Also here in 
. The acronym was a bit of a wink and nod to my politics watching self. I’ve been thinking of dropping it as a result of this as of late though.
DJ Space Pussy
Years ago, I was trying to come up with a cool electronic musician name, but hadn’t settled on anything. During that time, I did some electronic tracks for a singer, and when she went to shoot her music video for one of the tracks, she wanted me in the video as the DJ/electronic musician.
The video was shot in a rented out club, and we had a ton of extras, all drawn from the local rave/burner communities.
The song was an electronic dance remake of the old jazz classic “Fly Me to the Moon”, so I thought it would be fun to wear an astronaut helmet and a t-shirt with a cat in space.
In the middle of the shoot, someone in the crowd of extras pointed at me up on stage and shouted, “Hey look! It’s DJ Space Pussy!”
Lots of laughter, with me thinking, “Funny, but no.”
But from then on, everyone at the shoot started calling me that. Then the singer credited me on the video as DJ Space Pussy. Then others in the scene would find out about the story and start calling me that. It stuck.
But it also brought people joy and some laughter, so I embraced the madness and said, Well why not?
Turns out having a name that is so amusingly unforgettable even before anyone has heard your tunes isn’t a bad thing. I’ve been invited to do some pretty cool things just based on the name alone, so I guess it worked out.
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This is such a great thread; so many interesting, inspiring, or hilarious stories.
I cycled through a few names in the 2000s until one fateful day listening to Soma FM. A song by Pinback was playing, and not being familiar with the band, I looked them up. Reading their Wikipedia page, I was amused to learn that their name came from a character in a science fiction story.
At the time, I had been reading a piece of science fiction myself, Alfred Bester’s landmark, yet under-appreciated The Stars My Destination. In the book, there is a world-spanning megacorp run by a reclusive mastermind, both known by a single name: Presteign.
I don’t remember if it clicked instantly or if it only came to me days later, but at some point, my mind connected Bester and Pinback and realized I had to be Presteign. Google didn’t turn up anyone else performing under the name, and I was even able to scoop up the .com (as well as the handle on a then-new site called Twitter).
Over the years, I started using it as an umbrella for other side projects as well, which I like to think is totally in line with the spirit of Bester’s original Presteign.
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I go by Cool Doug Love. I stole it from Bobbito Garcia, who called himself Kool Bob Love at the end of “Rhymes Like Dimes” by MF Doom.
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I have the large-format illustrated edition of that, which is arguably the first modern “graphic novel”. Cool source for your moniker.
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For me coming up with an artist name has always been one of the most difficult things related to this music hobby of mine.
My first one was Subaudition, meaning something you can’t really hear but can sense. It is/was a duo playing minimalistic acoustic-based, atmospheric music. Some people called us neofolk which I didn’t really like but that was the tag given to many of our labelmates so yeah.
The next two I’ve come up in the last couple of years. Hemmelig means secret in Norwegian and I found . Funny thing was that when I came up with the name (it was a word in a Norwegian documentary, the full name of which I don’t remember right now), I immediately looked it up on Bandcamp and didn’t find a match, so Hemmelig it was. BUT when I got my lazy ass to actually register the name into Bandcamp a few months later, sure enough the name had been taken by a Scandinavian indie band! 
Hemmelig is an umbrella artist name for all kinds of (instrumental) electronic music.
The last one is Sinne, again a word of Scandinavian origin (Swedish) for senses. I spent 2020 and 2021 making an album and the whole time I was thinking what to call the project until I settled with Sinne. I was going to stylise it Sinné but a friend of mine emphatically talked me out of it. ”WTF does the accent mean anyway, you’re not going full Sigur Rós are you? That’s just pretentious.” Fair enough (and I fully agree now). Sinne is my artist name for cinematic, electronic ambient with vocals.
I really like single-word names that are somehow heavy with meaning but which give me enough wiggleroom in terms of musical style.
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Way back in 1992 or so when I was wearing all black all day and carried a lot of Weltschmerz with me I had an experimental industrial noise project called B.L.D. (Black Letter Day). Eventually things lightened up a few years later and I was deejaying as DJ Bold. Now even more years later I didn’t have the most meaningful idea but I liked to simplify the former typographically and from now on it’s just B_LD.
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The „band“ name I used since the 80s had been used by too many others too many times so I searched for something that is not on Apple Music and anywhere else and finally went with 2A2E which is the amount of these letters in my name and no one else will ever use such a stupid name… still doing my (almost) one song per months challenge…
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More recently I started using jasl. My name is Jas Langdon so it’s a no brainer but Jasl is a bit like jLo… which I find is a fairly adequate piss take. Sorry to all jLo fans here 
It’s not meant to be cryptic or hipster but perhaps it is.
Another name I use is ‘Ka Su Fl’ - I live in the Netherlands and being a brit I tend to play with the language. In dutch a kaas soufle is a cheese soufflé - a bread crisp hot pocket piece of shitty junk food. They are disgusting and of course cheesy but Ka Su Fl sounds so exotic. I was inspired by ‘Sun Kil Moon’ who I love and of course Mark Kozelek is a total dickhead too. So it all makes sense - I think.
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Norwegian and Swedish has alot of similarities. But Sinne means anger in norwegian. hehe.
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Back in the Elektron Users days i was on one of the compilations, and had to find a name fast. Looked down on my Monomachine as that was integral in everything i did back then. Came up with Thomachine. It looked ok, but i get kind of embarrassed when saying it out loud. Specially with a norwegian accent. hehe.
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Yeah, sinne means there or thither in Finnish and I almost didn’t use Sinne as my artist name for that reason.
Also, I heard if you read it “shi” and “nay” it would be close to shine in Japanese which means: die! Which isn’t quite what I want the name to convey.
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More recently I started using jasl. My name is Jas Langdon so it’s a no brainer but Jasl is a bit like jLo…
Jasl is not ok. This is the first name in the board that I’ve instantly had to reply to.
jLo for the few
for everyone else 
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ah c’mon man nothing wrong with a bit of ‘vajazzle’
(now I know why my bandcamp is very quiet)
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actually… I’d never heard that term
before so I also wanna thank you for not only opening up a whole new world for me but once it catches on (which I sincerely hope it does) it’s likely my bandcamp page will be flooded with visitors (albeit for the wrong reason of course).
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I make visual art and both it and my music are inspired by video games. Also, a stupid « what animal are you? » test on the internet said I was a deer a few years back.
So, I chose « low-poly » (low detail 3D models, common in retro games from the late 90s when I got into gaming) + deer, and I got lopodyr. I think it sounds quirky, which I feel fits my style well.
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funny when I chose my current pseudonym it was an anagram. searching through Google for how often such a combination could be mentioned, I saw that it was practically non-existent. but over time, for some reason, this pseudonym was chosen by some gay band, then some African singer, then some anime fans … at some point, some techno musician even appeared who lamented that they might start to confuse us. but I decided to leave it as is and see where it all leads.
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From Michael Herr’s Vietnam War memorial “Dispatches”,
“The sergeant had lain out near the clearing for almost two hours with a wounded medic. He had called over and over for a medevac, but none had come. Finally, a chopper from another outfit, a LOH, appeared, and he was able to reach it by radio. The pilot told him that he’d have to wait for one of his own ships, they werent coming down, and the sergeant told the pilot that if he did not land for them he was going to open fire from the ground and fucking well bring him down.So they were picked up that way, but there were repercussions.
The commanders code name was Mal Hombre, and he reached the sergeant later that afternoon from a place with the call signal Violent Meals.
" God damn it, Sergeant,” he said through the static, “I thought you were a professional soldier.”
“I waited as long as I could, Sir. Any longer, i was gonna lose my man.”
“This outfit is perfectly capable of taking care of its own dirty laundry. Is that clear, Sergeant?”
“Colonel, since when is a wounded trooper ‘dirty laundry’?”
“At ease, Sergeant,” Mal Hombre said, and radio contact was broken. "
The two words together just jumped off the page to me.
Also, after 2.5 decades of working in the hell of other peoples kitchens, Violent Meals made sense to me in a way. Its a strange combination of words and conjures strange imagery to my mind.
sustenance. violence. That which keeps us alive created in a violent act.
I like it. Lots of people i have shared my music with tell me they hate the name, and thats okay with me. I get it.
But it fits me and i like it.
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