Today we’d like to introduce you to Annie Tsai.
Hi Annie, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
When I was 5 years old, my parents put me into piano lessons. I had an on-and-off love-hate relationship with playing the piano growing up – there were times when I really loved it and found it a source of comfort, and other times when it felt like a chore. Still, I stuck with lessons all the way through to the middle of high school, holding on for so long I think in large part due to my piano teachers primarily assigning me movie themes and show tunes to play rather than traditional classical music.
When I was around 10 years old, I started composing short pieces on piano. I would transcribe them by hand onto staff paper that I had drawn myself and play them for my family. I joined the school orchestra in fourth grade, choosing to play viola because I wanted to learn the alto clef, and later picked up guitar on the side for fun in high school. In the summer before my junior year of high school, I attended a music composition summer program at Illinois Wesleyan University, where I was tasked with composing a piece for flute, cello, and piano. That was my first experience writing for multiple instruments.
In college, I double majored in music and computer science. Music was actually the first major I chose, but at the time, it wasn’t a career path I realistically envisioned for myself so I chose another major to accompany it as my career safety net. It was in the music major program though that I took a theater sound design class as an elective, which introduced me to a DAW for the first time, Logic. I didn’t realize at the time that what I was doing in Logic would come to be something I do now for hours on end.
After graduating from college, I joined a startup as a software engineer, and as fate would have it, my onboarding mentor just so happened to be a DJ/producer on the side. We quickly bonded over our shared appreciation of EDM and I began going to her place after work every month, where she would show me how to navigate Ableton. A year later, I was a proud owner of Ableton and began to slowly learn how to produce music. Then, COVID hit.
During lockdown, I moved home and made it a goal to produce one song every quarter. I made a detailed spreadsheet for myself of music production YouTube videos to watch every day, effectively putting myself into a self-constructed YouTube university. I did successfully produce a song every quarter that year, but then as COVID restrictions lifted more and more, I slowly stopped producing. The return to normalcy made it hard for me to fit music production into my life, as it hadn’t been in my priorities prior to lockdown. Finally, in 2023, I decided I either had to make music production a priority or let it go completely as a failed hobby. I enrolled in a 12-week bass music mentorship program, where I was able to receive direct feedback on my music for the first time, significantly leveling up my production skills.
After finishing the program, I was an infinitely better producer from where I started, but I lacked discipline and focus. I was working on the same song for over a year when in mid-2024, Taylor Swift dropped a 31-track album in the middle of touring. Around that time, I also listened to a podcast about ZHU’s 52 to ZHU project and found it inspiring. The combination of these events made me decide once again that something needed to change, and that’s when I started my 53 to Enani project, where I would produce a track a week for 53 weeks. Serendipitously, a month after starting that project, I won the SLANDER x ICON Collective Grant to attend ICON Collective on a full scholarship for their music production program. I felt like my life was truly about to take off.
In April of 2025, I moved across the country, quit my tech job, and started at ICON. I was at school every day almost from opening to closing, so eager to learn as much as I could. This was a school I had known about for years and so many of the EDM giants I looked up to had passed through those halls. Unfortunately, 8 weeks in, ICON abruptly shut down. I was crushed – after winning the scholarship almost a year prior to my actual start at ICON, I had inadvertently pinned all my hopes and dreams on the school. With its closure, I was left feeling very lost, unsure why I had uprooted my life for this dream and what my path would be going forward. That was the first time I seriously thought about quitting music, thinking maybe it was a sign from the universe. With the support from friends and family, I slowly regained my purpose over the next few months, eventually coming out of it with an even stronger drive to be an artist. I used my tech career habits and applied them to my artist project, creating sprint boards and content tracker spreadsheets for myself. I decided to stop waiting around for perceived signs from the universe and start doing the thing now.
Today, I’m at a new school, pointblank, which kindly honored my scholarship to attend, I’ve completed 53 to Enani, and I just released my first song on all streaming platforms! The song is about feeling lost and going through difficult changes in your life, but trusting that in the end, you’ll be okay. It’s a song I wrote during the period of time when I was struggling to rediscover my purpose after ICON’s closure, and all the while navigating a breakup as well. Because it’s such a personal song to me (and was actually the last song I wrote as part of 53 to Enani!), I wanted it to be my first official release. I produced, wrote, and sang the song in its entirety, which is an added bonus because even just a year ago when friends would ask if I would ever sing on my own songs, I swore up and down that I wouldn’t… yet here we are. Life is unexpected in that way. 🙂
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It definitely has not been a smooth road. I went into more detail in the previous section, but there were many points of struggle, the first being coming out of COVID and struggling to prioritize music production, then again in 2024 when I realized I was struggling to finish songs because I never felt ready to call them done (typical artist behavior, am I right), and then again in mid-2025 when ICON Collective shut down abruptly and I lost my sense of purpose.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am an electronic music producer, singer, songwriter, and DJ! I have produced many different genres in the EDM space, from dubstep to trap to house to techno and more, but my primary genre is cinematic/melodic bass. My music is typically characterized by vocals over piano, guitar, and orchestral instruments like strings and horns (the cinematic side), as well as heavy-hitting drums and saws (the melodic bass side) in the drops. I’m a sucker for a good melody, but I find a good melody is only as good as the harmonic structure underneath it so I always try to find the most emotional chord progressions to work with first and then write the melody to fit in with that. For the songs where I am the vocalist and songwriter as well, I write from my own experiences so that every song is meaningful to me and anyone going through a shared experience. My songs lead by emotion and the #1 goal is always to make people feel something!
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
I love that in LA, you can be whoever you want to be. I’ve never met so many people chasing their dreams in one city and it’s inspiring being around so many people doing amazing things! Coming from a tech background and living in cities like SF and NYC prior to LA, I can really feel how unique LA is in terms of the people and culture in that regard.
What I like least about the city is probably what everyone likes the least, but it’s the traffic. I moved from NYC so getting used to driving again was one thing, but adjusting to the fact that 10 miles can take you anywhere from 20 mins to an hour has been… interesting. On the plus side, I’m now an avid listener of podcasts and I also get extra time to practice singing!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://enanimusic.com/
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/enanimusic
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Enani/61584304784920
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/enanimusic
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@enanimusic
Image Credits
Kim Ambrocio
Remy Annetta
