SMOL

Smol’s music is an escape pod of fractal sound design, contorted basslines, self-actualization, and community empowerment.

At the onset of 2017, after having DJ’d and produced under various aliases since the start of the decade, Calgary-based artist Adam Blanchard made the decision to depart from rigid industry conventions and begin anew.

Instead of making music with the aim of marketability and label appeal, Smol would reflect the music that Blanchard found emotionally fulfilling to both listen to and produce.

Blanchard began to realize that through music he had the potential to enact change in the community around him, and so he simultaneously created DoYu Digital as a platform to release music and assemble a collective of likeminded artists. Like his own music, the mission of DoYu is to encourage artists to embrace their own eccentricities and channel it into sound.

Through his releases on DoYu Digital, Aufect, Rapture Studios, and RustOut Records, Smol’s music has continuously proven to be dynamic. While his tracks are categorically bass music in nature, they’re punctuated with traces of his former work as a jungle and house producer, and shift from lo-fi, washed-out and moody ambiances to neuro funk and beyond.

A classically trained pianist and jazz lover, Blanchard also decided to incorporate his love of organic instrumentation into his music through sampling live instruments, then meticulously tweaking each sample into something that sounds both familiar and completely alien.

His live sets capture this same nature, a trait that led Calgary’s celebrated theatrical group Le Cirque De La Nuit to enlist him as their official DJ and audio engineer. With Smol’s music receiving support from establishments like Noisia Radio, and DoYu Digital boasting a growing roster of equally notable emerging artists, it’s clear that Blanchard’s maverick vision has not only succeeded, it’s expanding the boundaries of bass music with every release.