If I forget, the music remembers.

My name is Ivan, and iif started long before I knew what it would eventually mean.

The name actually came from an old gamer tag. At the time, the letters did not have some deep meaning behind them. They were just something I used. Years later, while listening to music and thinking about the memories and feelings certain songs could bring back, those letters finally started to mean something.

If I forget.

If I forget what something felt like. If I forget where I came from. If time changes the way I remember a person, a place, a moment, or even myself, I want the music to take me back.

That became the reason behind iif.

Music was always the thing I came back to.

I started getting interested in producing around fourteen after watching my brother remix songs. Something about being able to take sounds and turn them into an entirely different feeling fascinated me.

Since then, I’ve tried a lot of different paths. I’ve taught myself different skills, chased different careers, and questioned more than once whether music was actually something I could turn into a life.

But I kept coming back.

There have absolutely been moments where I’ve wondered what I’m doing. You can spend days, weeks, or months working on something you care about, release it, and watch almost nobody hear it. Then somebody else can make something for the first time and suddenly thousands of people are listening.

It’s hard not to question yourself when that happens.

I’ve questioned whether I’m good enough. I’ve questioned whether I’m wasting my time. I’ve wondered whether I started too late or whether I should be doing something more practical.

Then I sit down and make music again.

And I remember why I’m here.

I want you to feel something.

Progressive house became the way I learned to translate emotions into sound.

I love all kinds of music. Drum and bass is actually one of the genres I listen to the most. But when I sit down to create, progressive and melodic house are what naturally come out of me.

There’s something about those melodies, those chords, and that feeling of a song opening up that I can’t really explain any other way.

When I’m producing, I know something isn’t finished until it gives me that feeling. Sometimes it’s goosebumps. Sometimes it’s nostalgia. Sometimes it’s euphoria. Sometimes it just hits somewhere deeper than I expected.

That’s what I want someone listening to feel too.

Not necessarily the exact emotion I felt when I made it. Your memory doesn’t have to be my memory.

A song might remind me of one point in my life and remind you of something completely different.

That’s the beautiful part.

For a few minutes, you don’t have to suppress it, explain it, or pretend it isn’t there.

You can just feel it.

Because I think we hide too much of ourselves.

There’s a lot of pressure to become whatever version of yourself the world finds easiest to accept.

At work you’re one person. Online you’re another. Around certain people you hold parts of yourself back because you’re worried they’ll think you’re weird, emotional, too ambitious, too quiet, too loud, too different, or just too much.

I don’t want this community to be another place where you have to do that.

I still game. I love anime. I collect things people my age might think I’m supposed to have grown out of. I overthink. I doubt myself. I dream much bigger than my current circumstances sometimes make reasonable.

That’s me.

And if somebody thinks that’s weird, that’s fine.

I’d rather build something with people who don’t feel the need to pretend.

That’s what I want iif to become.

A sanctuary for the dreamers, the overthinkers, the nostalgic ones, and the people still figuring out where they’re going.

For the people working toward something bigger while life keeps giving them reasons to question whether they’ll ever get there.

For someone who can miss a chapter of their life without wanting to live in the past. Someone who can look back and think, I miss that, but I’m grateful I got to experience it.

For the person who needs to hear that where they are right now doesn’t determine where they end up.

And most importantly, a place where people don’t just think they belong.

They know they do.

That’s also what I love about dance music.

Some of my favorite festival memories aren’t about production, lasers, or even who’s on stage.

It’s hearing thousands of people sing the same song together.

It’s looking over at one of your best friends during a song you both love and knowing you’ll probably remember that moment years from now.

It’s meeting someone you’ve never spoken to before, realizing you both know every word, and suddenly it doesn’t really matter that you were strangers five minutes ago.

For that moment, everyone is connected by the same thing.

I want to create those moments.

Maybe one day it’s my song that an entire crowd is singing. Maybe somebody meets one of their closest friends during one of my sets. Maybe a track becomes attached to a road trip, a relationship, a breakup, a festival, a terrible year they survived, or one of the best nights of their life.

That’s bigger to me than a stream count.

Because numbers eventually become numbers.

Memories stay with people.

And if someday they start to fade, maybe the music brings them back.

That’s iif.

If I forget, the music remembers.