Orange Blossom Award: Aych, The One Who Built the Circuit

Aych during Loud On 7th, the multi-venue, week-long Tampa music festival he curated in 2025 — an independent, artist-driven circuit that connected performers, rooms, and audiences across the city.

by Avery Anderson

Tampa’s music scene doesn’t suffer from a lack of talent.
It suffers from fragmentation.

Great artists. Scattered rooms. Isolated nights that feel electric inside the venue — and then disappear by morning. What’s rare isn’t the show. It’s the connective tissue that turns a scene into a circuit.

In 2025, that connective tissue looked a lot like Aych.

As reported by Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, Aych was the force behind this year’s Loud On 7th — a week-long, multi-venue music festival that spread across Tampa and Ybor City, intentionally stitching together independent artists, DJs, and spaces that don’t usually share a calendar.

That detail matters.

Loud On 7th wasn’t built around a single room or a single night. It unfolded across venues, genres, and formats — ticketed shows, free events, showcases, and community-driven gatherings — expanding who could participate and how. The reach wasn’t just measured in bodies through a door, but in how many artists got folded into something larger than their usual silo.

Creative Loafing’s coverage frames the festival as an ecosystem moment: local rappers sharing space with DJs, singer-songwriters, and experimental acts; venues benefiting from shared momentum; audiences moving through the city instead of staying put. That kind of cross-pollination doesn’t happen accidentally. Someone has to design for it.

That someone was Aych.

He’s often described first as a rapper — which is true — but his 2025 impact came from what he built around performance. Loud On 7th functioned as a living map of Tampa’s independent music culture, showing artists not just where to play, but how their work fits into a larger story.

This is the labor we rarely celebrate.

There’s no single headliner to credit. No neat attendance number that tells the whole story. The impact shows up later: in new collaborations, in artists playing rooms they hadn’t before, in audiences trusting a flyer because the week itself earned credibility.

In a year when many local musicians are still navigating rising costs, shrinking margins, and a nightlife economy that rewards sameness, Loud On 7th made a different argument — that scale doesn’t have to mean corporatization, and growth doesn’t have to flatten identity.

The Orange Blossom exists to honor the people who make scenes legible — who do the unglamorous work of alignment, scheduling, persuading, and trusting artists with real space.

In 2025, Aych didn’t just put on shows.
He built a circuit people could step into — and kept Tampa’s independent music conversation moving, one night at a time.

What Are the Orange Blossom Awards?

A month-long series from The Arts Passport celebrating the people and organizations whose quiet, steady work strengthens Tampa Bay’s arts ecosystem. No applications. No campaigning. Just community-driven recognition, released daily in December.