Following my review of his latest EP, I had a nice conversation with crxw. He talks about his upbringing as a producer, his greatest hits, habits in the creative process, favorite albums, and whether he likes sprinkles on donuts.

You can check out crxw in various corners of the web:

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1oolm 2026-09-23T04:27:09.185Z
heyo! super happy to have you here. how are you doing?
crxw 2026-09-23T13:45:18.560Z
hello, thank you for having me! im doing great, what about you?
1oolm 2026-09-23T13:52:55.996Z
quite exhausted, but pumped nonetheless. been a busy week, this is the highlight. :P

of course, introduce yourself to the readers!
crxw 2026-09-23T15:29:20.447Z
i’m crxw, an artist and producer from montreal. i make music mostly centered around vocaloid, hardware and digital synths, and dense arrangements. i also currently make all the visual art for the music myself!
1oolm 2026-09-23T15:30:28.813Z
hell yeah!
how'd you choose the name crxw? some kind of origin story?
crxw 2026-09-23T15:36:17.395Z
i used to go by crow, for a long time and when i first started music i really wasnt taking it seriously at all. i tried using “crow” when uploading through my distributor but they declined it as it was too overused. i ended up replacing the “o” with “x”, because i thought using a 0 was a bit too cringe at the time lol. weirdly enough it ended up fitting the universe of my music really well, it almost look like internet corrupted language for crow,
1oolm 2026-09-23T15:38:26.999Z
actually really interesting that it's the distributor that was the catalyst for the spelling change.

what got you into music production? how long have you been doing it for?
crxw 2026-09-23T15:52:12.912Z
i think i started because at the time, not much really interested me. not games, not school (i was constantly skipping it lol), not really people either. then i stumbled across this new wave of music (mostly idm and vocaloid), and remember being kind of in awe at the emotions it made me feel, because they felt completely new to me.

that gave me this idea that music could potentially make you feel things you’d never felt before, and that really excited me. novelty is probably one of the things that excites me most about life in general.

when i started, i basically pushed everything else aside for about a year just to learn and understand music production. i was doing it every day for around 6–10 hours. i felt more attracted to it than anything else i’d ever done, mostly because it felt like there was endless potential in it.

i started around four years ago now, i think. funnily enough, the second track i ever worked on in my life is still up on my profile,"eeried."
1oolm 2026-09-23T15:56:56.391Z
honestly, you're doing great at inventing new feelings. that strong work ethic has clearly paid off: turns out we've been doing this for the same amount of time LOL.

nowadays, do you do anything outside of producing? how often is music work on your mind?
crxw 2026-09-23T16:12:09.458Z
nowadays i mostly alternate between music and art, with music still being my main priority. i try to make something in ableton pretty much every day, even if it’s small. if i’m not able to, i’ll usually just rest or play something instead so i don’t completely burn myself out, because i have a pretty bad tendency to overwork myself.

music is on my mind most of the time though, even when i’m not actively working on it. i’m usually thinking about some sound or new idea i want to try later.
1oolm 2026-09-23T16:19:50.503Z
trying to doodle every day is certainly something i need to try; setting lower stakes for work time - the need to always be good enough before even considering hopping in.

do you have any particular overarching workflow/process that follows a track from start to finish? how long may that take? do you focus on one project at a time, or maybe multiple?
crxw 2026-09-23T18:21:33.740Z
i have a few rules i set for myself. one of the biggest is that i don’t want to use any preexisting sounds or presets, so pretty much everything has to be made specifically for the track.
i usually start with a piano composition and let my ear guide me rather than trying to force everything into a specific theoretical framework. i’m really into jazz, especially unconventional harmony and the way it can approach tension and resolution, so working by ear fits pretty naturally with how i want the music to feel. once the composition starts taking shape, i’ll create all the synthesizer sounds around that particular idea, still mostly judging everything by ear and whether it belongs in that world.
i also try not to reuse sounds i’ve made for older tracks, even if i originally made them from scratch. i like every project having its own little vocabulary of sounds rather than pulling from a library of things i already know work.
1oolm 2026-09-23T18:40:06.781Z
that definitely explains much of my shock listening to your tracks flow so freely/naturally. a sort of a dying art.

coming off of sound synthesis, are there any pieces of gear (plugins, hardware, so on) you'd like to note as particularly influential/reliable in your craft?
crxw 2026-09-24T18:21:52.690Z
i think i’m deeply influenced by the idea of machines becoming human, or somehow turning into living organisms, so the yamaha fs1r is definitely one of my favorite synths. there’s something about its formant synthesis and the way it can move between sounding synthetic, vocal, and almost organic that fits perfectly with what i’m trying to make. for example, the choir in “downright resolution” was made entirely with the fs1r.

before i could really get into hardware though, serum was probably the most important synth for me. i’ve used it for so long that i know pretty much all the ins and outs of it, so at this point i can usually imagine a sound and already have a pretty good idea of how to build it.
1oolm 2026-09-24T18:28:56.331Z
ohhh, god that's cool. i think i've gushed about that sound enough already.

you're quite eccentric when it comes to naming tracks. are there any lesser-known (or outright unguessable) meanings to some of the titles you'd like to share?
crxw 2026-09-25T19:19:02.667Z
tbh, they’re usually pretty unconscious. it’s always about trying to reveal something about myself, something i felt in the moment, or just words that came to me naturally. some of them do have deeper meanings and a certain world built around them, but i usually think it’s more interesting to let them speak for themselves.

i like letting the listener understand whatever they want to understand from them, and if someone is really invested, they can try to decrypt what’s behind everything. it’s usually written in a pretty poetic way rather than being something i’d want to explain directly
1oolm 2026-09-25T19:26:03.400Z
makes perfect sense, i respect that. that's an on-brand extension of the music itself. i appreciate an artist that can keep me guessing.

you're got two particularly star-studded releases: what were those bursts of popularity like? how do you feel about "unpledged allegiance" now, in retrospect?
crxw 2026-09-29T00:32:44.001Z
i think those releases are a phase of my work that i still really respect, but i didn’t care that much about the fact that they reached a lot of people. what matters more to me in retrospect is what they represented at the time

“i love the way it cries” is a funny one because i never expected it to become popular at all. the song was actually supposed to be scrapped from the album initially.

with “unpledged allegiance” especially, i still value it, but i don’t think it has the amount of depth i eventually wanted my work to have. there were ideas in it that i still think are cool, i just don’t think i had fully figured out how to express them yet. i see it as an important phase, but not something that represents the full scope of what i am now.
1oolm 2026-09-29T03:00:14.460Z
fair enough! that's how i envisioned that era myself, from an outside perspective.

do you have some favorite albums, or recent ones in your rotation, that you'd like to speak of? is genre discovery and diversity a priority to you in your music listening habits?
crxw 2026-09-30T17:26:01.099Z
i really love jazz and unconventional harmony in general. some of my favorite albums would probably be john coltrane’s giant steps, ahmad jamal’s the awakening, and max roach’s members, don’t git weary.
when it comes to electronic music, i listen to a lot of dennoko-p and koronba, and then the classics like squarepusher and aphex twin.
i think genre diversity is really important because, no matter the artist or genre, there’s usually something i can learn from it. listening to things outside of what i normally make helps me see music from a different perspective, which really helps 🙂
1oolm 2026-09-30T17:32:18.766Z
absolutely agreed!! the 3 years I've listened to exclusively hardcore seem so boxed-in to me now, not just in creativity, but cultural enrichment in general. experiencing things is awesome, i will do that, thank you very much.

do you like sprinkles on your donuts?
crxw 2026-09-30T17:33:44.487Z
honestly i dont really eat sweets, but i was a fan of sprinkles on everything as a kid LOL
1oolm 2026-09-30T17:38:48.407Z
my irl friend was right on the money. she made a bet that you don't like sweets LOL.

and i think that's pretty much it! it's been quite a wonderful conversation, I've learned a lot and I'm extremely glad for the opportunity to share with the rest of the world.
lastly, as a sign-off, you have the option to send in any audio file you want. anything at all.
crxw 2026-09-30T17:45:39.742Z
HAHAHAHA i wonder how they guessed 😭
thank you!! it was a pleasure, genuinely. it was really nice having the time to actually think about all the questions and everything. i really enjoyed it.
here’s an old song i just found,, i don’t have any plans on continuing it, so i thought why not let it live here :, )