We were lucky to catch up with Kris Mayers recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Kris thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

Considering I’ve been a musician of sorts since 2009, I definitely wish I started being more creative a lot earlier. I didn’t start getting serious about creating my own music until about 2021, before that I was mostly just playing covers or letting other musicians take the creative lead in other bands. I’ve always messed around here and there but I spent most of my free time playing video games. Of course, I don’t really regret this since I was just doing what I enjoyed more at the time but it makes me wonder how things would have been different.

Starting a more serious creative path sooner in life probably would have been a lot more ideal for a few things I wanted to do. I always wanted to take my musical projects to the stage quite regularly and feel that interaction with the crowd and sharing my music with an audience directly. However, since becoming a Dad last year I just don’t have time for this side of the industry. It goes without saying that taking care of my family is a lot more important to me and it was always going to happen, I just left trying to do live performances on the regular a little bit too late.

Kris, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a musician and an amateur audio producer in my early 30’s. I’m not very good at talking about myself, but I’m trying to improve on that!

Primarily I’m a musician. I enjoy making music, putting it together and then showing other people. Even if that’s only about 12 people on the internet (which tends to be the way). I put my music together mostly by myself but I occasionally get help from friends I’ve connected with over the years. Areas I tend to get assistance with is drums and percussion. My brain doesn’t enjoy putting those bits together at the moment.

Making my own music meant that I had to teach myself a lot about audio production tools to put together good sounding demos. However, this spiraled into actually putting together final products which are now out there for people to listen to. I’m quite proud of the stuff I’ve put together after receiving some great feedback – particularly my debut album with my project “Purgatorial”. I’d never put a proper album together before that, yet I somehow pulled it off. A lot of trial and error and studying the work of others lead to me getting that album to a point I was pretty happy with. Originally I was going to re-record the whole thing and use it as a very polished demo to reference but many people that heard said they thought it sounded like the real thing.

Since then I’ve extended out offers to other musicians to mix their music in a similar way. I make a point of not charging much as I know that proper audio production is quite expensive. I’m not trying to compete with the big boys, I’m more targeting bands or musicians that only have small budgets just so they don’t give up on their art due to lack of funds. While I don’t refer to myself as a “proper” audio engineer of sorts I still like to give my clients a proper polished product that sounds top notch.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding part of being an artist is creating something you’re proud of and seeing people enjoying it. Honestly, I’m not super bothered if anybody else listens to anything I put out there, but it’s definitely nice. I don’t get caught up in streaming numbers since they are meaningless unless they get huge, but it was cool to see a few Purgatorial songs hit 4 figures on Spotify. I have the label I released the album through to thank for that mostly, but I can see there is a dedicated community that has shared it around a bit and for that I am extremely thankful. This is what keeps me motivated to put stuff out there instead of making it and just leaving it to be forgotten on my hard drive!

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I would love to get to the point where one of my releases gets printed on vinyl. I think that’s probably my biggest goal. When I’ve done that, I’m all good. I’ll continue as I am but just a lot happier! I don’t mean a print-on-demand service either, I mean a proper release from a well established label that can put out a very high quality product.

I’ve looked into funding a release myself but it’s absolutely not worth it alone. They’re so expensive and you have to buy them in big bulks. I have no idea how to market myself but with an industry professionals help then I think we could make something quite special. I just need to convince someone to do exactly that.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @thevoid.wav
• Other: band instagrams:eowa.uk
  purgatorial.uk

Image Credits

Purple artwork is the album artwork for the Purgatorial debut album called “Fading Whispers of Voidbound Souls”.

The grey and gold album artwork is the artwork for the Eowa debut album called “The Year without a summer” – please note this is actually being re-released due to a better mix, the original has been removed in favour of this one but it’s not out just yet. I don’t mind if people see the artwork though.

The yellow shots are from an upcoming music video for an Eowa song. The drummer is called Ada, guitarist without the microphone is called Ryan and myself shouting into/eating the microphone.

There is also a team shot after we finished which has the three of us in the middle, Paul on the left, Ed Cuss (the director) kneeling down and Ryan on the right.