Introducing... Elfaction

Welcome back to MoveOnUp in 2025! For the first article of this year, we have one of our new writers Natty Gray Watson all the way from Tulsa, Oklahoma, introducing us to & interviewing the online group Elfaction...

Low-res, y2k digital aesthetics, obscure JRPG art, ethereal, soundtrack-esque production, and deep lore: welcome to the fantasy laden world of the online music guild, Elfaction.

In recent years, thanks to a mutual friend, I was introduced to the realm of Elfaction through the music of its founder, 7Nightz, or simply, Nightz. An artist whose sound is self-described as cloud rap, though I personally find there to be as much influence from modern cyber music and other niche internet genres as there is hip hop. Elfaction represents a Soundcloud birthed style reflective of the information era we reside in, an amalgamation of the consequence of everything existing at the flick of a finger to anyone on the world wide web and the generation that grew up with it.

As someone who was in high school during the dawn of the so-called “Soundcloud Era,” and whose friend circle religiously followed, what at the time was experimental and cutting edge, artists such as Lil’ B, Metro Zu, Raider Klan, Ocean Gang, Goth Money, and other influential internet hip hop movements and groups, I couldn’t help but be enthralled by the glimpse down the rabbit hole I had been allowed through the music of Nightz and his Elfaction peers.

What I find in Elfaction is an echo of the nostalgic past wed with the fervor and hyperinnovation of Gen Z online culture, a collective of young people serendipitously brought together through a mutual appreciation of artistic aesthetic and digital fate who make amazing, beautiful music. Their lives and relationships to one another seem analogous to the exponentially online world we find ourselves in, where we become further and further intertwined with the tech that permeates and facilitates our day-to-day lives. I recently had the privilege of being invited to the Elfaction discord server to talk with them about the group, music, art, and what it means to be an “internet artist” amongst a virtual community.

The group’s core members are Nightz, a 21 year old living in Oklahoma, Sayako, a 17 year old living in Germany, Forevermore, a 20 year old living in Texas, and Seriyouse, a 22 year old living in Virginia. Nightz and Forevermore first became acquainted after an introduction through, coincidentally, the same mutual friend that had introduced me to the music of Nightz, the Oklahoma artist, Asa. Forevermore and Seriyouse had known each other prior and were members of a group known as Based Dark Angel Boyz that Forevermore had originally started. Nightz would join Based Dark Angel Boyz along with Sayako, who had originally met Nightz on Soundcloud through being fans of each other's work. Based Dark Angel Boyz would lay the foundation of their friendship and collaboration, but it would be Nightz who would catalyze the concept of a cohesive collective through the founding of Elfaction.

According to Nightz, “in 2021, I had something really tragic happen in my life. When that happened, I started yapping to my friends and I would say things about elves and the ‘Forest Realm’, and I would start putting those themes into my music.” Nightz went on to elaborate that elves acted as a metaphor, citing video games and fantasy culture references of how elves would frequently hide their identities in public spaces by wearing robes and hoods or disguising their pointed ears. He explains, in that way, elf identities, such as pointed ears, act as a sort of symbol of insecurity. “And it really made me think that it's kind of like how people realize that they have obvious differences, and they mask that so that other people can't see them. So I would call these obvious insecurities that I had, elf ears,” Nightz said. The premise of Elfaction would be to assemble a group of people who “would not hide their insecurities from the world,” and what better a team to assemble than prior collaborators and friends, Seriyouse, Sayako, and Forevermore.

To me, the symbolism of Nightz’ thoughtfully fantastical universe, the elves, the Forest Realm, and their disconnect from villages and other external groups, struck me as a parallel to many younger people’s relationships with their tight knit, online niche communities and social circles versus the realities of their day to day existence. An almost alter ego, where the day to day “real” life is saturated with boring, tepid redundancies, like work, commuting, and surviving in contemporary society, while, at proverbial night, these real identities could be revealed and the true nature of the individual be free to express themselves and revel in it in a collective manner. When the elves venture out into the village, the hood stays on, hiding their identities and true nature, however, when the elves gather in their hidden, Forest Realm cities, they are free to be the truest version of themselves.

Describing their sound, Sayako refers to it as a “style of modern cloud rap with individual accents and retro influence.” They express wariness around descriptors such as “hyperpop” or “digicore”, which initially I felt was a necessity to describe their sound due to its frequent shifts in pitch and speed. However, Nightz clarifies that those modern genre tags are pigeonholeing to the Elfaction identity, citing the group’s lack of autotune and distinct musical influences as examples. Amongst the four of them, they reference the 2013 and 2014 retro scene of Soundcloud, Metro Zu, Yung Bruh, and Black Kray as having been highly impactful on their artistic development. The influence of these artists is definitely present in Elfaction’s music, but I think it’d be hard to specifically describe their sound by direct comparison to these artists. It’s almost as though the sonic culture and the wide, internet sourced branches of influence around the early Soundcloud scene and its artistic aesthetic were more impactful on the group than the actual style of the music itself. The impact manifests in more of a way of practice and digital ethos than an immediate influence of sound.

Elfaction’s music is angelic, ethereal, spacey, and atmospheric. The vocals are often duplicated and appear as though they’re coming from a distance, occasionally taking on the appearance of having an ever changing mix or production style throughout a single song. This could be due to the unique creative personality associated with being a young artist, uncertain or not fully knowledgeable of the tools at their disposal but simultaneously driven to create music. Regardless, there is undoubtedly a distinct audible undertow to their music that unites it in style as much as it highlights the individual group members and their tracks’ different ornamentations and shifting sound. There is an essence of digital lofi to it all, as though it’s coming out of a friend’s bedroom speaker on a late summer night, hazy and dreamy. It’s soothing and floaty as much as it can be forward and high energy. Contemporary cloud rap ran through the blender of the modern internet’s musical anarchy, poured out on ground paved by the dawn of Soundcloud.

Despite it being the platform of origin from their artistic influences, to individual projects, to the formation of their group, the Elfaction crew expressed a bleak perspective of the modern Soundcloud site and scene, citing app crashes, a lack of community, and a general disinterest in most of its recent trends. They praise Discord, where they now primarily exist, for its ability to foster the sense of online community they desire. Their perspectives on other popular music platforms and promotional spaces such as TikTok and Instagram reels is critical, and they feel a sense of frustration around the social media giants' use of short form videos as a means of content farming and killing originality and artistic voice, not to mention the bottle necked sense of almost mandatory participation in these formats in order to gain traction as an artist. There’s a sense of uncertainty amongst them when we’re discussing media platforms and the future of digital music scenes, a semi-pessimistic attitude towards the future of music proliferation, host sites, and the means to “blow up”.

Simultaneously, there is an undeniable sense of apathy amongst them as to what the next “it” music app or site will be that exudes an air of positivity, ultimately art and self expression is the goal and whether or not there is the perfect means of getting it online doesn’t seem to matter to them so much, or at the very least doesn’t worry them. I find it refreshing, perhaps due to my millennial upbringing. I find the uncertainty of the internet and its ever shifting forms severely anxiety provoking, especially if you have any sort of dependency on them. For Elfaction however, likely due to their younger age and Gen Z status, they’re already more than used to the exponential growth and change that comes with the modern manifestation of the web. They don’t mind a pivot and the quality of their work speaks for itself more than the platform it’s debuted on. They themselves are a product of modern 21st century online culture, and they’re inextricably intertwined with its ebbs and flows. There’s nothing to worry about when you’re already bobbing and floating in these digital tides you once crawled from.

Elfaction’s deeply intertwined relationship with the internet and its source of online community has, like for many groups of similar nature, bred a reluctance around the prospects of participation in local communities and live performances, similarly to Nightz stories of elves. With minimal experience with playing shows and expressions of disconnect towards their own locale, Elfaction and its Forest Realm seem to be purely an online experience for the time being. There’s talks of tours and potential ventures into the world of live music, but in some capacities, their relationship to online music seems to have disengaged them from scenes as much as it has introduced and united them. This sort of paradoxical nature is reflected not just in relation to “real” life versus virtual, but in the inner workings and mechanics of the collective as well. Ironically, despite their familiarity with each other, mutual aesthetic desire, and parallel work of the last few years, collaboration isn’t necessarily an inherent aspect to Elfaction and there is not necessarily an intent of frequent or even regular crossover between the individual artists in their work. There is a clear uniting undertone to the music and visuals around each of the four core members and their alliance, however, there is not a hard pattern of working together in an audible sense. There is no Elfaction album or tape. The closest you can get to that is the occasional joint effort on a single, but even then, this is typically just between two of the Elfaction members and not all four. That’s not to undercut the group though. There is a very obvious bond of friendship and camaraderie, but I couldn’t help but be puzzled by, what seemed to me, an obvious undertaking to pursue as a guild such as theirs. Forevermore commented that, similarly to the reason for the lack of strong interest in local scenes amongst them, there is an issue of reliability and the challenges cross-collaboration poses. There is a clear value on the individual and their own creative leanings, the power of Elfaction is less in their united art making and more in the seemingly almost coincidental cohesion of sound and branding amongst the four; in that way they really do operate more as a guild than a collective.

Sayako, Nightz, Forevermore, and Seriyouse all mention a mutual love for, what to them, is considered vintage aesthetics, similarly to the shared interest in fantasy and elves. For the group, this overarching style primarily spans the visuals associated with older JRPG’s, anime, and low resolution y2k digital photography. They all enjoy playing and emulating video games, watching fantasy movies, and reading visual novels, and like many of their peers, they can’t help but be drawn to the highly compressed digital imagery of the early 2000s. In this way, Elfaction finds the most unity through not just their similar musical stylings, but their personal hobbies and interests; as Sayako puts it, “we all kind of, like, just tapped into the same stuff.” It’s an apt reflection of socialization in an increasingly digitized sphere, there also just happens to be a love of music and art involved.

Ironically, and paradoxically, despite their present lack of interest or desire to actively join or participate in a feet-on-the-ground, traditional local scene, and expressed anxieties around the idea of live performance, when talking about the future, there is a strong interest amongst the crew for international touring, particularly in Europe and Asia, where according to members of the group, there seem to be large pockets of fans of their individual work. The “Elfaction Tour”. They not only suggest it out of a dream-like desire, but say there is in actuality, a high feasibility of the tour happening, even suggesting that it should happen “ASAP,” and “within the next year.” This moment in our conversation is particularly inspiring. The sentiment amongst the four in regards to a, potentially, life altering experience like an Elfaction world tour is really beautiful and strikes a personal chord with me. They all hint at feeling a sense of stagnancy or being stuck in their personal day-to-day lives, the idea of a global, or international tour breathes a life into them that is visibly refreshing. Not only do they feel it is possible, but they believe that this is a goal that is worth risking everything they have for, at the potential of not just larger success, but even more so for a life-altering, coming-of-age type experience that unites the four of them. In a funny way, this is one of the moments where they collectively appear to be the most connected. Again, their unity comes less from their mutual, collaborative creative vision itself but their similarities as individuals and friends, and a shared experience of getting older and becoming an adult in the 2020s. A story of maturing and finding community in the digital age. Stand By Me meets Code Lyoko.

For Sayako, Nightz, Forevermore, and Seriyouse, there is no lack of ambition, drive, and seriousness in regards to their art, music, and work; they all want it to be their careers. This is also reflected in their views of Elfaction, which isn’t just a social club to them, despite it being a large part of the group’s function via its Discord server. Nightz and Forevermore elaborate at the end of the discussion that they are aware of the areas Elfaction may be lacking, or a little weaker, and they intend to zip that up in 2025, aiming for more cohesion as a brand and a group, and even hinting that they might finally take a crack at an Elfaction group album or tape. Their optimism and friendship is inspiring, and I have no doubt that in the coming years, we will be hearing more and more about them as Elfaction, as well as individual artists. Whether it be through their influence on even younger upcoming artists, or their music and art itself. I think back to Nightz’ origin story of the Forest Realm and elves, and of Elfaction’s disillusionment in their own reality-based, monotonous routines and a sense of disconnect in an increasingly challenging, confusing, and disheartening world, and how when together they can pull back their hoods revealing their pointed ears, and take on the greater kingdom as a unified guild of talented friends and artists. I’ll see you at the Elfaction world tour.