The Three-Year Gap

Honestly, it feels weird to write a blog post as an artist. It feels like nobody does this!

My usual philosophy is: do things, focus on your “now”, and everything follows. But not this time. This time I want to appreciate the times, tell people more about myself, and about the journey.

So here it is.

Moscow

Moscow, Russia, isn’t my hometown. By the time this story starts, it was my third year there. And I should be honest about the context: bass music was not popular there at all. Some people say there’s no scene in Europe — in Moscow it was “what is a scene?” level. How people reacted to dubstep there honestly deserves its own post.

But even without a scene, there was a place: Motyga Yeti, and a party called Funky Tunes — me and other local artists. Shout out to Nikita Kuptsov, who gave me a chance to play there! My first Funky Tunes show was chill: funk classics, breakbeat, a bit of dnb, a bit of house. On the second one, I blasted dubstep. Nobody was expecting it. Everybody really liked it.

There’s a specific feeling when a track that exists nowhere except your computer is suddenly blasting through a club system — bass music, loud, in a room full of people. And it wasn’t just me and a laptop up there. We called ourselves the Tequila Funk Band: Vladislav Kovach on sax, Filipp Dering on trumpet, Oleg Kirillov on trombone — real instruments playing along live over niche bass tracks.

And around all of it was my friend Mark Beziaev, warming up the crowd, always somewhere near the backstage, always with advice about the music career. My manager in every sense except the job title.

We were just starting to feel it.

I Left

In 2022, I moved to Spain.

Part of it was simple: when the country is in the middle of a military conflict, it’s very hard to focus on making people happy — and that’s what this music is for. Party music felt completely out of sync with the room. Part of it was brutally practical: I was working with foreign companies and my revenue depended on it, and receiving money properly became impossible. My DistroKid account got banned just because I had an address specified in Russia — US sanctions. When even your distributor drops you over your address, the message is pretty clear.

Still, leaving felt strange, maybe even a little guilty. Not in a dramatic way, but in the quiet way where you know a chapter had momentum and you never really got to finish it. The chapter didn’t end. It just stopped mid-sentence.

Escape

Moving somewhere and actually building a life there turned out to be two very different things. There was adaptation, paperwork, work, language, new routines, new people — a long stretch of figuring out how life functions in a new place.

But the internet didn’t notice I left. The momentum was still going online, and I was still the one responsible for Tequila Funk — the music, the releases, the presence. At the start of 2023, I was still in the flow. From Spain, I put out Escape on November 8, 2023 — the last Tequila Funk release before the gap.

Somewhere in there, a realization landed: if I don’t build a good source of income, at some point I won’t be able to make music properly at all. And I like being independent. I don’t really want to work for some label full-time, you know? I’m doing this music thing for fun. If it gives money — cool. If not, I’ll make money somewhere around music, or by writing code.

So that’s what I did.

A Side Door Into the Industry

The first attempt was Buzzer, in May 2023 — a landing page tool for musicians and their music links. It worked, but pretty quickly I realized it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. So in June 2023, I started Banger.Show — a tool for making music visuals. At first it was just another product idea, a way to combine music, visuals, and software into something useful. Then it started getting little signals from the real world. Effin posted a teaser for Get It On, which made Banger.Show more visible in the bass music niche. SoDown used it for a social post. Hairitage signed up and even sent me a brief piece of feedback. Later, Wakyin used it to promote Fruta Fresca on TikTok.

Those signals were enough to pull me all the way in. The whole of 2024 went into perfecting Banger.Show — the renders, the templates, the details. When you care about craft, a tool like this can absorb every hour you give it. But 2024 wasn’t only about work — that’s also the year I met my girlfriend.

In 2025, the detour went deeper. I started Rebounce — another music tool, this time built around feedback, versions, and helping unfinished tracks move forward. I also joined Remotion, which pulled me even further into the overlap between code, video, tools, and creativity.

For a while, all of this had real momentum, and that felt strange in a good way. Tequila Funk was quiet, but things I built were moving through the same world — bass music artists, release promos, TikToks, people preparing their music for the internet. I wasn’t releasing anything, but I was still somehow inside music. The gap was never empty. It was just routed through different things.

Everyone Kept Moving

Meanwhile, the scene didn’t wait. I watched people grow a lot during those years. GorillaT is one example — consistently making good music, showing up, and reaching numbers that became kind of insane. LSZEE turned out to be an awesome duo. Vincent Antone was a great find for me and a genuine inspiration. Ahee went far.

Watching all of it was inspiring, and it also hurt a little, because I could feel that I wasn’t capturing my own moment.

Making Music = Creating Memories

Taste changes. The things you want to make at one point in your life don’t stay exactly the same forever. I still love funky wubz, but I don’t hear things the way I did three years ago. There were ideas I wanted to make back then, and some of them are gone now — not deleted, just unreachable.

Because sometimes a track is not only an idea. It’s a timestamp. It captures what you were into, what felt exciting, what your life sounded like at that exact moment. And if you don’t make it then, you don’t always get the same version later.

Lost Lands

Still, through all those years, Tequila Funk kept surfacing in small, unexpected ways.

One day I was in the middle of a coding session. By that point, I honestly thought everyone had forgotten about me. And then I see it: SoDown playing Feel The Magic at Lost Lands. My track, coming through one of the biggest systems in bass music, in front of a crowd I’d only seen in videos. My mind was completely blown. He played Escape at some of his shows too. I kept rewatching those videos and feeling quietly grateful every time.

Sometimes I’d also see TikToks of people discovering my music, and I never quite knew what to do with that. Comment? React? Post something? Come back immediately? Pretend I had a plan?

For a long time, I mostly stayed behind the logo.

Unfinished Business

That’s what I want to change now. I never really talked to the people who liked my music. I uploaded tracks, watched some numbers move, saw comments from a distance, and disappeared back into whatever I was building. I don’t want Tequila Funk to feel like that anymore — not in a forced content-machine way, just closer. More human. More connected to the people who listen, the people who helped, the places where it happened, and the strange little moments around the music.

And this time, it’s not just a feeling. My new tune Space Selecta comes out on July 10, 2026. I started making it back in 2021, during the Moscow times, and I finally finished it — to capture some of that atmosphere. Earlier I said some ideas become unreachable. This one waited.

Moscow had momentum. The move happened. The gap happened. The timeline continued. And Tequila Funk still has unfinished business.

So this time I’m not disappearing behind the logo. If you want to be around for what comes next — there’s a Discord now. Come hang out.