London – 19-year-old producer, singer-songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, Alex Burey, has released “Inside World,” the title track from his debut, four-song EP, coming January 26 on his own Pling Recordings label.
The song has a lounge lizard vibe with dreamy, ethereal music juxtaposed with Burey’s understated vocal.
His unique musical background has led to an expressive style that reshapes the music of countless left field influences – from electronic musician Aphex Twin to Shuggie Otis and Pink Floyd to Outkast – and shades it with stories from the fringes of London life.
Burey started playing the piano when he was seven. His classical training led him to write songs on the piano as a young child before moving on to learn guitar and bass. Once at school he soon turned his attention to grime music. “Loads of people in the area were MCs but no one was making the music,” he remembers. So he taught himself how to use software starting with a mixer his father had brought home to fix up lights for a Halloween party.
Soon his house became the local studio. “All these 17-year-old MCs, rowdy guys, would come around to the house.”
Today Alex works in a self-made studio at the end of his parent’s garden, often making music in there all throughout the night, emerging only when the sun comes up. “When I’m feeling happy I can work all day and all night, I don’t have a time zone,” he explains.
Burey’s inspirations are wide-ranging and eclectic. If there’s one thing that sets him apart from his contemporaries, it’s his artful skill at creating music that brims with reveries of warmth and comfort twinned with an honest expression of human experience. “I always aim for my music to be comforting,” he says. And you can hear that promise in the warm synths and sequenced sounds he employs: the bird caws, the sunrise horns, the hazy, sun-blushed production filters & the gorgeous, layered harmonies that hang effortlessly in the breeze.
