Cyrus Melchor

Cyrus Melchor (born October 22, 1972) is an American music composer and multimedia artist (sometimes referred to as "Mount Cyanide") whose works have appeared on record releases, television and radio advertisements and film scores. In 2007, he won both a CLIO and an AICP award for his composing work on Coca Cola's "Parade" commercial.

He was born and raised in Hollywood, California where he continues to reside today. Starting as a music producer, his first release was a remix for Massive Attack on their debut album Blue Lines at the age of 18. He went on to produce music for a variety of 1990’s urban music acts ranging from the mainstream R&B Bell Biv Devoe to the underground cult hip hop group Blood of Abraham. As Cyrus continued to delve into his past loves of classical music (he briefly studied piano and violin in elementary school), hard rock of the 1970’s and 80’s (guitar is his main instrument though he never mastered proper techniques—he augments those shortcomings with technological noodling and improvisational psychedelic tweaking) and electronic forms, a new fusion formed for him which detracted him from flourishing in the mainstream genres of the record industry. This detour led him to film scoring and composition, a world that happily welcomes experimentation and doesn’t rely on the repetitive formula of adhering to radio trends. Emotion and mood could be better explored in this arena and the attraction became mutual. Landing early composer roles on Coors and MTV solidified his career in the advertising market where he continues to work on high profile national and worldwide commercial campaigns such as Coca Cola, Infiniti, Lexus and many others. It made perfect sense for the man who spent much of his childhood auditioning for commercial acting roles.

Throughout early schooling Cyrus Melchor garnered many accolades for his short stories centered around extraterrestrial contact and bloody crime which led him to the University of California, Santa Barbara where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing. In 2001, he brought together his passions of science fiction, experimental music and film for the multimedia release Mount Cyanide’s Antarctica on the Electromatrix DVD Awaken. Antarctica was a long form music video that he wrote, directed and composed music for. Crayons, still shots and digital video were all employed for the high concept, low budget piece dealing with extraterrestrials, nuclear colonization and ecological concerns that toured the film festival circuit.

Currently, Cyrus Melchor plays guitar in the Camarillo Blues Triangle (a loud experimental improvisational cinematic psychedelic hard post rocking breakbeat organic synthesized hallucination band), composes music for commercial and film scores and is toiling away on a self-inflicted shotgun novel for which he is also scoring and planning to shoot.