The Anonymous Artist – ZHU
Remember the year 2014 when the worldwide hit song “Faded” earned the spotlight in the music realm with an anonymous artist?
ZHU, the first anonymous artist to be nominated for a Grammy is coming to Vancouver this week! ZHU will be performing on Thursday and Friday at the Harbour Event Centre and the Convention Centre in Downtown Vancouver. I think the tickets are already sold out for Friday the 27th and that’s why they added a second show on the 26th. It’s a late-night show. The doors will open at 10:00pm and the concert will be going on until 3:00am. A five-hour long concert is going to be a crazy yet fulfilling for those who are going to attend. I’ve been to a few concerts in the past years, and none of them lasted more than three hours, so this one that ZHU is performing for five hours is really some dedication.
Released on July 13, 2014, “Faded” has received more than 161 million views on YouTube and a lot of people still enjoy this song very much. The album version length at 3:46 and the radio edited version at 2:46, this single was an international success. Following the success, ZHU released an extended play with ten tracks that were all remixes with different artists for “Faded”.
ZHU is an American electronic music producer, DJ, musician, songwriter and singer that grew up in San Francisco Bay Area. He has been active since the beginning of 2014, and the world started to know his name because of his song, “Faded”. But ZHU didn’t just stop there with his music production. He signed to Mind of a Genius Records, and he released three studio albums, five extended plays and twenty-five singles. In 2015, his single “Faded” was nominated for Best Dance Recording, but then it lost to “Rather Be” by Clean Bandit.
Talking about electronic music, this is a niche category, but it is cool once you know a bit more about it. I minored in Applied Music Technology when I did my undergraduate degree at UBC, and it was one of the best programs that I’ve ever studied. I remember using computer programs to compose music. We worked with dancers and engineers in live performances that required data to be sent to the software to generate signals that can control different aspects of audio and visuals. I think the fun of that is that every performance is unique, and something is going to sound different every time, in a creative way.
Let’s take a listen to ZHU’s recent update on his channel, “Days Before Grace (Visualizer)”