This week’s Artist Spotlight focuses on musician, poet and Millikin student Justin Hymer.

Hymer, a freshman business and entrepreneurship major, has put his own unique twist on electronic music and spoken-word poetry by combining the two mediums to create a truly original sound. He uses computer software to create background music while he recites poems that he has written himself. This is a style he calls extremely experimental. Although Hymer’s main focus is experimental poetry, he also branches into other electronic music genres, including but not limited to, hip-hop and dupstep.

When talking about his main drive to create music, Justin describes it as pure emotion, which is extremely illuminated throughout his entire music portfolio, available on Soundcloud.

“I wanted to be as pure as I could be. Not having any kind of filters. And when I perform, I don’t want to feel like I’m looking insincere. I tweak, you know, I do all these things to really show myself and my lyrics when I’m performing,” Hymer said.

When asked about his artistic skills, Hymer said, “Art is just expression of emotion. And without emotion you can’t have art, and without art you can’t have emotion. I’ve always really attached myself to this idea, that anything that we do or say is art and expression, and so I try to find every single way to express myself. That’s how I got into music.”

Hymer even elaborated on his innovations in poetry, specifically how adding music to the background of his spoken-word poetry creates a more sensual basis towards the meaning behind the words, taking a very unconventional stance on spoken-word poetry.

Hymer has been lucky enough to show his experimental poetry live, as over the previous summer he went on a tour around Illinois with the band “Loses The Mighty,” performing his spoken-word poetry as a middle-act for a variety of heavy metal concerts.

When asked about his main goals as an artist, Hymer elaborated that his main drive to perform and create music for his audience.

“All I ever wanted was to connect with my fans, or at least have that same emotion that I feel being felt inside of them,” Hymer said.” And that actually happened my last two shows that I played. It brought me to tears, because I played the show, and I played the most emotional set that I had ever done. It was completely original, it was my longest set, and I went all out on it. After the show, two or three people came up to me with tears in their eyes, saying ‘You don’t know how much that meant to me,’ and they opened up about their problems. I thought to myself ‘I actually made my dream come true.’ I wanted my feeling to be shown and it really came full circle and worked out.”

From his innovations in music and poetry, as well as his sincerity both in meaning and fans, Justin Hymer is truly an artist worth acknowledging.