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Jan 13, 2026
Lynyn: Trace Elements
“There’s a resonant frequency in here at 126 or so,” Conor Mackey says as he boots up his laptop. “I have to drop an EQ into my master to cut those out.” The spacious studio in his third-floor apartment on Chicago’s North Side is warm and well-appointed. The twinkling string lights hung around the ceiling are washed out by the afternoon sun, but seem perpetually on, suggesting they often illuminate many a late-night session. An impressive arsenal of gear rests on tiered racks against the west wall: a Dave Smith Prophet Rev 2, a Vermona DRM1 drum synth, and two Nord keyboards. Two cases of Eurorack modules sit on the bottom level, patch cords plugged in like synapses ready to fire. After Mackey flips switches on some of the outboard gear nestled on his workstation, he hits the spacebar, and the glowing drone that begins “Nobody Knows Me,” the opener of his excellent and ambitious new album Ixona, wafts gently from the speakers.
Lynyn - “Nobody Knows Me”
Though he’s been making music all his life, Ixona is only Mackey’s second statement as a solo artist. He graduated from Minnesota’s St. Olaf College in 2013 with a music theory and composition degree, and in 2018 was one of three finalists in the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra’s composer-in-residence competition. That same year, he started working for Brain.FM, a music streaming app designed to aid in specific tasks like deep work or meditation. As the company’s in-house composer for five years, Mackey created over 1,000 pieces for its various prescriptive services and he credits that frenzied period for developing a deep trust in his instincts. “I would write 30 minutes of music every day in lots of different genres,” Mackey says, emphasizing a need to get thoughts down without second-guessing them.
“If you listen to a rock band, or classical music, or jazz, you’re aware of the instruments. You have all this cultural and historical context. Electronic music doesn’t imply anything but the sound itself."
As the guitarist for post-rock quintet Monobody, Mackey combines jazz chords and intricate, mathy runs. You can hear echoes of that style in his solo work, as songs often end up miles from where they started, their structures jutting into space like crystals. And though he’s a multi-instrumentalist with impressive chops, he’s always been drawn to electronic music for its innate mutability. “As a form, it doesn’t have a physical manifestation,” he explains. “If you listen to a rock band, or classical music, or jazz, you’re aware of the instrument. You know what a violin sounds like. You know how it's played. You have all this cultural and historical context. Electronic music doesn’t imply anything but the sound itself.”
Lynyn - “4m Hiero”
Mackey launched Lynyn, his alias for jittery, exploratory IDM, by producing and mixing the entirety of Chicago artist (and Monobody bandmate) NNAMDÏ’s 2021 EP, Are You Happy. Those tracks are kinetic, club-ready pop, spacious enough for NNAMDÏ to stretch into and polymorphic enough to continuously surprise. He issued his proper debut, Lexicon, the following year. It’s a stunning feat of sound design, a knotty collection of sputtering, spasming electronic music that refuses to sit still. The studio was quite a bit smaller when Mackey wrote Lexicon, mainly relying on the Prophet and a sparse Eurorack setup. But when it came time to make another record, he wanted to take advantage of a newly expanded array of gear.
Lynyn - “Roll 5321”
The result, Ixona, sounds dreamy and fluid, almost poppy in stretches, and feels more immediately accessible than Lexicon. The album has an organic quality that its predecessor shied away from, full of plasmic, gurgling textures that sound as if they've been sourced from the inside of a human body. The songs still shimmy and shudder through labyrinthine arrangements, but they feel more lived in. Mackey’s adept at figuring out how different subgenres fit together, like the jungle beats and acid bass of “Roll 5231” or the shadowy dubstep and folktronica of “Pad C U.” “Night Shift” begins as a noisy ambient tune before mutating. There are a lot of ideas here, but Mackey blends them with clear confidence, smoothing out the edges of what, in less assured hands. could be a jarring listening experience.
“Iliamna” takes on an almost R&B flavor, as soft voices coo amidst streaky neon pads and one of the record’s most minimalist drum patterns. Every now and then, Mackey leaves in the singers’ inhale, which almost operates as an open hi-hat. Another voice, pitch-shifted and syrupy, enters the mix, recognizably human but warped through a digital degradation plug-in, giving it the uncanny sheen of a lossy MP3. The treated voice seems to be singing lyrics, but they’re illegible, reduced to mere syllabic shapes.
In fact, almost every track features a voice, some of which sing phrases, some of which croon wordlessly, expanding the album’s biomorphic and emotionally weighty nature. Mackey didn’t realize he’d added so many vocal samples to the record, looking at them more as textural elements than expressions of a particular theme. It was an unconscious decision, though very much in line with the philosophy he’d developed for Ixona: “Lexicon was metallic and plasticky and had more aggressive sounds. Here, I was trying to bring the same sort of rhythmic intensity and highly detailed percussion, but with a warmer, more inviting palette.”
Lynyn - “Uja End”
The composition process involved what he termed a “dump of raw material,” loose generative sessions based on MIDI data he’d send to his Eurorack systems – especially to a Mutable Instruments Plaits module, which has a “particle noise” mode that sends dust noise through band pass filters, creating crunchy tones perfect for the clicks+cuts-style beats Mackey favors. “As the MIDI comes through, it triggers the sequence of modulation,” he explains. “I would let this run seven, eight times to get various takes, then go through and listen to small sections and loops, shaping it into something that has an arc and purpose.” He pauses, sees me scribbling in my notebook, and likens it to my own process: “You write to edit, right? First, you just have to get something on the page.”
Lynyn - “Versimiltude”
Most of the album tracks are full of intricate percussion. Mackey says he’s most interested in rhythm and its trance-inducing properties, citing British drum and bass group Roni Size & Reprazent’s New Forms as a formative influence. “It’s that high-energy, propulsive driving rhythm that has forward momentum but remains in stasis,” he says. “Steve Reich’s music is another perfect example of that. It’s intensely rhythmic and almost all percussion instruments, but feels like a static block.” On Lexicon, Mackey took that approach to its maximum, layering hard breaks with all manner of interlocking patterns. “I tried to tone that down a bit here,” he says, “not necessarily displacing the primacy of propulsion and rhythm, but I wanted it to be a bit sparser.”
Download Lynyn’s free Karplunderphonic Instrument Rack
“This is a percussion randomization engine. I created this much in the same way I patch in Eurorack, every new MIDI trigger results in a reshuffling of the parameters. The Drum Rack samples were recorded from Eurorack, specifically the Mutable Instruments Plaits module using the dust noise model which I used extensively on Ixona. That's being processed by a few high-feedback, low-delay time delays giving the Karplus-Strong element. I highly recommend mapping the macros to the knobs and adding in a bit of additional movement!”
*Requires Live 12 Suite
As much care and diligence go into creating these pieces, the live show is a chance for Mackey to reinterpret and blow them apart. He eschews all hardware, instead remixing stems with just Ableton Live and a MIDI controller, to which he maps various effects. “It’s a really cool way to come back to the music after finishing it months ago,” he says. “All of these components were treated as objects to be manipulated to begin with, so now I get to interpret them differently.” Mackey performs with visual artist Owen Blodgett, a longtime friend and collaborator who provides digital-surrealist art and animations for Lynyn's album covers and videos. Blodgett has a custom video engine and touch designer that receives signals from Mackey’s setup. “He’s got a bunch of audio-reactive components,” Mackey explains. “It’s similar to my process – he does 3D modeling with all these modular pieces that he can combine in different ways to get pretty wild visuals.”
Lynyn live at Lincoln Hall
Mackey gets excitedly wrapped up in the minutiae while speaking, an energy that’s probably even more potent as he’s “nose to the screen, clicking around” a song in progress. Every tiny clip, every synth patch, every intriguing sound he comes across leads him in new directions, and each method of composing – the urgent genre studies for Brain.FM, the hyper-detailed writing process, and the live reinterpretation – allow for different deployment of his own instincts. There are endless possibilities, each one forking off into whole new realities. Lynyn is Conor Mackey’s way of tracing those paths.
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Text and Interview: Dash Lewis
Photos: Natalie Escobedo