The Clio Award Comes to La Crescenta
Cyrus Melchor is a young man with an impressive future. He is a budding author, music composer and multimedia artist, lovingly known to his friends and family as “Mount Cyanide.” Melchor has been producing music professionally since he was 18 years-old with his first production being a remix for the group Massive Attack on their debut album.
He has an inbred love of classical music, having studied piano and violin in elementary school, and has used that background to develop his own style of musical interpretation that envelops fantasy, electronic sound, and, in his words, “improvisational psychedelic tweaking and electronic forms — a fusion that detracted me from flourishing in the mainstream genres of the music industry.”
However, that style is precisely what won him the Clio award for his “Parade” commercial for Coca-Cola. In this commercial, there is a young man on a bicycle, riding along a dreamy street, clutching and drinking his Coke. While riding along, his imagination takes him through a wonderful parade of Scottish pipers, zoo animals, large buildings, baton twirlers, drum majors and various other imagined parade characters. All the while, there is a haunting mix of hallucinatory music in the background, aiding his imagination and enhancing the euphoric feel of the ride. When the boy finishes his drink, both the “Parade” and the ride are over and the boy returns to earth, to marvel at his flight of fantasy.
The commercial appeared both on television and in movie theaters during 2006. Melchor’s commercial has been permanently inducted into MOMA, New York and will appear at LACMA on July 25, traveling with the world tour of Clio Award-winning commercials.
Melchor’s “melting pot” of familial influences might be a contributing factor to his diverse talents. “I am a cultural mix of ethnicities including Japanese, Filipino, Dutch and Irish, but I am American through and through,” he said. “I was born in Los Feliz and have lived here all my life. My family still lives here, too, and I now reside in La Crescenta, with my wife and my dog (who is also a mix of breeds — retriever, pit bull and shepherd).”
Currently, Cyrus Melchor is the guitar player for his band “The Camarillo Blues Triangle” and he also is working on a book. He has a degree in creative writing from UC Santa Barbara and is continuing to write and play his style of music. His clients include such high profile companies as Lexus, Infinity, Budweiser, MTV’s “Real World and Road Rules” and the CBS hit show, CSI.
To learn more about the creative style of Cyrus Melchor, go to his web site, www.mountcyanide.com. For more information about his band, visit myspace.com/camarillobluestriangle. The band will be playing a free concert on Saturday, July 7 at 2121 Lofts, located at 2121 E. 7th Place in Los Angeles.