Savino Go - Ianua

Ianua Bio

Ianua (pronounced: YAH-new-ah) is the music production alias of Savino Go, who is a Technology in Music and Related Arts (TIMARA) and Computer Science double degree student at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio. Outside of college, Savino lives in Kansas City, Missouri where he is in touch with the vibrant music scene, especially the electronic and experimental music communities.

With his Ianua project, Savino hopes to explore his interests and hobbies in the worlds of sound design and synthesizers in a way that incorporates a sense of narrative and is compositionally fulfilling for any listener, be they casual or analytical.

Stream or purchase Ianua music at the following links:

If you use a streaming service that isn't linked above, check for my name anyways. I use a service called DistroKid to ensure my music gets onto streaming platforms, and they distribute to about twenty different services. The above links are the ones that I actively maintain.

If you would like me to update my profile on a service that is not included, please email me.

More Information: Initially, Ianua was born from a need to get my work in public. My composition teacher, Michael Miller, highlighted the importance of music distribution to me, and so I aimed to find a way to accomplish that goal that I was comfortable with. Beyond simply letting people hear music and pieces that I create, I felt it was important to have some sort of overarching theme. Additionally, I was really worried about my digital footprint. Those worries combined with a general fascination with logo design and iconography, and really a neurosis about looking professional led me to design a brand for myself.

The word ianua is Latin for door, and January is one of its English derivatives. My years long study of Latin in middle and high school has given me much of my linguistic and semiotic knowledge, and January is my birth month, so Ianua felt like a significant and personal choice. Additionally, I felt that thinking of this project as a doorway or a series of doorways to new musical experiences would be a helpful way for me to allow myself to experiment without feeling like I was breaking some sort of constructed image.

With my name decided, I began to draft a logo. Most of my inspirations were companies with iconic logos, flags, and other electronic music artists. I was particularly a fan of logos that also spelled out a word, or words that stylized such that they read as symbols. I liked the aesthetics of Virtual Riot's logo in particular, and my logo is certainly in imitation of his to a degree.

To make my logo more iconic, I wanted to try and incorporate some sort of doorway into the work ianua. I eventually decided on a sunburst within the first letter a, as that would leave me with a clean single symbol that I could use separated from the word if I wanted to, but would still look nice when written with the rest of the word. I've included some concept drawings I made in highschool:

After I established that logo, I did my best to put it in as many places as I could, trying out as many different ways to style it as I could think of. Whenever I would release new music, I tried to make visualizers to post on YouTube that would make use of my logo. This effort didn't get me very far as I found the process of making visualizers to simply be too slow. When I showed my logo to one of my more visually inclined friends and colleagues, Robert Read, cool stuff really started to happen. He created a few images using 3D scenes he had made in Blender and agreed to let me use them. The cover art for Arps in Space is one such render. Robert made several more works using my logo, nearly all of which I ended up using in some capacity.

I didn't make a whole lot of music during my high school career for a few reasons. Most of the reasons boiled down to me just feeling uncomfortable with the state that I could push my projects to. I often felt that I could reach a level of production quality that I enjoyed, and then that notion would be a deterrent for me to keep working on music. Having a logo and a brand to maintain did help alleviate these concerns to some degree though, I think. I was constantly worried about trying to project some sort of image as Ianua, and so every now and again the urge to have a filled out catalogue would overcome my perfectionist tendencies and I would put out some things that I thought were good enough to be on the internet.

As I've continued to make music and meet fellow musicians, many of these superficial concerns have alleviated. I'm now much more comfortable with releasing music whenever I have it ready, and a musical identity has begun to naturally take shape. I find that the music of Ianua typically deals with settings or locales articulated through sound design with bits of counterpoint here and there. Throughout everything though, I hope my music presents a willingness to learn new workflows and to try new things.

All of that being said, I did notice one day quite recently that my branding didn't look great when it was being casted on a TV. To fix that, I wanted to create a new profile picture. I needed something that could be iconic from a distance, but interesting to look at when expanded. To accomplish this, I created a photo collage behind my logo. While certainly not as cool a some of the ones made by Robert, or my college peers Will Judd and Oliver Harlan, I do think it helps create some interest at closer proximities.

To create this new profile image, I used a picture of the Kansas City skyline, some pictures of synthesizers that were gifts from my Dad, and a picture of the inside of the first computer I ever built. This profile picture should be uploaded anywhere Ianua has a presence, so see if you can spot the four images!

Thanks for reading.

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