Ambedo music profile 

• Nick Chase

Oftentimes musical artists don't want to be confined to one certain box. They love to branch out and create different types of music, blending genres at times. For Brandon Keith, AKA Ambedo, constructing different sounds is a passion. By day, he's a gentle singer/songwriter serenading you with an acoustic guitar. By night, he turns it to eleven and plays some of the most hardcore dance music in SLC.

Sometimes bands and singers don't put a lot of thought into what they call themselves, and sometimes they do. Singer/songwriter Brandon Keith wanted his name to reflect him as an artist, while also sounding artsy and appealing. "Ambedo" means to be fully engrossed in a singular moment.

"I Googled it, I liked it. I thought it fit kind of with what I was going for with my music vibe," Ambedo said. His music does have a slight melancholic sound to it, allowing deep emotions and subject matter to come through on stripped-back, soft songs that emphasize his voice and acoustic guitar.

His most recent single, "Moving" showcases this delicate sound and is paired with deep lyrics that many can relate to. "It's funny because it was one of those songs at the time I wrote it because I was moving," he said. In all the hustle and bustle of physically moving, he realized how much he was moving emotionally. "I was not in a great relationship, I moved four or five times in a single year, I was moving on from that bad relationship, and I was moving on from personal issues. Moving on from mental health issues including depression and actually started going to therapy," he said. "Just moving on and making choices and moving past obstacles that were in front of me."

The track morphed into this anthem of needing to move forward and trying not to get stuck for too long. "I really wanted just to get that across from the song that things can really suck, but as long as you're moving, it's probably good," he said.

Ambedo enjoys making subtler, softer tracks because they allow room for listeners to hone in on personal, heartfelt stories. "I feel like a lot of meaning and stuff can get lost in a messy punk track," he said. "I kind of want people to listen to the lyrics a little more, kind of get the idea that I'm coming across." Some songs, like "Moving," take months for Ambedo to write, while others like his track "Freddie Mercury" were written in a day. "I was just at a house party that I wasn't having a ton of fun at, and so I just went into my friend's bedroom and was playing on his guitar," he said.

While heartfelt acoustic tracks speak to Ambedo on a deep level, he also loves to dabble in other genres, specifically hardcore dance music. Ambedo has partnered up with local label ETAin45 to bring more hardcore punk-tastic dance tracks to SLC. "We think SLC is the perfect place for this kinda music given our history with punk in general," he said. "I mean, SLC Punk! is a classic staple in our world and it changed my life. Salt Lake has a beautiful punk community." The music that Ambedo and the studio are looking to make is fast, getting up to 170-200 beats per minute and has kicks that are a lot harder. "I've listened to it my whole life because old school video-game music is really fast, and I enjoy that," he said.

This is a fun juxtaposition for Ambedo. He enjoys creating different types of music that appeal to different listeners. He affectionately describes himself as a singer/songwriter by day and happy hardcore DJ by night on his Instagram profile. Ambedo loves writing songs but also has copious experience with producing music. "It's exciting for me because I have just always been making this music. I think on my production side I just kind of let anything happen. I will make a song out of the sound of trains, I don't care," he said. Ambedo is looking forward to bringing more of this sound to SLC and to be creating it himself, letting the creative juices flow in more than one way and one genre.

Ambedo is set to have a busy 2023, not only releasing a concept album with ETAin45, but also still focusing on acoustic work that will hopefully be dropping this summer. A big goal for this year is to also spend more time producing with friends and helping others get their music out there. "I do a music day here in my own studio where I'll get musicians who maybe don't know how to finish their song, or they just don't have enough musical knowledge to write," he explained. "So I bring them in here, and I just help them make the song that they're trying to make using my studio. Hoping to do a lot more of that. That was my favorite thing to do last year, was to help people produce stuff."

Whether Ambedo is singing a sincere, earnest track on guitar, or producing heavy-hitting dance projects, he hopes that listeners know that he puts his all into creating music. "I only ever write about stuff that I genuinely care about, and I hope people relate to it. I'm not trying to be anything else besides Ambedo," he said. "Your mom probably really enjoys my acoustic stuff. Your little brother loves my DJ stuff."