Riley Schmelzer, 19 years old and also known by the moniker No Signal, grew up in a musical home and started to take his art seriously when he was 14.
“That’s when I wrote my first EP and my first album,” Schmelzer says. “The EP was released when I was 15, and then I spent a bunch of time producing, writing and recording the first album. I released that when I was 17, when I deemed it was ready.”
Five years on, Schmelzer struggles to define his own sound.
“I think the whole genre labeling has never been my strong suit,” he says. “I would just go with alternative rock for now, but it evolves. God forbid, any musician or group keeps the same sound throughout their whole discography. But we’ll just go with that–alternative.”
The new No Signal EP is called venus (lower case is deliberate), and Schmelzer recorded and produced the project by himself.
“The way that I go about it is, I’m usually sitting downstairs doing something with friends or doing anything that isn’t music,” he explains. “I’ll have a song that comes into my head, and I put that down in Logic Pro X, the software that I use. The guitar, bass and vocals were all recorded at my house, alone in my basement. For every project before venus, I would do the drums as well, and every other production aspect. But this time around, we headed out to a studio to get an acoustic drum sound for the project.”
As of right now, the artist has only produced his own work, but he thinks it would be a fun task.
“I’ve been alone, doing all this stuff, producing rock and metal music for myself,” he says. “But I still get ideas from all different sorts of genres, and I still experiment with 808s and more hip-hop drum sounds. But I usually never end up using them because the song that I’m writing doesn’t call for it. But I think it would be fantastic to work with another artist.”
Looking ahead, No Signal has huge plans once the EP is out.
“I’m looking for big venue bookers so we can start doing a show,” Schmelzer says. “No Signal has never performed, because we’ve never had to. There’s never been a direct reason other than just wanting to, and sadly in this day and age, wanting to play a show in the rock industry is not good enough.
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