Fithoff - Ambient gone futurism [An Arpwire Artist Spotlight]

Fithoff has been making music for years, but the past year marked a clear shift with the emergence of a new project rooted in trance, Eurodance, and electronic club sounds. What began as casual experimentation quickly turned into a focused creative direction, resulting in the release of promised future. In this interview, fithoff reflects on their musical beginnings, the influences that shaped their sound, the process behind the album, and what comes next for the project.

So you've been doing music for years, but this Fithoff project has been going on for what seems like a year now. How have things been going creatively for the past year with the new project?

This whole project is just a random set of coincidences. I’ve always had interest in electronic dance music but I’ve been mainly making ambient music and playing indie rock in a local band. I was just messing around with a synth I got myself for a birthday in early 2024 and instead of making ambient stuff like I’ve planned I ended up with a house track that I really liked. “I can’t randomly drop a house track under an ambient project all of a sudden” so I’ve decided to start a new project and, oh man, did I struck some creative gold at that time. Making music was never THIS joyous. The collection of synths grew bigger and bigger with each couple of months and I’ve noticed that this project is taking a lot more of my time than it is acceptable for a random music side quest. So I did a nosedive into learning more about EDM production and now here we are.

What got your start into making music?

Oh, it’s a long story. I was lucky enough to have an Xbox 360 console as a kid (which was, of course, modded so I had basically limitless access to the whole game library) and there were 2 very important games. The first one was ‘Lips’ which a pretty much your standard karaoke game but, oh my, did it have a good music library. This game got me into Radiohead, Michael Jackson, Rihanna, Coldplay, The Police etc etc. Just really expanding my music taste from nothing to… everything really. And there was also the game based off the musical ‘Grease’ and I enjoyed the songs from it so much I asked my dad to download the whole soundtrack from the movie to my phone. It was late 2000s and internet connection on a full scale was still pretty much nonexistent in Russia at the time so I didn’t  get the chance to get these songs on my phone until a very rich friend of my grandma gave me her usb internet-modem. When I told that lady what my intention with internet was, she sat down with me and showed me an Elvis Presley music video on Youtube (cause some of his music was in ‘Grease’). I was BLOWN AWAY, ‘Oh, I REALLY want to be like Elvis someday’. That was the fuse that started my dream of making music. I’ve tried to play guitar, write songs but nothing came out of it due to various reasons until Covid happened. Even though lockdown was not really a thing in my city I still strictly followed it. Locked in my home with guitar, piano and ukulele, I started to learn music production in FL Studio, the thing that I delayed for way too long. The beginnings was me making simple beats and recording really awful folk songs and eventually I got into making ambient music in mid-2020. Due to my neurodivergent nature I’ve tried a lot of musical genres over these 6 years but ambient and trance were the only ones that really stuck around. Which would probably be weird to 16 year old me cause I genuinely thought that I’m going to be a folk singer hahahaha. 

Are there any songs or albums that you can remember from when you were younger that have contributed to this eurodance, trance sound that you're doing right now?

I don’t think there was a specific ‘album’ but due to various political and social reasons Trance and its’ adjacents were really prominent in Russian pop music during the whole 2000s decade. Acts like Руки Вверх or very well-known even outside of Russia singer Света were all making trance or Eurodance music at the time. And, obviously, mid 2000s in European music were defined by Romanian Popcorn which is a distant relative of Trance. Edward Maya’s ‘Stereo Love’, Inna’s ‘Hot’ and all of the other stuff was so overplayed on the radio it’s going to sit deep in my brain for eternity I think. Classic Trance was also very prominent on the radio, I remember hearing Paul Van Dyk and Armin Van Buuren in my father’s car A LOT as a child. I got into Trance again in 2024 while revising Kylie Minogue’s discography. I was reminded what a great song ‘On a Night Like This’ is and I thought ‘man, I really want to hear more stuff like this’. And here we are.

Congrats on your new album promised future by the way. Embracing the feeling is one of my favorite tracks off the album. Anything fun you can share while you were making the album?

Thank you! Making this album was an absolute chaos (that I loved), the concept, the covers, the tracklist, the list of collaborators, all of it was changed a lot of times. To the point where I had to give myself a deadline by which I had to finish the album. Making music is not really a fun process to describe… The most fun there was to me was sending vocalists that are on the album the arrangements and hearing what they wrote for it for the first time. Truly an incredible feeling.

Have you played any live shows? Or considered wanting to do anything live?

I’ve only played a live ambient set in our local city park last year. It was fun but very exhausting… I would love to play some dj sets as fithoff but the only place that plays electronic music in my city is a warehouse techno club and I really doubt they would allow me to play bright and melodic Trance music for a couple of hours hahahaha. I might do an online dj set sometime though.

We recently put out an arpwire version of your music video of 'you're my dream.' how was it making that music video?

It all goes back to the making of the track itself. I met Penna (the vocalist and the writer of ‘you’re my dream’) through this online media that posts local Russian musicians from across the country. They’ve posted her 90s house track “Море Обнимает Меня” and I was shocked that somebody in my city makes actually good dance music cause music scene here is pretty… not dead but not alive either. I contacted her immediately and was like “OH MY GOD do you want to make a trance song together???”, it was very early into making my album PROMISED/FUTURE so that was basically the only vocal-ready arrangement that I had at the time. The process of making the track took a couple of month and it was finished in mid-April of 2025. By that time the weather was really nice and I got this idea to shoot a campy 2000s looking music video on a camcorder that I got. I think it was in late may that we actually filmed the video. Penna’s boyfriend drove us like 15 minutes away from the city to the beautiful landscapes where we filmed all of the scenes purely driven by intuition, we did not have a plan lol. It took about 3 hours and we even got to collect the tea herbs before going back to the city. It was very fun and it was nice to meet Penna for the first time irl, she’s a very charming person ☺.

What software, hardware, or gear are essential for your signature sound?

I taught myself FL Studio back in 2020 and even though it’s definitely not the best DAW you can work in but it’s really comfortable to me personally. The whole album was recorded using Behringer’s JT-4000 (I don’t think there’s a single track on the album that doesn’t feature this synth in some way), it’s the clone of JP-8000 by Roland which is THE Trance synth. Literally shaped the sound of the whole genre. I initially got it as a synth for ambient music cause it was very prominent in Half-Life game soundtrack, which is my favorite game of all time and it feature some of the best ambient music to ever exist. But it happened again: I got a synth for making ambient music and ended up using it to make dance music hahahaha. It is also literally the size of my palm which very neat.

Any artists or producers that you’ve collaborated with in the past that you’ve enjoyed working with?

I enjoy collaborating with people overall. I enjoyed working with both Penna and Novigle for the album, they’re both great. But I was really starstruck to work with Неатида. She’s and underground Eurodance singer that I’ve been listening to for years at this point. It was very flattering to hear that she liked the arrangement and is down to write a song for it. I think “Wings” is the closest the album gets to that classic Eurodance sound. I love it so much.

What's next for fithoff? Any projects or aesthetics we're aiming for?

I’m really bad at promo which is not the best quality an underground musician can have. So I think for a lot of time this year I’m going to promote the album in various ways. Maybe even play it live at a dj set at some point. When it comes to music, I’m really enjoying making lo-fi house and lo-fi trance tracks at the moment. I’m assembling an EP with this sound, I think it may come out in the summer or a bit later. I’m also planning to collaborate with a couple of vocalists this year too. I feel like Trance music is going to have its’ renaissance this year in some form so I need to lock in. To make Trance great again hahahaha.

- Trace Davidson

Writer, Curator