About Me

Hi!
Thanks for clicking on this page. I'm Aien, a Romanian-Canadian independent solo artist. My real name is Ion Mihaescu and I currently live in Vienna, Austria. I can, to a lesser or greater extent, sing, play guitar (both electric and nylon acoustic), electric bass, piano and drums. Ever since I took a significant interest in mixing and mastering, I've generally been anti-loudness and had strong opinions about audio quality and equalization. I also license all of my music under a CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons license, allowing anybody to share and adapt my work as they see fit, provided I am properly credited for that work.

I play a mix of

Hard Rock,

Industrial,

Progressive Rock,

Pop,

Noise music,

Ambient,

and Nu Metal

and my influences include

Alice Cooper, Guns N' Roses,

Slash, Pink Floyd,

Judas Priest,

Porcupine Tree,

Korn,

Marilyn Manson,

Nine Inch Nails,

and Dream Theater

• "The Threat", which I wrote in 2017, was particularly influenced by Slash's "Watch This"

The guitar has been my primary instrument of choice, as I began learning to play the classical guitar from the age of 7 as an after-school program. After discovering my passion for the instrument, I started taking some private guitar and piano lessons at the Spielstatt institute. I initially taught myself the electric guitar by playing along to my favorite classic rock songs before opting for formal education for that instrument as well.
I was around 13 or 14 when I fell in love first with Slash's debut solo album, then the two Use Your Illusion albums and, finally, "Chinese Democracy" by Guns N' Roses. All of these records would go on to greatly influence my first 3 songs, which I wrote at the age of 15, and which I titled "The Threat", "And It Rang into the Valley" and "Terminator". Even before I wrote the aforementioned songs, I was in the midst of essentially re-recording "Chinese Democracy" as accurately as I could, right down to the note. Most of these efforts are audible on the Chinese New Year Demos album. During this process I learned how to use Cubase (which I had gotten for free with my Digitech effects pedal), which I would continue to use to the present day for recording, editing, mixing, and mastering. As time went on and I started listening to various other genres of music and bands (most notably Korn and Marilyn Manson), the re-recording project slowly morphed into a cover album, so I ended up scrapping most of my prior recordings and re-recording almost everything beginning in Spring 2018. At that time I attempted something similar with 3 songs from Korn's "The Path of Totality", hoping to improve on the source material, although I ultimately scrapped that cover project, as I needed to focus on releasing the Chinese Democracy tribute album. In order to fully realize the project, I had to quickly teach myself how to sing, play the bass and realistically arrange drums. I had originally planned to release this cover album on the 10th anniversary of "Chinese Democracy", but since I was nowhere near finished with recording, the album, which I titled "10 Years of Democracy", ultimately released on January 2nd, 2019.
After the surprisingly successful release of "10 Years...", I had plans to release a companion EP with covers of other songs originally recorded by Guns N' Roses during the "Chinese Democracy" era that were not included on my freshly released album, aptly titled "In Addition to Democracy". I decided to release each track of that EP as soon as I'd finished it in order to ensure a more steady flow of content for the tiny audience I had amassed. It was around that time that a vast number of Guns N' Roses demos from that era leaked online, and, feeling inspired by what I'd heard, I chose to turn that EP into a larger project, so I hastily threw together all of my cover songs and original demos into the "2020 Intentions Sampler" and began work on a more cohesive album in February 2020. At the time I was becoming more enamored with, in my opinion, more creatively conscious and interesting "artistes" like Alice Cooper, Trent Reznor and Steven Wilson, which prompted me to release a concept album based on a foundation of entirely unrelated Guns N' Roses demos. 9 months later, on November 11th, this project released under the name "Too Late for Democracy", with "Going Down" as a single.

In September 2019, I joined Austrian Alternative Rock band INTERGANG, with whom I've co-written two songs, but I've only played a single concert with them. I've also been engaged in a project with Nick Lepsky called UNXYNV (United Nations of Axyonov) since 2021, for which I'll be releasing an EP in Summer 2022.