First, thank you for joining me here in my online world. ♡

I call my music-loving alter ego "Selkie," but my real name is Kyra. I coded this website by hand, and though it isn't perfect, I'm very proud of it! It's the second website I've made; my first one is called Eden Online, and it houses all my random interests along with my personal blog. I still update it quite often, and I have so much fun expressing myself through web design.

I started this Selkie project because my Spotify playlists were simply overflowing. I have always been a huge music nerd, and I've always been the friend who constantly requests the aux cord. (A bit annoying? Yes.) Eventually, my friends began to acknowledge my musical expertise by asking me to "DJ" their birthday parties, which for a group of 15-year-olds just meant bringing along an iPod or two and plugging in to the speakers at whatever venue their parents had rented. It was so much fun.

I hadn't realized it yet, but I had caught a case of the crate-digging bug! And thus I became a lifelong music explorer. When I got a little older, I learned how to mix music with a DJ controller, and I went on to have a wonderful DJing career here in my local city's club scene. I've been lucky enough to play so many fun shows with lots of friends in attendance. I've even played sets at Love Burn festival in Miami, Florida, and a Fashion Week afterparty in Milan, Italy, if you can believe it! There is no feeling quite like putting on a song I love and seeing my friends bop to it with smiling faces. It has been one of my life's greatest joys. ♡

After a few years, I got burned out on the club scene; it was messing with my sleep schedule, and truthfully I'm just not much of a performer. However, I still have a lot of love for rave culture, and I still love to go out and enjoy music from the dance floor. Maybe someday I will go back to DJing in clubs, but for now I record mixes in my bedroom and post them here for you to enjoy! My favorite thing to do with music is to find a bunch of really good songs and compile them into a mix based on a certain feeling or sound. You can think of them like soundtracks for a particular vibe. You can hear my mixes on my Mixworld page! I also listen to new music releases fiendishly, and you can read some of my thoughts on new drops and up-and-coming artists over at my blog.

With regard to genres, I have a very obvious soft spot for synth-pop and electronic music. But really, I am a product of music streaming culture; I am so grateful to have grown up with access to any kind of music my heart desired, from anywhere in the world, new or old. I think it's beautiful that we can all connect with each other in this way. The internet allows us to transcend borders! We are completely free to express ourselves through music, and to experience the musical output of others -- at least, more so than any other time in human history. I truly believe that music enables us to achieve a kind of global unity. Eventually I want to write down more of my thoughts on streaming culture, but for now I will point you to my favorite writer on the subject, Glenn McDonald, who was the former Data Alchemist at Spotify and whose work defined the hyperpop and escape room genres, among many others. His website Every Noise At Once catalogued every genre of music on Spotify, but since his time at Spotify has ended, he now posts regular updates to his blog (including back-end API workarounds to make true crate-digging possible on Spotify, if you're into that sort of thing). He also wrote a fantastic book about streaming culture, You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song, which I cannot recommend highly enough. But I digress. Basically, genre is the thing I care about least when I'm listening to music, and the thing I care about most when I'm classifying it. But the two qualities I really look for in music are thus:

• How inspired is the music?
• Does the music reward repeated listening?

If a song (or album, or EP) has those qualities, it almost always finds its way into my rotation. I will elaborate more on my crate-digging criteria in the future, but for now just know that those are my priorities when I'm securing the goods for you.

Now you know a bit about me and my relationship with music! Thank you for taking the time to read this, it truly means a lot that you visited me here in my little internet home. I hope you enjoy poking around here, and don't forget to sign my guestbook! ♡