The Key Ratio project is the culmination of Ankur Soods 20 year background as a DJ and producer in various electronic music genres, as well as in audio engineering. Following his debut EP of late 2021 and a full length album in summer 2022, he is venturing through a genre free space between electronic and acoustic music.
Born in 1984 to a hippie family of an Indian Yogi with guru aspirations and a German former Osho follower and women health expert. Ankur started DJing Psy-Trance at the young age of 13, spending his young teenager years frequenting all types of raves he went on playing Psy-Trance gigs from around 2000, which led to almost 20 years of a DJ and producer career in that genre. Organizing and promoting events from 2004, Ankur later went on to found and co-organize the, by now legendary, Freqs of Nature festival. This project ran for 7 years until it was brought to an end in 2018, in order to make space for his 2013 brought to life techno project Sharad Sood, as well as for his audio engineering career.
The COVID lockdowns gave him space to realize he had always focused on making music he could play in his sets, rather than making music for the sake of the music, and that led to the creation of the Key Ratio Project as well as the start of the Never Not Now label together with some of his closest people: Naty
Seres, Nathaniel S, Mad Zach and his friend since kindergarten Tobias. His production approach is a hybrid set up based around a large and extremely rare, analoge, Austrian Acousta DCA-200 mixing desk, from 1991 which was carefully restored and recapped.
The synthesizers, modular system, drum machines, samplers, step sequencers and hardware effects, are mostly controlled by a computer and summed on the mixing desk using racks full of analog dynamics and other processing. This technique limits him to a no-recall, one-take mixdown approach, which means, once he decides a song is done and the 2-track is recorded, there is no
going back and no further adjustments are possible. Working in this way is liberating to him because he can’t get lost in months or years nerding out on details of a mixdown and instead follows his inspiration and creates new music.