AeTopus is a progressive Electronic music project performed and produced by

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and Defi ...

Bryan Tewell Hughes. The music has received critical acclaim within the

new-age New Age is a range of spiritual or religious practices and beliefs which rapidly grew in Western society during the early 1970s. Its highly eclectic and unsystematic structure makes a precise definition difficult. Although many scholars conside ...

and electronic music genres, and the album ''Between Empires'' won the award of Best Electronic album in the 2012 Zone Music Reporter Awards. The album ''Tempula'' was nominated in the Best Electronic category in the 2006 NAR Lifestyle Music Awards. Other nominations for ZMR Best Electronic album include the 2013 EP ''Angels and Machines'', the 2015 CD ''When'', and the 2018 CD ''Totem Totum''.

Biography

Bryan Tewell Hughes (May 19, 1966) was born in Quantico, Virginia. He began taking piano lessons at age 6, and took up playing bass guitar at age 17. He claims to have been introduced to Electronic and New Age music by his grandparents in the early 1980s, and cites Ray Lynch and Kitaro (notable pioneers in the genre) as two of his early influences.AeTopus official website biography page
/ref> Between 1987 and 1997, he played bass guitar in local

Blues Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...

, Reggae,

Funk Funk is a music genre that originated in African American communities in the mid-1960s when musicians created a rhythmic, danceable new form of music through a mixture of various music genres that were popular among African Americans in the m ...

, and Punk bands in

Moscow, Idaho Moscow ( ) is a city in North Central Idaho, United States. Located along the state border with Washington, it had a population of 25,435 at the 2020 census. The county seat and largest city of Latah County, Moscow is the home of the Universit ...

(where he earned a B.F.A. in Fine Arts/Painting at University of Idaho in 1989), Portland, Oregon, and his current home of Bellingham, Washington. After releasing a solo industrial CD, AnthroPile: ''Take'' (1999), he began an

audio engineering Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound * Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum * Digital audio, representation of sou ...

internship at Binary Recording Studio in Bellingham. Hughes has dedicated his musical energy to AeTopus since the release of the full-length CD ''Memories of the Elder'' in 2002. He is also a visual artist, and is credited with the art and

graphic design Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdiscipli ...

of most of his CD liner notes.

Musical Style

AeTopus' sound combines both synthesized and recorded elements, and often features sound bites or spoken human vocalizations that are used to solidify each album's theme. The music is reminiscent of early Electronic New Age in that it contains many common synthesizer sounds (such as arpeggio beeps and bass pads), yet has an exotic presence due to the use of orchestral and ethnic instruments (such as

violins The violin, sometimes known as a ''fiddle'', is a wooden chordophone (string instrument) in the violin family. Most violins have a hollow wooden body. It is the smallest and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in the family in regular ...

, pipe organs, and African percussion). The music of AeTopus has generally been described as a blend of several Electronic music subgenres. Jim Brenholts of Ambient Visions referred to ''Memories of the Elder'' as a "hybrid", describing it as possessing "...elements of the

Berlin school Berlin School may refer to: * Berlin School of Creative Leadership * Berlin School of filmmaking *Berlin School of electronic music, or ''Krautrock'' *Berlin School of experimental psychology *Berliner Modell The Berlin Model (german: Berliner Mo ...

, pastoral new age, dark ambience and droning

minimalism In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...

. At the same time, it is none of those styles. In a 2008 review of ''Tempula'', Bill Binkelman o
Zone Music Reporter
noted that "...Hughes has fashioned a type of music that belongs to no country and yet also icall countries."

Discography

* 2002 - ''Memories of the Elder'' * 2006 - ''Tempula'' * 2012 - ''Between Empires'' * 2013 - ''Angels and Machines'' (EP) * 2015 - ''When'' * 2018 - ''Totem Totum'' * 2020 - ''Deep Variants'' (EP) * 2020 - ''VARIANT'' * 2022 - ''Urbus''AeTopus Bandcamp album page
/ref>

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:AeTopus Ambient musicians New-age musicians Living people 1966 births