Quix

For Jono Schnell, growing up was all music. Now better known as trap producer Quix, he was home-schooled for a few years and for him that meant being able to learn to play instruments. “I had a lot of downtime to play the drums and guitar and stuff, and get my musical background good,” he told RNZ's Music 101. And then he discovered electronic music. “First it was dubstep, which is really intense music. It’s like heavy metal to classical music.” He went through a phase of experimenting, trying to make dubstep, house, trance. “I just wanted to make stuff. I just wanted to put something down and be able to listen to it back.” And then, at age 18, Jono found the style he’s built his reputation on. “Something resonated within me. I was like ‘this is actually what I feel like I need to do, this kind of music’. The song he heard was RL Grime's Flood, which was playing on George FM as he drove back from music practice. Jono says: "It honestly changed my life that evening. It incorporated every music element piece of energy that I loved. That night I searched George FM for the song and had it on repeat!" He tried to figure out how to capture the energy he heard in other trap tracks, but make it his own, and make the audience feel what he felt. Four years on, stats from Soundcloud show he’s connecting. A collaboration with Boombox Cartel is at 1.7 million plays and everything else he released last year has had hundreds of thousands of plays. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.