My first intro to US3R took place at Substation in Seattle back in the summer of 2022, during my first year in the Pacific Northwest. On that rainy night drive from Portland, I ended up with enough footage for a music video. That night at Substation felt like a friendly, local show that just happened to include synthwave touring acts such as Betamaxx, Parallels, Missing Words, US3R, Teeel, DJ KZL, and SLACKMACHINE. It was also the first time I met the folks at YES Music Productions who put on the show that night along with many others each week, along with Michael Weber, whose tracks I played at my last DJ gig in Washington, D.C. before making the move out west.
Two years later in 2024, Night Rider 87, ODDitee, and I caught up with US3R in Portland and commiserated on the state of music, where we’ve been, and future plans for where we were at various stages of our careers.
Moving up to this weekend, aka, tomorrow on Saturday night at the time of this writing - US3R, Future Flux 84, ODDitee, and I (as Velocity 128) will be driving out to the high desert to Richland, Washington for the synthwave dance party at Ray’s Golden Lion.
Q1: When we first met up in Portland over ramen, you mentioned your double album, “Dreams and Nightmares,” that you produced over the course of the pandemic. Can you take us through that process and how it has affected your artistic outlook since then?
US3R - Dreams and Nightmares (2021)
US3R: Not strictly a double album, but just 19 tracks. At the time, I was in the mindset that I wanted to release a lot of singles so that I could promote my music more. However, we were in the early pandemic, and with each passing month, the doors just remained closed longer and longer, and the end of the quarantine just kept getting further delayed. After about a year, I realized that I had written / released multiple songs that seemed perhaps unrelated but were actually super overlapping in that they reflected how I really felt at those moments. It was like I was creating these time capsules of my headspace throughout the pandemic.
Q2: There were some expositional spoken word tracks in "Dreams and Nightmares” that marked a timeline of how things unfolded. If you made another one like that right now, what would it cover?
US3R: Once that became clear to me that this was chronicling a journey, I needed to make it make sense for the audience, so I recorded a few tracks of spoken word narration to help frame and tell the story. What I ended up with was an album that chronicled the high highs of me touring the US, coming home to quarantine, then seeing my city devolve into chaos for months, then the deep yearning for escapism, and a slow healing. It was cathartic to release it as an album, it was really sad to listen to.
Q3: You’ve had a few collaborations over the years. What worked best during those collab sessions?
US3R: I have tended to be the main producer on my collabs - meaning I write a core piece of the music, the other artist contributes to it, and then I mix and master it. The upside was that it always tended to sound cohesive along with my other works because it was finished by my own hands, but I would like to try something else in the future where I'm more of a contributor and less of the main driver of it.
Q4. You’ve been prolific releasing multiple albums and singles each year. How do you approach your live performances compared to studio sessions? Has your live show changed over the years?
US3R: The key to this is to actually play an instrument fluently in front of the crowd (in some aspect, however you can) even if it's a track-band type setup. The background for this philosophy is because I grew up in a family of professional musicians who were touring members of several famous acts. So growing up, it wasn't so crazy to hear stories about them playing shows at Red Rocks or something wild like that. So, growing up, I was always surrounded by them and their other musician friends. For that reason, I've always played in bands - I was in a lot of rock and metal bands back when I was younger. I was a drummer in one, a singer in another, a guitarist in another. I built a lot of fluency in various instruments, and I realized after a few of my early US3R shows that the more live I could make it, the happier the audience would feel. So that's been my goal ever since.
US3R live in Portland, Oregon; 24 Oct 2025; presented by Pacific Northwave Collective
Q5: New year, new gigs. What are you looking forward to in 2026 musically or otherwise?
US3R: In 2026 I am looking forward to just not giving myself any kind of goal or schedule - I want the music to happen organically and not feel like I have a mountain of homework to do :) I tend to stress myself out year after year with all these ambitious plans for everything and I think I'm ready to take the more chill approach. Though I would love to write more with other people - perhaps this will be the year of collabs.
Upcoming Show:
Links:
- US3R on Bandcamp | Instagram
- Pacific Northwave Collective on Instagram | Facebook
- YES Music Productions on Instragram | Facebook
- Ray's Golden Lion on Instragram | Facebook
- Future Flux 84 previous blog post
- ODDitee previous blog post