was, I think, in mid-2024, and it was a really small set I did with my samplers. It was some really crappy jungle tunes. I decided I needed to start making music that works better in a live setting. If I’m not interacting with an audience, and I have my head in my gear, nobody’s gonna wanna watch that. I took that and formed my next performance, which was in August of this year. That was a collection of everything that I’ve made since 2023. Having an audience react so powerfully to stuff I’ve written really pushes me to keep on going down that route where I write more. I want to get more personal with my art, and I think that’s really what playing live has done for me. It’s really pushed me to be a little more personal in my lyrics, instead of just writing the same breakup song over and over again.

Can fans expect any upcoming projects before the new year?
Yes, actually. I have a new release coming out on December 12th. It’s an EP called “Assorted Sound Experiments Vol. 1.” It’s a collection of four little tunes I made. It’s more of me messing around with my synthesizer and my drum machines. It still sounds like me, but it’s certainly trying to go a little deeper in my influences and stop caring about what sound is gonna get popular. It’s more about pushing the envelope in a way.

That’s very exciting! Where can people find you?
I’m on Instagram, my YouTube is dreamish, Spotify, Apple Music, think of any streaming service, and I’m there.

Do you have any final words for everyone reading this article?
I’d like to say thank you to Mr. Lamb, my creative writing teacher, for encouraging me to write lyrics and put myself there in that regard. Big thank you to Tom Buck for designing my logo, and Robbie Wabi Sabi, another Dallas-based artist, who got me involved in the local electronic music scene.

Thank you so much for meeting with me!
Thank you! This was awesome.