We are devastated to learn this morning that producer, art director and DJ Alland Byallo has passed away.

Byallo grew up in LA but was most closely identified with the electronic music scene in San Francisco. He had been living in Berlin for the last several years.

5 Mag received a number of tips about this overnight and was able to confirm Alland’s passing with an authoritative source. The source informed us that Alland passed away suddenly at home after feeling ill the prior day. More details are expected to be forthcoming.

It is the suddenness that is the most shocking: Alland was, by all reports, living his best life in Berlin. He had flourished as an art director, to the extent that he had retired from DJing after 25 years and focused his musical creativity on production for his label Full Bleed Sound.

Will Sumsuch interviewed Alland Byallo for his The Mixdown series in 5 Mag Issue 206 a few months ago; you can read that story, which was posted online less than a month ago, here. At the time the feature was being written, Alland had left employment at Beatport, and had just released Fill Light Shine, the sixth EP on Full Bleed. I reviewed it when it was released and what I thought of Byallo’s music hopefully comes through. “If Alland doesn’t teach music production he could and likely should,” I wrote. “He’s one of the few producers I can think of who doesn’t just continue to produce at a high level but is elevating higher all the time.”

Listeners could detect a sense of creative and perhaps spiritual rebirth on Fill Light Shine; Alland described the inspiration behind “Karma Beach” to Sumsuch, trying to address what had been a “really, really rough 2022”:

“Everything you could imagine was coming at me hard, and I was kinda losing it by autumn. I had a chat with HR at work, and she told me to get my ass on vacation immediately. So I jumped off the call and booked a trip. Ended up in Zadar, Croatia pretty soon after. Found a little strip of beach called “Beach Karma” that was relatively isolated, spent every day laying around reading Dilla Time, listening to Azymuth, Bob James, Yusef Lateef, Joe Sample and so forth on repeat, and literally felt every single bit of stress melt away. That beach, that week, was my fill light. The struggles, the memories… sure they were still there, but this smoothed out the edges and showed me the love and life that was hidden in the shadows. I hadn’t left those shadows in a long time. I came back a totally new, calmer, friendlier person. The person I used to be.”

 

The sense of constant improvement, for the sake of constant improvement, that I heard in his music comes through in Will Sumsuch’s interview with Byallo. The focus of The Mixdown is creativity and process in music production; Alland’s words are full of wisdom and a beautiful spirit as well as some practical life advice for aspiring producers. It’s shocking to realize right now that this might have been his final interview.

In regard to Fill Light Shine and self-releasing his music, Alland said he was “the happiest, most free I’ve ever felt with my music. I am in a perfect place right now and I’d like to think it shows in my music.”

“I do a lot of learning in the scraps of spare time I do have. Always learning something. Just got a fancy new camera, learning videography, exploring cinematic lighting as best I can. Also started learning TouchDesigner recently but that’s a long road. I guess I hope I can one day merge all my talents and skills into some kind of magnum opus. That’s the dream right?”

 

Photos by Kenneth Scott.

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