Serbian Producer P.A.V. Talks Chill Music, New Material

In the world of electronic music, Serbian artist Pavle Piscevic aka P.A.V made his first step as a curator, starting a channel on YouTube called ChillYourMind. His dream as a little boy, however, was to create motivating, “beautiful melodies” as a musician. As recently as December last year, he put time aside from running ChillYourMind (which has since become a sought after record label) to release two tracks called “Bliss” and “Daydreaming,” which have already hit over a million streams on Spotify.

As much as it was a longstanding dream realized for Piscevic, he says the goal has always been to make music that connects. The producer recounts how one fan messaged to say that his music calmed him and gave him more clarity when it came to making decisions. Piscevic adds, “These days I am going to the gym and listening to some life value podcasts. Fitness definitely is something that I strongly stand for and I am working on myself especially in lockdown.”

Listen to “Bliss” below. 

Recently engaged and running a high-traffic YouTube-born label/channel does mean that the electronic artist’s life is admittedly calm, but he wouldn’t have it any other way if he had to make dreamy, tropical-inflected chill songs like “Daydreaming.” He says about his process, “I start to jam a little bit on the piano and randomly stumble on a nice chord/chord progression and then I try to build that into a break full of atmospheric elements.”

Piscevic does acknowledge that he often hosts similar music on ChillYourMind, but his goal as P.A.V is expressing his “definition of good, calm music.” The key for him as both, a curator and music maker is originality. “It is not something that one gets by forcing, it comes with time,” he adds. It’s what will keep musicians afloat and eventually set them apart, according to Piscevic. He cites producer-DJ Kygo, one of many artists whose music has thrived via ChillYourMind. Piscevic adds, “Kygo has his own sound, he is credited to be the mind behind tropical house. His sound was really original. I think artists need to accept that you need to lose a lot in order to win later. Hard work always pays off.”

In Piscevic’s case, things certainly have panned out favorably ever since he set up ChillYourMind in 2014. It has nearly a million subscribers on YouTube, over 26,000 followers on SoundCloud and hundreds of thousands of subscribers to various Spotify playlists. Even in the pre-pandemic time of streaming, Piscevic called these growing digital audiences as crucial to both labels and artists. “I think a lot of labels were not prepared or got hit by this, plus the value for talent has been thrown off. Labels tend to choose a bigger name over smaller artists even though the music might be better,” he says about the current scenario.

There’ll be more music from ChillYourMind as well as P.A.V in the coming months. Although there haven’t been many interactions with India for Piscevic so far, he says when the time is right, he’ll definitely make the trip. “I would love to visit and explore the natural tradition that I have always heard about,” he says.

Listen to “Daydreaming” below.