On Friday, Feb. 6, third year psychology major Quinn Ryan played a DJ set in the KSPU studio in Weter Hall. He played a variety of music, from mainstream rap to his own electronic music.

Ryan started producing music on GarageBand in 2020. After experimenting with Ableton, a more professional software, he decided to use DJing to share his music.

“I kind of had this thing where I was like, how am I gonna share this music with people? And that’s where DJing came in, ’cause that’s what most producers of electronic do — they DJ as well. So that was kind of my way of performing and showing my friends and interacting with the music,” Ryan said.

This year, Ryan decided to test the waters, playing more underground music that he loved. He played multiple dorm room sets during the academic year that incorporated both remixes of popular songs and undiscovered tracks from lesser known artists, as well as his own.

“I feel like part of the joy with music people don’t know is that it’s unexpected, and a lot of it is unreleased, so they can’t hear it anywhere else,” Ryan said.

Ryan played 45 songs during his set, five of which were produced by him. Aside from pop and popular rap, he played house, stutter house, dubstep and UK garage. He shared that he finds UKG to be the most energizing.

“The big genre I played was UK Garage. It came before dubstep. It sounds nothing like dubstep, but it emerged from the UK in like the ’90s, I believe, or the ’80s. And then it went on to become dubstep. Garage is characterized by that BPM of 140, and that really driving drums and very high energy baselines. I find it’s just the most exciting music,” Ryan said.

KSPU staff members reported about 40-50 people coming in and out of the studio. Ryan was excited at the amount of people, which was twice the usual amount of attendees at his dorm performances.

“I think it helped having KSPU sponsor the event and advertise it. And I think when you’re a DJ, independently, you have to become your own promoter. So, yeah, I’m super happy with [the turnout]. It really made me happy. A lot of people got to experience it,” Ryan said.