The Thing About the Mask
Behind the mask, Prodsynesthete isn’t exactly who you’re expecting.
PRODSYNESTHETE, photo by Zac Wilson
Prod-synes-theet, that’s how you pronounce it.
Prodsynesthete is an unusual stage name, one that has a habit of getting caught on your tongue at the home stretch of actually saying it out loud. It combines the words producer and synesthete—someone with synesthesia—into an intriguing, if phonetically-challenging alter ego. As a member of the artist collective SKEEMN and a frequent collaborator of big-name local artists like Jang the Goon, Prodsynesthete is the masked MC with the onstage energy of someone who brings a MAC-10 to a knife fight.
There’s something theatrical about the mask. A man in a mask is automatically interesting. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book—right up there with breaking the fourth wall or burning down your own myth. But Syn (as I’ll call him from here on out for the sake of not accidentally spelling it wrong later) has a trick that feels less like a gimmick and more like a shield, a barbed-wire fence between the everyday pedestrian and the ugly, the unsavory, the unapologetic. He isn’t asking for your attention; he’s challenging you to keep it. He’s the mystery man of a local scene that thrives on visibility, the accidental anti-hero who’d rather blur the lines than underline them for effect.
He has a collection of masks, somewhere around twenty, he later says—ranging from the standard black balaclava you can buy in any sports store to fang-adorned ski masks—all projecting this aggressive anonymity that musters a mix of confusion and intrigue. It verges on unsettling, occasionally kitschy depending on the design, and in an age where local rappers want to flex their moissanite chains and insist they’re harder than their surroundings suggest, here’s this guy, the occasionally described “Spokane Ghost”, daring you to believe he even exists.
I’m waiting outside the Luminaria Building for him to come and let me in. Just a heartbeat away from a shelter, kissing the south wall of the train tracks, life plays out a little grittier here. People hover, caught in the grip of a chill that works hard to freeze them in place on the sidewalk. A woman approaches from the dark, arms stretched wide, clutching two large sheets of cardboard above her head like makeshift wings. She doesn’t notice the black trash bag she drops behind her, neglecting it as you could assume she must’ve been time and again. It speaks volumes about our shared existence, the one leaving us helpless with frustration at a reality that often leaves strangers invisible, disregarded or even forgotten altogether. It’s an undercurrent of quiet anger that permeates like a stink, briefly spotlighting this shared discontent that we all carry to varying degrees, a reminder that beneath the surface, people are wrestling with the weight of their circumstances under a machine that crushingly treads over us everyday like an enemy tank in wartime.
Anger, rage. I keep coming back to the feeling because that’s how I would describe Syn’s whole vibe. He’s a totem of it, an avatar. His voice hits like gravel on steel, growling, shouting, an unmitigated vocal explosion. Lyrically, he’s unapologetic, quick to call out the issues at the risk of losing control. Honestly, I’m not sure what I’m walking into.
When Syn lets me in through the side gate of the building, he greets me with his mask on but drops it almost immediately. His facial features are surprising and youthful, not what you’d expect at first. Initially I think I’m getting played, and he sent in a ringer with a list of rehearsed, canned answers for this bum with an interview request. But then I see it–the eyes, the same eyes you can make between the slits in cloth–eyes filled with that same raw, wiry, unfiltered intensity, I know I’m in the right place.
Inside, he leads me up through the expansive, circular space—passing a ping pong table, two studio spaces, and a new screen-printing station—to a rooftop solarium where other SKEEMN members Bendi and Jordan Taylor are already chopping it up; producer Brant Demetri will join us later to listen in. Syn leans back against the railing most of the time, effortlessly at home as he begins to explain himself.
SYN, THE SPOKANE GHOST, photo by Kay Gonzalez
We start with the musical background from the beginning.
“My mom was a professional vocalist, and she raised me gigging,” he recalls. “When I was 12 years old, I played Pig Out at the Park for the first time with a band called Ursa Major and Spectrum. Then when I was 16, I played trombone with Mojo Box.” Somewhere in there too he describes playing with community college jazz ensembles, night club performances while still in high school, a list of all the instruments he can play; a hefty resume built up before he could legally vote. “I’ve been gigging a long time,” he says proudly.
So we have this multi-instrumentalist kid who grows up playing in jazz clubs and at sweaty food festivals. And now we have this guy. How did we get from Point A to Point B? How did we make it to the mask?
“After I went through, like, a lot of personal events that, like, really shaped me,” he explains, staggering his words, mulling it over in real-time to produce the most cohesive answer. “Cause I think pain contains evolution,” he continues. “After I went through, you know, a good amount of things in that regard it caused me to want to talk about those things, I ended up putting up a mask and covering my face.”
He’s stunningly frank in how he speaks, very open, as if every word is burning with the same intensity as his lyrics.
“A lot of the mask stems from…” he pauses, then gets specific. “ I’ve had my address leaked like five times in two different locations. It started when I was 15, 19, and 23. I want to talk about that shit, but I want it to stay anonymous.”
I ask about the doxxing, the address leaking, and he dives head-first into the question. He frames a story from his mid-teens around the popular video game Rocket League, an online multiplayer game that’s basically soccer with RC cars.
“There’s this dude who’s 48 years old, somehow doxxed me through the game, and he came from California all the way to (my hometown),” he says. “I managed to avoid him, but my friend didn’t and ended up getting raped.”
“After that, I kind of took it upon myself to try and learn how to hack, and then I started shutting down CP websites,” he says. Though he’s quick to clarify, “I’m not saying, like, I was a mastermind or anything.” He goes on to detail just how well it worked for him, for a while at least. “One day, while I was hacking, I plugged in my iPhone, charging without a VPN changing its location, and I got doxxed that way.”
It was a costly mistake, a case of find out finally catching up to fuck around. “I got followed in my first week of having my driver’s license, when I was 16, and I barely got away. I had to roll my car one night.” From here, he describes a spiral that breaks out of the rabbit hole of child predators and commits to self-destruction, touching on other heavy examples of pain in the short span of a few years.
With respect, it’s hard not to draw parallels with a masked vigilante you might find in a comic book. Everything he’s detailing up to this point is tragically perfect, archetypical in the unimaginable type of trauma that must change the trajectory of a life forever. It only makes sense that a pain like this, so consuming, demands transformation- in this case, an outlet in beats and lyrics where it has room to finally exhale.
PRODSYNESTHETE PERFORMING AT “FOR THE RAGERS” (THE BIG DIPPER- SPOKANE, WA), photo by Zac Wilson
For Syn, as we know him now, the evolution started with production. The second step leading to where we find ourselves currently.
He started with a college audio production program that fell apart, something he attributes to the failure of his instructor; some has-been turned educator whose course was far more a vanity project than anything resembling curriculum. His real education started closer to home. “I learned how to audio engineer from Sherm,” he says. “He engineered ‘Billie Eilish’ by Armani White, and ‘Bands’ by Shoreline Mafia.” With emphasis, he lays it out, “I basically paid for lessons and was like, ‘Bro, teach me this hit, draw it out for me’.”
Not long after this is when he linked up with SKEEMN, initially as a producer. Production is something he takes a lot of pride in, maybe even more so than rapping. “I think from a production standpoint, I add a lot of value,” he explains. “I think that’s what I’m best known as. Out of 46 songs—soon to be 54—I produced every one except one.”
The transition from producing to rapping came naturally, an actual opportunity to really get it all out. “I just started rapping because it was the easiest form for me to tackle first.” In terms of influences, he adds, “Two artists that got me to snap and realize that I could drop the weird shit were Death Grips and JPEGMAFIA.” He goes on, “Death Grips’ Exmilitary and The Money Store are still 30 years ahead of their time. JPEGMAFIA took sounds that should never work with a human voice and forced it to. That taught me that being different is totally possible if you stay true to yourself.”
‘BEAT A PUSSY PEDO UP’ is a strong example of those influences at play; a full-send lyrical assault on a former scenester with an alleged liking for underage girls. The beats are heavy, jagged, with lyrics thrown out in a way that by the end he’s nearly drowning in himself.
“Man fuck all that! Tell your fucking Governor to change the state laws. If the state law’s sixteen Imma’ knock ‘em out. Yeah! Your sister sixteen Imma’ fuck her too!”
Hard to put the genie back in the bottle when you say something like that.
There’s not an ounce of second thought or careful phrasing as Syn explains the backstory to me. “I called out a dude who doubled down on fucking 16-year-old girls at 28 and sent one of my old friends a voice message doubling down. So I took it, screen-recorded it, and sampled it. I dropped it in the first second of a track and got him run out of town.”
Old habits die hard. For Syn, the cause continues in his music—he wages war against the injustices he sees in his community, especially when it comes to predators in the local music scene. “There’s a lot of predators,” he says matter-of-factly, his words cold, carrying a simmering rage I’m afraid to touch. “That’s definitely what I’ve come across.”
But it’s bigger than that. Syn isn’t just “the rapper who hates pedophiles.” There’s far more in his words that reflects things that are, unfortunately, more broadly relatable. ”My dad is an immigrant from Venezuela,” he shares. “He moved here when he was 28 with pretty broken English. I grew up watching him beat the system legally, and I’ve seen him experience racism while doing it.” He continues, “I’m related to family members that are still applying for papers. The hoops they have to jump through, the ways laws change to prohibit them—it’s pretty absurd.”
Even if not addressed specifically, you can hear those feelings in the likes of tracks like, ‘SELF MEDICATE’, ‘THERE’S A GHOST IN THIS BITCH’, ‘EXECUTE’, ‘DARK TIMES’, or even his recent collaboration with Jang, ‘CONTRADICTIONS’. It’s all in there for discovery—beneath the growling and bumping 808s—an artist with his whole life on display, one bar at a time.
Despite what’s come before, the road ahead for Syn looks different, not confined by the brutal sound of his back catalog. His upcoming 30-track project (divided into three segments of 10), Synesthete Vol 1: A Distorted Dystopia, explores a broader spectrum of emotions and styles. “It’s just a take on the full scope of my sound, from melodic, to emotional, to instrumental, to the signature sound people are used to from me,” he says. The culmination of five years of work spanning changes in life, artistry, and environment, it’s an unexpected proof of life. Later, we’re on the small catwalk of accessible roof, staring out into the night sky blocked by the few tall buildings looking over the city. He wants to show me something new, something different—vulnerable and emotional, a cry for help from a younger self—that is sure to shine a new light on the inner workings of someone who fashions himself an enigma.
(L TO R) THE AUTHOR AND PRODSYNESTHETE, photo by Jordan Taylor
In a place smeared with part-time posturers and full-time bullshit artists who suffer the bleed-through of their transparent personas, to find someone who proudly channels through a second self is a deep breath in a suffocating space. For Prodsynesthete, the mask isn’t a facade—it’s a testament to survival, a method of laying himself bare while maintaining the boundaries he’s built by necessity. Whatever comes next is sure to stay raw, relentless, capturing the chaos of a life and a world living on the constant threat of collapse. As he puts it,
“I’ve been through hell. But I’m still here, and I’m still creating. That’s what matters.”
Go see Prodsynesthete with Chuck Vibes, Spooky, and Cruel Velvet at the release party for Chuck Vibes’ new album, “gthm”, Saturday, January 25th at The Chameleon (Spokane, WA).
Tickets Here: Chuck Vibes | Jan 25th | The Chameleon | Handstamp
Pre-Save a copy of Prodsynesthete’s “SYN’S PARADISE”, available everywhere January 27th.
Link Here: SYN'S PARADISE by prodsynesthete - DistroKid
