01. Who are you ?
My name is Andrew Lozano. I’m an American producer and mixing mastering artist. I was born in San Jose, California, and currently live in Sacramento, California, with my wife and three daughters.
02. What are you listening actually ?
I enjoy a wide variety of music. My recent musical tastes include chill-wave, ambient, downtempo, and Lofi chill-hop. My early influences came primarily from the San Francisco Bay Area’s underground house music scene. Mark Farina’s DJ performances of Mushroom Jazz and House music are among of my favorites to listen to. Underground house has a unique way of merging jazz with conscious hip-hop, bringing the two genres together. My current influences are definitely Tycho, Khruangbin, Odesza, Disclosure, Tame Impala, Tribe Called Quest, Anderson Pakk, Pomo, FKJ and everyone on Roche Musique label.
3. How you came to music ?
Since I can remember, musicians have frequently visited our home for prayer gatherings. My parents were and still are ardent Christians, so we held weekly prayer gatherings that featured lots of praise songs. I was extremely fortunate to be around some of my relatives who were already on the road and performing on the Christian circuit in the latin music scene. Like all young boys, I enjoyed skateboarding and bicycling while growing up, but I also developed a desire to play an instrument, which led me to put down my skateboard and take up a bass guitar. I was fascinated by how much sound four strings can produce. In primary school, I was singing in an all-boys choir and dragging my bass about. I was a big fan of « Depeche Mode » and their polar opposites, « The Red Hot Chili Peppers, » and it was at that point that I knew I wanted to be in a band.
I finished from high school in 1994 and immediately went into full-time music. Throughout the late 1990s, I was a member of several underground bands before transitioning to making electronic music. In the year 2000, I joined the house music trio « Uneaq » on Om Records in San Francisco and began touring throughout the United States. When I relocated from San Jose to Sacramento in 2004, things began to take a more serious turn. Clique Trax was a new house label that a young artist and I had created. Soon after we opened our doors, I decided to launch my own music studio and label, Freqy Music Group. Locally, I began collaborating with some of Sacramento’s top artists. This allowed me to refine my engineering skills and produce, mix, and master some of my best work to date.
4. What gear do you use in studio/live ?
DAW- Logic Pro / Presonus Studio live 16.0.2 mixer / Tascam Model 12 mixer / Big Knob Studio Plus / KRK ROKIT 10-3 G4 / Mackie MR5 speakers / Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol A49 Controller Keyboard / Korg R3 synth / ASM Hydrasynth Explorer synth / VMS ML-1 Slate digital mic / Slate VSX headphones / Vintage Fender jazz bass / Les Paul guitar / Cry baby wah pedal / Yamaha THR10 II guitar amp / Ebow
My pedal board:
Ernie Ball tuner and volume control / Keeley Compressor / Strymon Iridium AMP &IR CAB / Boss MD 200 / Strymon Timeline Delay / Ventris Dual Reverb (E-DOME setting)
Soft synthesizers:
Omnisphere 2.8 / Serum: Advanced Wavetable Synthesizer / Output Arcade sampler / Sonic Academy Anna 2 synth
Software plugins:
Valhalla DSP | Reverb & Delay Plugins / iZotopes mastering plug advanced suite Ozone 9 and 10 / Waves plugins / Slate Virtual Mix rack
5. Do you have an anecdote or a memory to tell us about your music ?
I was living in California when Covid struck, and it seemed like tragedy after calamity. We saw enormous fires coming from northern California, turning the sky orange with ash dropping everywhere. It wasn’t depressing; in fact, it was kind of exciting because I felt compelled to write about it for some reason. As I began writing day by day, I fell into a musical coma. I’ve written a lot of underground house music in the past, but this time I wanted to challenge myself and slow things down. I’ve always been a fan of Downtempo and Lofi music. So I got to work and made two full-length albums. It was like nothing I’d ever done before, and it made producing fun again. Each song was like a mini-movie in my imagination that I had to record. I wrote one to two new songs every day for two months until I had over 58 tracks mixed, mastered, and finished. But it didn’t stop there. I caught Covid for the first time in 2022, and it completely incapacitated my smell and hearing for around five days. I recall going into the studio and wanting to work on music, but nothing sounded nice to me since my hearing was bad. So I decided to leave the studio when I stumbled over my guitar, almost falling over, and discovered a low hum or drone coming from my reverb pedal that felt comforting to my ears. I promptly recorded the signal, and within two months I had written over 25 ambient songs. My enthusiasm had been rekindled. I realized I’d added a new genre to my repertoire, and it felt great. I recently released the full-length album Beauty All Around, and I intend to release more ambient music in the near future.
6. Which artist would you dream of working with?
I would want to collaborate with Tycho’s Scott Hansen or be one of the bands appearing at their new Golden States Festival.
7. What are your plans for the future?
I’m actively working on polishing my ambient music so that I may combine it into my Lofi chill-hop shows and perform live with a band with projected visuals. This will be the best way to tell my musical story.
ARTIST LINKS
Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/officialandrewlozano
Bandcamp- https://andrewlozano.bandcamp.com/album/beauty-all-around
Spotify- https://open.spotify.com/artist/44rKcFbZ3lEEgmc2K78ZGe
Apple Music- https://music.apple.com/us/artist/andrew-lozano/332555355
Photo artwork- Angela Lozano
Photo :