By Topher Manilla

Photo by Morgan Duncan

Conversations with Edward Madill seem to get metaphysical real quick. One moment, the 20-year-old UNC-Asheville student behind psych-gaze oddity Wyla is talking about an inspirational trip to Asheville’s Moog headquarters when he was in high school. The next, he’s waxing poetic on the belief he shares with the late Robert Moog that the human mind and computers can — and will — weave together in a cosmic communion.

“My dad took me for my birthday, and it was about a year after Moog died,” Madill remembers. “Everyone there has a sort of spiritual way of believing the human mind can fuse with electronic things. It’s really kind of beautiful.”

And when we discuss the little nuggets of late-90s, indie rock irony folded into his music, Madill — an incredibly jovial young man — goes down a similar path.

“I do think there’s something really beautiful, almost spiritual, about irony,” he says, “that ability to double-think yourself. Really.”

To date, Wyla is not much more than Madill collaborating with friends and self-recording a constant stream of digital albums and EPs. The first songs were written and posted to Bandcamp at the start of Madill’s college freshman year.

“I didn’t even own an amp for that first Bandcamp EP,” Madill says. “It’s about being someplace on your own for the first time, falling in love.”

A Wyla standout, “Nebuchadnezzar,” with its blown-out boogie, is a tribute to a hut in the woods near campus where Madill and friends go to hang out every day.

In a city rich with guitar noodlers purporting to be psychedelic, Madill’s crunchy, slow-burn drug-rock is nice counter-programming for the true psych scene.

In the last few months, the Bandcamp jams have drawn attention from bedrock tastemaker blogs like Altered Zones, who noted “Madill’s engaging, cavernous baritone floating a few meters above the swirling noir grooves,” and likened Wyla to Marmoset, Swell Maps and Syd Barrett.

Pretty decent company, and one that might also include the ragged cosmic-smack blues of Spaceman 3. The blogs, Madill says, have drawn the attention of a few labels. One senses that Madill’s music would be a fine fit on the roster of a young label like Woodsist or Underwater Peoples.

His latest long-player, Dulcet, was posted to Bandcamp in June. It’s a healthy step forward. “Hazlo Girar” is a smiling nod toward the chillwave of Washed Out, and as good a send-up of the sub-genre as I’ve heard in a while. And my favorite tune, “Take Your Time,” intricately weaves two lovely guitar parts — one an open, Neil Young-esque strum; the other a chugging, Pavement riff.

All the while, chiming synths fall in and out of the fog. It’s some elevated songwriting that Madill just shrugs off in that sort of mountain-surfer way that Asheville folk sometimes have.

“I was in jazz band forever,” Madill says. “My teacher was pretty chill. He didn’t make me learn music, just chord structures.”

Madill is trying to figure out a steady band for Wyla. He’s losing his bassist to the Marine Corps (where he’ll play stand-up bass in its band), and the current drummer is an out-of-towner. Madill is ready to get deeper into the scene as a live act, too.

As he puts it, “Asheville is really exploding right now.”