2021 – Page 3 – Audiofemme

Sound Baths Helped Center Taleen Kali; Now She Pays It Forward With Free Songs For Meditation EP

Last April, as soon as Taleen Kali and her bandmate Miles Marsico were vaccinated, they headed to a warehouse in Glendale, California, just outside of Los Angeles, with a bass, a harmonium, some synths and singing bowls. Then they hooked up the bass and synths to “a mess of pedals” and recorded a sound bath. On November 5, the fruits of that session were released as a five-track EP, Songs for Meditation, for free, a gesture that Kali describes as a “gift to the universe during these wild times.”

Songs for Meditation is divided into five improvised compositions that take their titles from the components of narrative structures; it begins with “Prologue” and ends with “Denouement.” The EP is also structured similar to a traditional sound bath, although some of the techniques they use aren’t. “It’s a meditation record, a sound bath record, but sometimes it also sounds like a post-rock record or an ambient album,” Kali says on a recent phone call. It’s also a culmination of a rock musician’s journey into the healing power of sound baths.

<a href="https://taleenkali.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-meditation">Songs For Meditation by Taleen Kali</a>

Back in 2013, Kali, who plays multiple instruments including piano and guitar, had been experiencing tendonitis and was noticing the beginning of carpal tunnel syndrome. That’s when she headed to her first yoga class, which quickly became a passion. In a class she took early on, the teacher played a singing bowl; Kali was instantly intrigued. “It sounded holy. It sounded beautiful,” she recalls. Kali wanted to learn everything about singing bowls, so she trained to become a sound bath practitioner.

Singing bowls, particularly the crystal ones that Kali often plays, have some major differences from traditional rock instruments. “With rock and roll or punk, you can thrash. You can thrash on your guitar and it feels amazing. You can feedback. I feel like when I play traditional rock instruments, I can be really volatile with them and channel anger and channel all sorts of things that come up,” Kali explains. “However, with singing bowls, if I do that, I’m going to break the crystal bowl.”

In fact, Kali did have a crystal bowl once that broke when it fell, even though it was packed inside of a gig bag. The fragility of the instrument lends itself to a different type of playing style. “You really have to play the singing bowl with reverence and be very grounded while you play it, otherwise, you’re going to hurt the singing bowl or hurt yourself,” says Kali; it’s more like settling in to a balancing pose in yoga.

Still, there are elements of singing bowl techniques that Kali, who released the rock-oriented EP Soul Songs in 2018, has been able to transfer over to her work on guitar. “It was great practice for me for relearning to play guitar in a safer way in order to avoid injury,” says Kali. “The practice of playing the crystal singing bowl really has reeducated me in thinking, getting grounded, taking a few breaths before I play, so that I’m playing from a more centered place.”

A few nights before our interview, I sat in on a virtual sound bath where she played three crystal quartz composite bowls that were tuned to the notes D, F and A, respectively. “They make up a perfect triad, a perfect chord, a major chord,” she explains. The bowls were already tuned to those notes in order to achieve the harmonic sounds that they can produce.

In the sound bath, she encouraged viewers to set an intention and gave journal prompts. The latter activity, she says, is the result of the amount of people in the creative fields who attend the events. “They can be really creatively generative,” she says of sound baths. Something like a journal prompt can help direct that inspiration.

Kali has been creating sound baths for about three years now, but, for a while, she had put the practice aside due to touring. “My singing bowls were in the studio in the gig bags,” she says. “I didn’t have them out anymore.” That changed, though, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Kali brought her bowls home from the studio. “Within the first few weeks of the pandemic, I started doing these virtual sound baths because I needed them,” she says. “I needed to come down off of all the anxiety related to the start of the pandemic.”

She kept going with it, and has more recently started doing one-minute sound baths on Instagram, where she plays at times that are unannounced, although they typically come at the top of an hour. These mini sound baths are a response to the phenomenon of doomscrolling. “I also fell prey to so much doomscrolling and internet addiction, especially in the middle of the pandemic, when I couldn’t socialize normally,” Kali says, noting how she would end up spending time on social media networks even when she didn’t want to. “It started to not feel good. That’s how I knew that it was addictive.”

The Instagram pop ups are a way to offer some of her sound bath work for free, something Kali felt was important to do. “By playing the instruments, it’s actually helping me too,” she says. “It’s a fair exchange of energy. I’m not giving anything away. It’s helping me, it’s helping others, and that feels really good.”

Follow Taleen Kali on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

hackedepicciotto Renders Tumultuous Pandemic Year on The Silver Threshold

If there’s one song that truly encapsulates the frustration of life right now, it’s “Babel,” from hackedepicciotto’s latest album, The Silver Threshold. Over music that rises and falls with cinematic tension, Danielle de Picciotto tells the story of the Tower of Babel, of the construction of a building intended to reach heaven, of a God who splits their one language into many and of a people divided when they can no longer communicate.

“All of our songs always deal a lot with our situation and the situation that we feel confronted with, in general, around us,” says de Picciotto, who is joined by Alexander Hacke, on a video call from the duo’s studio in Berlin. Since The Silver Threshold came together in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and a series of global upheavals that happened in 2020, that certainly played a part in the album’s evolution.

“When we were writing it, I had the feeling for quite some time that people don’t seem to understand each other anymore,” de Picciotto explains. “As the pandemic progressed, that feeling got stronger and stronger. You had the feeling that you were talking to friends that you had known for your whole life and they just didn’t understand you anymore and you didn’t understand them.”

That situation reminded de Picciotto of the Tower of Babel story told in the book of Genesis (though there are parallels to the story throughout a variety of cultures). “I wasn’t raised religiously, but there were a couple of Bible stories that I always thought were interesting,” she says. “I very often have the feeling that we’re actually experiencing that which, in the Bible, was mentioned being in the very beginning.” She points out this is intended to be a contemporary commentary reflective of current global situations, asking the rhetorical question: “Do we realize that somehow, for some reason, we are in this state where we do not understand each other anymore?”

“That doesn’t mean enemies or people from different countries, but even your best friend,” she adds. “There’s something wrong in our communication and we have to figure that out again.”

<a href="https://hackedepicciotto.bandcamp.com/album/the-silver-threshold">The Silver Threshold by hackedepicciotto</a>

When the pandemic hit, hackedepicciotto, as de Picciotto says, considered themselves “touring nomads,” though the couple had long been associated with Berlin. De Picciotto is a U.S. born multi-disciplinary artist who moved to Berlin in 1987 and co-founded the city’s infamous Love Parade. She’s also released a number of solo and collaborative albums, written multiple books, made several films and has had her art shown in galleries and museums in Europe and North America. Hacke was born in Berlin and was just a teenager when he joined Einstürzende Neubauten, who would go on to become legendary force in underground and experimental music. He’s also played with Crime and the City Solution and composed a number of film scores.

The two have been collaborating on music together for 20 years now and, about a decade ago, they gave up their home and hit the road, mastering the ins-and-outs of checking gear onto planes as they played in various parts of the world. Their last album, The Current, was released in early 2020 and they had just begun a tour in support of that when the pandemic hit. Hacke recalls that he had planned to cancel the lease on their recording studio for that year, but had missed the deadline. It was “a very lucky coincidence,” he says. “Otherwise, if we hadn’t had that, we would have no place to hang out and work.”

Their final pre-COVID gig was in Frankfurt. Back in Berlin, they caught up on sleep. “We weren’t jet-lagged for the first time in years,” jokes de Picciotto. They also gave virtual performances a chance, although it wasn’t really their thing. “We missed the interaction with the audience, so we didn’t go on doing that as long as we planned,” she says.

“It is very different performing for an iPhone and a tripod than for people,” adds Hacke.

Meanwhile, de Picciotto wrote another book and Hacke worked on film music. “We don’t participate in the Berlin nightlife as much as we used to anyway. We don’t go out drinking or anything like that, so we did not miss that,” says Hacke. “It was really a time to immerse yourself into things that you were only talking about doing in previous years.”

In the late summer of 2020, they started writing new material as hackedepicciotto. They also earned a grant to fund their work and were signed to Mute. “The stars were aligned in a good way,” says de Picciotto.

Before they began recording at the end of 2020, they posed for a photo shoot with Sven Marquardt, an old friend of de Picciotto who is also well-known as the doorman at Berghain. “I always wanted him to take photos for our album, because I’ve done other shoots for him, but not of music,” says de Picciotto. While they don’t normally take press photos before recording the album, they did this time because of concerns of another lockdown.

“It really influenced us,” says de Picciotto of the film shoot, which became the basis of the music video for “Kirchhain.” “He works with analog cameras and only works with daylight. In that way, his pictures have this incredible aura and that really helped us with our music.”

“Also, he projects this authority,” adds Hacke. “You cannot bullshit him. He looks straight through you and that’s what makes the pictures great, because you have to be yourself.”

The Silver Threshold is designed so that each song goes up a key in the scale, beginning with D. The music is as reflective of the tempestuousness of 2020 as the lyrics. Take “Babel” as an example. “We work with strategies to illustrate conflict, like rhythms counteracting to each other and stuff like that,” says Hacke. “It gives you a feeling of uneasiness or a feeling of [being] out-of-whack. Rhythmically, I like to do these things, stuff that makes you lose your balance or something.”

The album also includes hackedpicciotto’s first love song, “Evermore,” a duet that came as a result of the lockdown situation and sounds as if the couple are singing to each other while caught in the midst of downpour. “We had that feeling that this pandemic was a storm that came upon mankind and we were all standing in this storm,” says de Picciotto. “We felt that the most important thing during the storm was to keep in contact with your friends and loved ones… because everybody was so separated. It was us two and, during the whole time of the pandemic when lockdown was really heavy, we felt like it was us two standing in this tiny little nutshell, which was our studio, and the storm raging around us and the only thing that kept us alive in the storm was our love.”

With “Evermore,” they brought the connection that they share into the lyrics. Says Hacke, “This is the first time that we also actually speak to each other lyrically, rather than describing something or proclaiming something to the outside world.”

The Silver Threshold, and “Evermore” in particular, taps into a chemistry that has always been part of their collaboration as hackedepicciotto. “I think that what makes this project work so well is that we are so confident and we trust each other so much,” says Hacke, surmising that it’s this kind of honesty that appeals to fans. “It’s a different set up than a regular band in that way.”

Follow hackedepicciotto on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Amy Jay Readies New LP Awake Sleeper With “Monster” Single

Amy Jay hates being the center of attention. An indie-folk musician based in New York, Jay finds that “everything leading up to the stage” sends jitters throughout her body. It’s only once she’s planted firmly centerstage that those rattling nerves dissipate, and she loses herself in the music. With her new song “Monster,” premiering today via Audiofemme, the singer-songwriter manifests her anxiety in tangible form, a driving tick-tock base mimicking her own mental war.

“Monster,” sampling her forthcoming new LP Awake Sleeper, out February 4, 2022, clocks in at nearly six minutes. Its structure is quite unconventional, containing two very different songs pieced together with a spacey instrumental in between. “I wrote these two ideas, kind of in the same headspace. I can’t remember if it was actually the same day or same week or something, but it was around the same time,” she says. “I love the tuning and the chords. It felt like something when I was playing it, and I experimented with finger picking and strumming.”

Over the coming months, she tried editing and expanding each separate idea but nothing ever worked. “What I had was a couple verses and a chorus. If I tried adding something else to one idea, it just didn’t feel right. I was not in that space anymore,” she shares.

With both ideas in the same tuning, she decided to “smash them together” into a towering, cathartic epic about anxiety. “Practically speaking, I was given a 10-song cap by my producer John [Seal],” Jay says with a laugh. “Then, there’s a beautiful freeform instrumental interlude between the two that I feel glues them perfectly together and ended up being exactly what I intended to say.”

Amy Jay · Monster

“Keep at bay all the worries/About the impression I’m making,” she sings, the clock striking like lightning through her vocal cords. “In this half-empty attempt at small talk/Due to internal dialogue.”

Pianist Andrew Freeman supplied the interlude, a drifting, mind-melting piano part that assists in quieting the harsh, combustible tick-tock of the first half. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted the clock ticking sound, because it actually did evoke anxiety in me,” she admits. Ultimately, Jay and Seal “ended up going with it” to hammer home the message of suffocating anxiety and its outward ripple effects. “I hope that it helps us face it – and helps me face it – in a way that’s constructive, so we left it in.”

Jay’s artistic career began five years ago with the release of an EP titled Supposed to Be in 2016. Her follow-up, So It Is, arrived two years later. Both projects indicated a knack for stirring together the synthetic with the organic, and her forthcoming Awake Sleeper continues the work with equally creamy, ethereal blends.

“Monster” is, if nothing else, an ambitious musical piece, haunting and torrential. In “trying to capture the emotions in a sonic way,” Jay beckons the listener into a front-row seat to her mental anguish. “That’s where I struggle with my anxiety. I’m very melancholic, naturally, inside my head, so trying to put that into the album, in creative ways, was really fun and interesting,” she explains.

Jay utilized analog synths, heard with resounding effect in the mid-section of “Monster,” and doubled up on vocals to create an immersive soundscape. “I wanted to use repetitive elements of instrumentation to portray a sort of emotional dissonance. I might look calm on the outside, and I might be sleepy, walking on the street and kind of half awake, half asleep in this weird state, but what’s going on inside is a very different experience.”

In the studio, she recorded live drums and bass guitar in the same weekend to “establish that foundation in a traditional way and set the framework to build upon all of these other elements,” she adds. Her vocals were simply the “cherries on top. I remember coming around every weekend during the recording process, having dove deep that weekend prior, with fresh eyes and ears and intensity.”

“Monster” and the previously released “Reliance” serve contrasting purposes for the album. She explains: “Lyrically, ‘Monster’ is capturing an underlying theme for the rest of the album (introspective anxiousness), and subsequently contains the lyrics to the album title. On the other hand, ‘Reliance’ is a manifestation of that theme played out in my relationship, portrayed in a lighthearted way.”

“I am still trapped in my mind like in all the other tracks, but ‘Reliance’ felt like it eased the listener into the idea in a relatable way before things get too overwhelming,” she adds, noting the song as the second track in the lineup. “[It’s] still very much an introduction but coming off the heels of [album opener] ‘Lucid Dreaming,’ helping the metaphorical heart rate go down and relax a bit. And still, it ends with heavy questions: ‘Do I rely too much on you? Take and withhold love from you?'”

Where the first half of the album possesses “a more forward sound overall, where lyrically and production-wise I feel my voice has value and I am wrestling with how to handle that,” the second half settles into a particular tempo, paired against a more visceral sort of lyrical vulnerability. Yet both “Monster” and “Reliance” are connected in their brawny use of “repetitive background melodies to portray the feeling of time. “

As Awake Sleeper will be Jay’s first-ever vinyl release, she chose “Monster” as the second-half fire starter. “Interestingly enough it’s also the second single — I didn’t realize the connection until now. In classical music, there’s the idea of a tonic expansion where you are building and building on top of the base key throughout the piece,” she says, “and this is kind of like that, if you think of the album as one piece. We are in the middle, and we are nowhere near done. What follows is a series of melancholic ballads, a lamenting plot twist, and the final capping off of the album with an unresolved layer of doubt.”

To celebrate the record announcement, Amy Jay will perform her first full band show since pre-pandemic on Stage 3 at the Rockwood Music Hall this coming Tuesday, November 16.

Follow Amy Jay on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Dropper Seeks Personal Growth with Lead Single “Don’t Worry”

Dropper is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Andrea Scanniello, who finally steps into the spotlight as a vocalist and songwriter after many years playing guitar, bass or keys in other projects. A veteran of Brooklyn’s indie rock scene, Scanniello previously played in High Waisted and Stuyedeyed, and has filled out the line-ups of TVOD, Russian Baths and Saara Untracht-Oakner (Boytoy, SUO)’s solo projects, among others.

She comes from a long line of musicians and has played music since childhood, but says she “was always too shy to show people music that I was writing. I was like, well I’ll just play guitar, I’ll play keys. It’s fine. I don’t mind being in the background.”

She is in the background no longer. Joining longtime collaborators Jono Bernstein (also of High Waisted), Yukary Morishima and Larry Scanniello, Dropper releases their first LP Don’t Talk To Me on February 11, 2022, and they’re premiering their first-ever single from the project, “Don’t Worry,” today on Audiofemme.

<a href="https://droppernyc.bandcamp.com/track/dont-worry">Don't Worry by Dropper</a>

The album is two years in the making, written and recorded pre-COVID, something Scanniello patiently sat on while she awaited the return of live music. “I don’t want to release anything if I can’t play a show,” she said. “I [didn’t] want to put it out in the middle of the pandemic, because we’re so new, that I just didn’t want it to get lost in the Internet shuffle.” The band will have the opportunity to preview the album on a handful of Midwest tour dates with Habibi later this month.

The record lays bare Scanniello’s personal journey through her twenties in nine tracks. She wrote it while she scraped by with a series of service industry jobs and all that comes with them: the late nights, the drinking, the shallow friendships born of participation in a scene. What started as an exercise in healing after a bad break-up became more introspective, a personal inventory of life thus far, the habits that weren’t serving her and the things she’d like to change about herself.

“For a while I was kind of caught up,” she says. “Going out too much, partying too much, and then being anxious because you’re partying too much, and not feeling really connected to anything you’re doing, general bad feelings.” She laughs. “Trying to work through that.”

In the band’s press release, they say they write music for “People who have worked in the service industry too long and become curmudgeons at the ripe old age of 26. People who are lonely yet want to be left alone. People who drink because they are sad but also sad because they drink. Bisexuals with crumbs in their bed. Optimistic pessimists. Those with seasonal allergies. But overwhelmingly for people who, in lieu of being crushed by the eternal weight of existence, choose to scream internally with a smile upon their face.”

And it lands squarely at this nexus, emotionally astute in a way that speaks to Scanniello’s self-awareness and chops as a songwriter. “Don’t Worry” is peak Dropper, in that it encompasses the entire weight of the album with these words: “I do it to myself.” The track negotiates the happy medium between what Scanniello calls “sad girl singer-songwriter kind of stuff” (your Angel Olsens and Waxahatchees) and the heavier, psychier aspects of the Brooklyn music scene, with nods to all the bands Scanniello has lent her talents to. It hits a nerve emotionally, but one can imagine the energy of a raucous, PBR-soaked crowd growing as the track’s energy builds from the opening licks to the multi-faceted explosion of sound that drops in after the bridge. The irony is that it’s exactly this kind of scene that led Scanniello’s songwriting to this place to begin with.

She says this track particularly speaks to “the amount of times in my life I woke up hungover, being like what the fuck am I doing with my life? But then realizing it’s my fault, these are choices that I’m making, and I could easily change these things but I’m choosing not to.”

This type of reflection and self-realization is frequently the catalyst for the type of change she’s referring to, a journey I imagine we’ll see play out alongside Dropper’s journey as a band. In the meantime, you might bask in the sharp empathy of this first offering, that you’re not the only one who feels this way.

Follow Dropper on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Allie Dunn Sheds Fear of Commitment on Debut EP Good As Gone

On her debut EP, Good As Gone, Allie Dunn overcomes her fears and transforms them into a collection of breath-taking songs. With a strong desire to bring back that nostalgic Laurel Canyon vibe while adding her own flair, Dunn shows off her sparkling voice and melodies to match on a backdrop of organic instrumentation.

Dunn notes that each of the four songs is a reflection of a different time in her life, particularly her experience with love and fears surrounding it. This becomes obvious in the first few lines of opening track, “Need Somebody” as she projects, “I was dead set on dying alone/85 with no one to call my own/Love was never a friend of mine/’Til it found me/Now I find that everybody needs somebody” Written in 2020 during the early days of quarantine with boyfriend Collin Rowe, whom she was staying with at the time, Dunn realized that we all need a support system in order to survive in life – once the right person entered her life to change her perception.

“It was a truth that I’ve been wanting to say, but was scared to say it,” she remarks. Confronting uncomfortable truths is a theme that arises throughout the powerful project. This shines through potently on “Do You Miss Me (NYC),” a love letter to the city she grew up in but left behind in order to pursue her dreams. Caught in a moment of fear and vulnerability at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic when it was unclear when she’d be able to return to New York to see her family, the lyrics woke Dunn up one morning, leading her to the piano where she finished the song in 30 minutes.

Growing up in New York, Dunn was instilled with a love of music and performing when she began taking piano lessons at age 10 and landed a starring role as Tracy Turnblad in her school’s production of Hairspray. “It was something so special about it that I really wanted to pursue it,” she recalls to Audiofemme. By age 13, while most of her peers where listening to Justin Bieber, she and her dad were immersing themselves in the Eagles’ classic rock discography, sparking her desire to write songs. Two years later, she acquired a guitar, but says, “It was more about the people I was playing it to than myself at that time.”

“I would write to make other people happy in a sense, or invite them to my world at that age, which was interesting for young me,” she explains. “But as time got on, it started to become more personal, my writing, and more about stories that I’ve been through and what I found that people relate to. I think that’s so powerful, because at the end of the day, the reason I write is to give people something to make their day better.”

Later her perspective shifted toward creating a space for people to feel safe being themselves. “Every day, people come across things that aren’t always authentic, and sometimes people feel like they have to fit a mold. I especially went through that,’” she continues. “For me, it’s being as honest and authentic as possible in my writing [that] allows people to realize it’s okay to feel, reminding them that there is still authenticity in this world of craziness right now. That’s my main motivation.”

Dunn carries this pure motivation into Good As Gone, reflecting her genuine spirit. It’s a great introduction to her ethereal blend of pop country and Americana, but the journey to get here was winding. Her mother was a doctor, and Dunn initially planned to follow that same path. “I wanted to have a career that helps people,” Dunn says. She studied pre-med in college, writing songs and performing with her band around town in between biology classes. But during her senior year, she was met with a life-changing epiphany while shadowing a doctor in the trauma unit. There, she encountered the family of a young patient who was in critical condition.

“That was a wake up call for me,” she says of the pivotal moment. “I was like, this is not something I’m passionate about. I’d rather allow someone else who really loves this stuff to do it.” It became clear then that music and songwriting was her true passion and life’s purpose; just one month after graduating from college in 2019, she was living in Nashville, pursuing her musical dreams unabashedly.

Still, a piece of her spirit will always remain connected to home, and “Do You Miss Me (NYC)” captures the homesickness and longing for a place she’s unsure that she fits into anymore. “You got a million people/You don’t need no girl like me to stay,” Dunn sings passionately in what she calls the EP’s most vulnerable number. “That song came out of my heart. It just poured out, I had no control over it. I don’t know what it was, but it just came out of me,” she expresses. “It was the first truth I’ve written since being in Nashville that I was not afraid to hold back. It was a moment for me where I was like, ‘why am I so scared to write what I’m feeling?’ because I think that’s where the magic comes from. That song was a turning point for me as an artist, because from then on out, I stuck to the truth and said the truth. I’m thankful for that song.”

Dunn reveals that “NYC” is the ideal lead-in to her next project that will explore her story in even greater depth. Until then, Good As Gone serves as a well-rounded introduction and glimpse into the soul of one of Nashville’s brightest new talents. “This EP was a little a foot in the water to let everyone see how I write, and if they can relate to any of the songs on the EP, then my goal is complete,” she proclaims. “I hope people see honesty and want to be part of that world where you’re allowed to be yourself. I want to bring back the feeling that music is something that people find solace in, and I hope that people find solace in my music, for people to find some piece of truth that they’re going through in my music.”

Follow Allie Dunn on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Carissa Johnson Premieres Game-Changing New Album Blue Hour

A week before the pandemic forced sweeping lockdowns in the states, singer-songwriter Carissa Johnson moved to Los Angeles to reset. Little did she know her life would be completely upended. “I was out of my world and not feeling the same inspiration,” she admits. Deflated and lost, Johnson spent her days driving aimlessly around the glistening cityscape, once brimming with hope and promise, and found herself unexpectedly inspired to write.

Several songs for her new record, Blue Hour (officially out Friday, November 12 but premiering today via Audiofemme), were born out of these early days of uncertainty and panic, including the galactic banger “Polaroids.” A month later, Johnson decided to repack her bags and head back out East, settling in the Boston scene. “I needed a break from the band and to figure things out,” she reflects on her time fronting Carissa Johnson & the Cure-Alls. “We had just been all over the country, and the three of us dispersed and moved to different places, so we’d fly home to Boston for our shows. I never felt like we had the proper time to really practice.”

Once in Boston, the ensuing 12 months, spent in deep self-reflection, gave birth to a 10-song manifesto that Johnson calls her “scrapbook of 2020.” While writing when she could, she took a day job with Fishman Transducers, building guitars and learning how to construct guitar pickups. “It took up a lot of my time, and I ended up being pretty tired after the end of the day,” she says.

But she kept pushing forward. “I only really needed a couple friends and a couple experiences to form the whole album,” she adds. She proceeded to pour all her “loneliness and confusion and frustration” into the work, and it shows. Blue Hour rocks hard, splintered electric guitars creating a star-like pattern in “The Sound” and a decorative thump mesmerizing the listener with “Tourist,” but it’s also quite brooding and emotionally confrontational.

In “Time, Only Time,” Johnson sings, “I took a loan out on myself/And now I’ve grown deep in debt,” and while it’s partly metaphorical, it feels more literal to Johnson in terms of the investment she made for the record. “I don’t know why, but today, that lyric has been going through my head. It never does. Honestly, it’s one of my most vulnerable lyrics that I’ve been scared for people to hear,” she says with a self-effacing laugh. “It’s one of those things where you don’t want people to know you’re driving yourself into debt. I didn’t actually take out a loan, but I really feel like I did. I’m spending the most money I’ve ever spent on anything in my life on this album. It feels like I put a down payment on a house.”

The message to “do it all, do it right now, just anything you want” operates against an effervescent, somewhat sticky, arrangement. And it is one creed Johnson grasps firmly in her hands. “Just go after it all and invest, even if you don’t have it, because it’s going to come back if you believe in it,” she says. “I really believe that, and I really am behind all of these songs. I think it’s a new level for me. I’m ready to get to that next level. It’s either all in or nothing.”

Among other sterling moments, “Middle of Nowhere” proves she really is ready for the big leagues. Originally found on her 2019 record, A Hundred Restless Thoughts, Johnson revisits the folk tune and chisels it into reverberating, static-synth track. “I used to call it my campfire song,” she says. “My friend Lukas [Kattar] played guitar on that one, and for the solos, specifically, he had like a 100 to 200-note solo in there. He’s a great guitarist, but that’s not what we were going to do.”

Instead, Johnson, alongside producer Benny Grotto (Ben Folds, The Magnetic Fields), chopped it down to 10 measures. “It ended up being like a Jefferson Airplane kind of thing,” she remarks. “Originally, it was a sad song. I felt that vibe come across on the acoustic guitar. When I did it with the full band, it added so much depth to it, and we actually swapped a couple of the chords. It gave it a whole different vibe that doesn’t capture the same feeling. I think it’s almost more hopeful.”

Musically, Blue Hour is a testament to Johnson’s fearlessness to go big. She’s already gone home, so she has nothing else left to lose. “Merry Go Round,” a breakup-turned-self-love anthem, sends electrifying sparks directly into the Milky Way, whereas “The Sound” creeps along the dirt like a black widow spider, a sinister force that’s near unstoppable. Once the percussion swoops in, it’s almost like the throbbing heartbeat from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

As with the entire record, the demo process for this song began in GarageBand, working as though she were building a song with her unplugged electric guitar. “I just started plugging it into my computer and recording it and then adding a drum track and then adding synth lines. I wasn’t even using a real keyboard, and I didn’t actually know what I was doing,” she says.

It sounded cool, though. Yet in the song’s early form, it was “actually the weakest [song]. It wasn’t hitting the way I wanted it to.” To get some feedback, she sent the bare bones over to her guitarist and frequent collaborator Steph Curran, who “added some really cool synth lines in the background that really drove it. I really wanted it to be spooky and have kind of a ‘game over’ noise in the beginning and at the end.”

Drummer Ryan Manning then took a turn to layer on that bottle-rocket-emitting drum kit and percussion. “He’s the hardest hitter, and that’s what that song really needed — to have that momentum behind it,” she says. “It’s my favorite song on the album.”

Blue Hour is far more than a career game changer for Carissa Johnson. It’s a life preserver tossed out into raging waters during one of the most trying times of her life. While navigating a new kind of isolation, she learned to cherish the people in her life far more than she had previously. She also dove into self-help books and started “learning about energy and physics. I’m pretty obsessed with manifestation and quantum physics,” she says. “I had to refocus. I was really feeling scattered and doing so much at once.”

Now, she’s blossomed into a vibrant, passionate human being and further learned “to do the things that really matter,” understanding “my space is worth protecting. I’m worthy of all these things. I was feeling down on myself and not feeling like I was where I wanted to be, from not being able to actually progress in the same ways that I knew.”

With Blue Hour‘s release, she barrels forward with renewed energy. “There have been a lot of moments where I’ve gotten kicked down and had to face a lot of things,” she says. “I’m gonna come out of this and make something better from it. That’s the reason I write and play music, and to hopefully help other people who are going through the same thing. I think that’s where this album was really born from — just wanting to continue doing that and create something great from all the difficulties of the last year.”

Follow Carissa Johnson on Twitter and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Zilched Rekindles Love for Stevie Nicks with “Stand Back” Cover on New EP

There was a time when Chloë Drallos – aka Zilched – was embarrassed that she ever loved Stevie Nicks. Growing up with a love for the classics and then rejecting them in the name of riot grrrl, Drallos has since found her happy medium in a cover of Nicks’ classic “Stand Back.” The cover is one of two songs from a special two-song EP, out yesterday, November 9th, just as Zilched wraps up a short tour with dates in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Brooklyn.

Drallos’ video references the original, as she dances in the dark under a spotlight. Except, in the Zilched version, Nicks’ dancing troupe is replaced by a shrine of the queen herself; Drallos makes her offering. It’s a celebration of youth, an acknowledgment of the music that shaped her, and a killer performance of her go-to karaoke song; she and her sister spent many nights early on in the pandemic with Ian Ruhala of HALA, the three of them doing drunken karaoke at his house. As a nod to those times, she got Ruhala to play guitar and bass on the cover.

Both “Stand Back” and the video for the EP’s previous-released single, “A Valentine,” encapsulate Drallos’ trademark DIY aesthetic. To be fair, it’s more than just an aesthetic, considering Drallos acts as her own merch designer, photographer, director, booking agent and producer. It’s not uncommon for budding artists to wear multiple hats at the beginning of their career, but it feels exceptional that Drallos mastered all of the above before reaching legal drinking age.

Drallos knew early on that she had to be a musician. Not because she liked being on stage or because her parents did it, but because it was the only thing that seemed to make life worth living. “It was mostly me being like, ‘this is the only thing that I think would make me maybe like my life, or whatever.’ So I was just like, ‘This is the key to being happy and not having to go to college. So I was just doing it.”

“Doing it” meant driving the 45-minutes from her hometown of Hartland, Michigan, to any show she could book in Detroit. The first show she played at Detroit’s El Club was the same week as her high school graduation. While other teens were thinking about college or prom or whatever teenagers think about, Drallos was planning her move to the city, and making sure she had a few friends when she got there. “I hear people say, ‘That must’ve taken a lot of guts,’ or ‘that must’ve been really hard,’ but I wasn’t thinking of it that way. I was like, ‘this is what I gotta do and I gotta do it now,’” she recalls.

It helped that Drallos didn’t really feel engaged with any part of her hometown. There, she kept to herself; even her music was a really private part of her life. While she was booking shows in Detroit, she rarely ever played out in her hometown. In fact, it took her a while to feel comfortable on stage. “I didn’t really hang out with a lot of people in my town so I was really removed from everything,” says Drallos. “And I also had, like, crippling stage fright.”

She explains that part of that nervousness stemmed from feeling like she wasn’t a good enough singer. Growing up listening to artists like Stevie Nicks, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and the like, her idea of what a voice “should” sound like didn’t line up with what was coming out of her. Her early music education consisted of absorbing as much knowledge about the “greats” as she possibly could. “I would come home and watch VHI Classic all day and I would write down all the bands or songs that played, and then I would download them on Napster, listen to them for a few days, delete them so I had more room, then do it again.”

This resulted in her early songwriting career to have a heavy folk-rock leaning. “For me, Bob Dylan was, like, my guy,” Drallos laughs. “I was obsessed with him and wanted to be him so I just wrote songs that tried to sound like him. But then I got into riot grrrl and grunge and I was like, I need a cheaper guitar to be cool.” She turned in her hard-earned Gretsch for a Danelectro and started to let herself sing. “My first practices did not include a microphone – I was sooooo shy,” she says.

Since then, Drallos’ deep knowledge in folk and rock has seeped into her smart and melodic songwriting style, delivered with the angst and honesty of grunge. In “Stand Back” Drallos pays homage to one of her heroes while inserting her own sonic personality. “She’s an artist I loved so much when I was in middle school. I thought she was like the perfect woman,” says Drallos. “In high school, I was trying to forget that I was ever like that and was too cool for that and then after I moved out, I went back to a bunch of those types of artists and was like, ‘I’m not too cool for these, they’re still the greatest.’”

Zilched may be cool as hell, but no one is too cool for Stevie Nicks.

Follow Zilched on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Alt-Rock Duo Mediocre Exorcise Pushover Tendencies with “Mattress Bitch” Premiere

When alt-rock duo Mediocre showed up at the East LA warehouse they’d booked to film their latest video, the woman who let them in was shocked – despite the fact that the location is mainly used for film production, this was the first all-female crew she’d seen shooting there. But Piper Torrison and Keely Martin are used to doing things themselves (Martin is also one-half of Bowie Nix, the production team responsible for all of Mediocre’s videos thus far). Not only is their quirky DIY spirit built into their musical and visual aesthetic, it’s also attracted the attention of Dangerbird Records.

In 2020, after hearing Mediocre’s self-released EP Emotion Sickness, the indie label invited the band to participate in their ongoing Microdose Series. Normally, Dangerbird curates up-and-coming bands and sets them up with whatever they need to record a single and its b-side; sometimes they throw a free show to commemorate the release. Mediocre brought a handful of tracks to Dangerbird, who selected catchy, kitschy power pop number “Waiting For Your Heart” and reworked one of the band’s older songs, “Give In,” as a shoegazey daydream.

But while they were still in the process of deciding what to record, Martin and Torrison had been furiously writing a new song, reunited after a year of college spent on opposite coasts, not to mention the pandemic. They squeezed it into their studio time with producer Danny Noguieras at Balboa Recording Studios (his band No Win also works with Dangerbird) and the label decided to release all three songs. “They really gave us so much freedom to just do what we want,” Torrison says. “It was really cool to have them on board with what we were doing, and I think that also helped us just be like, we got it. We don’t need to appease anyone. We’re doing our thing and it’s working out.”

The third single from the series, “Mattress Bitch,” premieres today on Audiofemme, along with the video Mediocre shot for it in that East LA warehouse. One of the rooms in was set up with a neon cross and church pews, which ultimately dictated Martin’s vision for the clip. While it’s essentially a performance video, Martin and Torrison also play a variety of other characters – a frustrated teacher, awkward schoolgirls, disaffected goth kids. It feels like a fun take on the repeated chorus, “We’re only playing make-believe/but I’ll keep coming back around,” but it also mirrors the song’s cheeky examination of pretending to be something you aren’t for the approval of others.

Martin and Torrison started writing songs together soon after their friendship formed, when they were still in high school. “When we first started out, we were just practicing in Piper’s garage, as all DIY bands start – humble beginnings,” remembers Martin. They’d pass a notebook back and forth, jotting down lyrics about whatever they were feeling, even something as a literal as what foods they were craving (the initial basis for their first-ever tune “Milkshake”). “Before we even talked about being in a band or anything, I think our way of hanging out would just be creating the most obnoxious, total joke of a song, cracking [ourselves] up,” adds Torrison.

Though they spend most of the year 3,000 miles apart now that Torrison is enrolled at UC Santa Cruz and Martin at Emerson College, they still develop songs much the same way; over texts, videos, and voice memos, they share ideas, lyrics, and melodies. “It’s been really cool still being able to write stuff from afar,” says Torrison. “Even when we were together, I would start a song and kinda stop myself and be like, no, I wanna write this with Keely, and I know that it’ll develop into something different if I stop here and we do this together. So it’s been pretty natural to transition into that, to be like okay, I have this riff idea, I’ll send it to Keely, and then she’ll send me something back with a little bit added to it, just back and forth like that.”

“I sent Piper the first bit of the first verse that started us writing ‘Mattress Bitch.’ I wanted to make it like, kinda funny, and I was trying not to think too hard about it when I was writing it, but of course when you look back, you’re like oh, there is deeper meaning to this,” Martin says. “I do think that it is a sad song in a way, and vulnerable, but hidden behind that humor – which is very much a common thing that I tend to do, or anyone else does when they’re confronting a something or someone but they don’t want to reveal too much about their feelings. Compensating with humor, just that general experience of making yourself small and forgetting your worth, I feel like that’s very relevant to anyone’s experience.”

Whether it is the humor in the song’s nonsensical lyrics (“I am a mattress/You can get on top of me if you want to”) making its rawness more palatable, or simply the pair’s familiarity with one another, both agree “Mattress Bitch” came together quickly and easily. “We wrote it while we were apart, and then as soon as we came home to LA for the summer, that was like the first time we really heard ‘Mattress Bitch’ live together,” Torrison recalls. They had about two weeks to nail it down before going into the studio, but Noguieras was as eager to include it in the upcoming session as the band was. “We sent it to Danny and he was like, yes, we’re recording that. He was really stoked on it too. The energy was matched,” Torrison continues. “But I think the comfortability with writing it, especially, points to our future of writing together.”

“I feel like that song is really indicative of the sound that the band is going toward. And of the bands that we had been listening to throughout these past couple years,” Martin agrees. “When I was trying to write songs in high school, I was like, okay, they have to mosh to something! And it was just this unnecessary pressure in my brain – when you’re young and you’re in a scene you want people to get riled up and stuff; I feel like I was in that headspace. That music is fun and I enjoyed playing it, it just wasn’t fully our style.”

“The bands we played with were very different from our sound at that time, very punk-heavy,” Torrison elaborates. “I think distancing ourselves from that, not having that pressure anymore, we can find our audience on our own. We’re not forced into this narrow punk scene. I think that expanded us to get more comfortable with our own writing and writing for what we like.”

That trajectory is evident comparing the Mircrodose singles to Emotion Sickness, which compiled much of their earliest songs. “By the time that we were able to release it, all of those songs felt very indicative of the past – in a positive way – but we wanted to get it out there fast as we could so we could progress to new things, you know?” says Martin. “We recorded the Microdose songs this past summer, so those two processes happened a year apart, but we experienced so much growth within that year. It was really cool to look back on the release date of our EP versus us recording these new songs. [Even] the songs we had written in the past, we were reinventing them now that we were more confident with our sound.”

Though “Mattress Bitch” may be the next tongue-in-cheek anthem of pushovers everywhere, Mediocre seems to have moved far beyond that mentality. Every step of the way, they’ve approached their songwriting, sound, and visual aesthetic with conviction. They’ve gone from “playing make believe” to believing in themselves – and we’ll keep coming back around, every time.

Follow Mediocre on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Donna Missal Shares New Sega Bodega Collab As She Embarks on First Post-COVID Tour

It’s just a few days before Donna Missal is set to leave for Houston to begin her stint opening for CHVRCHES across the United States. The L.A.-based singer has been busy with rehearsals, figuring out a cohesive way to bring together her body of work. There is new, unreleased material and songs that will drop while she’s on the road, in addition to her older music and the tunes from her 2020 album, Lighter, that she has yet to play live. This will be Missal’s first tour since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It feels like everything has changed so drastically about touring, as well as our environment,” she says over a Zoom call. Missal will be performing in cities she has seen before, but the experience could be something entirely new. “It feels like I’ve never done this before and I’m going on my first tour ever. It’s a strange feeling. I think it’s all very unknown still and I won’t know what I’ve gotten myself into until we’re out there doing it.”

Throughout 2020 and 2021, Missal had been staying active making new music. In fact, her new single “(to me) your face is love,” stems from this period. It’s part of a body of work that brings together Missal with UK producer Sega Bodega – he also produced her single “sex is good (but have you tried),” released in March 2021. The two began collaborating remotely during the pandemic, but this single actually stems from an in-person session, Missal’s first since prior to the stay-at-home period.

With “(to me) your face is love,” Missal offers a dose of retro-futurism with a sound that recalls late 1990s breakbeat. The accompanying video is a fashion-forward clip where Missal’s wardrobe, both sculptural and ethereal, reflects the juxtaposition of the powerful, electronic beat with delicate vocals.

Over a year ago, when Missal, like so many others, was at home, she bought some equipment and started recording at home. It was something she hadn’t done before. “All the music that I had made at that point, even if I had started it on my own, was created in a studio environment,” she says. “This was the first time I was working on ideas with total autonomy. It was just me messing around at home with vocals.”

Missal had a goal in mind. She wanted to gain enough skill at recording her own vocals so that, when the time was right, she could go into the studio and better explain the sounds she wanted or, maybe, do it herself. “I just wanted total freedom to focus on voice and lyrics and melody,” she says. So, instead of recording to an instrumental track or writing music, she used a clicker when she recorded with Logic, singing to a tempo that she thought would work.

The pandemic also prompted Missal to connect with people who could collaborate virtually. That was new for Missal too, as she’s typically worked on music with others in person. She sent her a cappella demos to Bodega, who composed music around the tracks and sent them back to her. “ It was the first time that I ever worked in that kind of process before,” she says. “We started making a lot of music that way.”

Flash forward to the summer of 2021: Missal flew out to London for her first recording sessions in a studio since the onset of the pandemic. The 10-day excursion was also her first longer stay in the city. “I wanted to finish everything that we started and I wanted to meet the people that had been working on this music with me remotely,” she says. “I had amazing support from my label to go do that.”

But Missal was able to do more than finish the tracks that began as remote collaborations. She and Bodega decided to spend a couple days writing new material together, in the same space. “It was so different from how I had been making music for about a year [at that point],” she says. “I was back in my environment, an environment that was very familiar to me, writing in a room with a person present and they’re producing and you’re doing your thing. It felt like a completely brand new thing, even though it was something that I had done before.”

“(To me) your face is love” is one of the songs that came out of this session. They wrote it in a matter of hours while in the studio, with Bodega working on the production and Missal handling lyrics and melody. “The song was really instantaneous. That’s always really fun for me, when they come together that way. Minimal effort, and you’re making choices based on what feels good and what you like,” she says. “You’re not thinking about how it will be perceived. You’re making music with someone in real time where both of your intentions are very pure.”

The experience in London proved to be eye-opening for Missal. “I also had this idea going out there that I wasn’t cool enough to hang out with those people,” she says. “It’s the most inclusive group of people that I’ve ever met. They were incredibly kind to me and brought me in like it was nothing. No one had questions about whether you were a visible person or whether you were worth it to engage with. That just wasn’t part of the way that anyone made their choices there.”

It was a chance to work on music without having to think about likes, followers, or whether or not it will sell or appeal to her fans. “I had a real revelation while being out there. I felt so much freedom that I hadn’t felt before,” she says. “It’s something that I’ll bring into my process moving forward with everything that I do, this openness to allowing yourself to be creative and make choices that feel good without worrying about all that other shit that tends to muddy the process and make music-making about something that it shouldn’t have ever been about.”

Follow Donna Missal on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Emma Ruth Rundle is at Her Most Emotionally Naked On Fifth Album Engine of Hell

Emma Ruth Rundle documents a chilling musical catharsis on her latest LP Engine of Hell; in the first fifteen minutes alone, she’s “down at the methadone clinic” on “Blooms of Oblivion” or lamenting the sadness of the world and the grief of death on “Body.” Pairing her world-wearied voice with piano alone proves deeply moving. The instrument is a sympathetic body; it tinkles, thunks, sings, shrinks away from touch or yields to the warmth of Rundle’s fingers. As far as comparisons go, there’s something here of Patti Smith’s throaty, poetic spoken word-style delivery and Tori Amos’ early work: confronting but beautiful songs digging through the emotional violations of her past.

When we speak, Rundle has taken time away from her Portland home to stay in a cabin near Netarts, Oregon. It is a different type of being alone to the one that instigated Engine of Hell. “Isolation was a was a huge piece of this album,” she explains; she began writing it while living in Kentucky with her (now-ex) husband, far from her roots and her rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. It was so alien to her that it sent her hurtling into a morass of memories and addictive behaviors. “The original title of this record was actually A Strange Midwest, which was about waking up in a weird place, alone, without any sense of self. The lockdown definitely pushed things further than maybe they would have gone otherwise. But I think a lot was leading up to this,” she says.

The album was recorded in Stinson Beach, California in December of 2020 at Panoramic House with longtime co-producer Sonny Diperri. “It was Sonny and I for ten days alone in the studio,” she remembers. “It was eerie, and intense and great. I did a lot of crying. We would track and then we’d listen, because we had to listen to choose the takes.”

<a href="https://emmaruthrundle.bandcamp.com/album/engine-of-hell">Engine of Hell by Emma Ruth Rundle</a>

All the guitar songs, and some of the piano, couldn’t be separated because Rundle had purposely recorded those songs as live performances. The process meant that Rundle would record several takes, listen back with Diperri, then do it again.

“The last few days, I added a bunch of overdubs with these keyboards they had lying around, only to decide that 90% of that was garbage and that the record didn’t need it,” Rundle adds. “It needed to be as naked as possible.”

It is the starkest of her records, the most bare-faced, openly wounded, humbling work of art. Sober today at 38, and grateful for it, Rundle’s formative musical influences make perfect sense – she recalls 1996 Tori Amos opus Boys For Pele as a spiritual sister to this album, along with Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green and Nick Drake’s Pink Moon.

“There’s also this record, Monotony Fields by Shape of Despair, a metal album that had so much despair on it, which gave me permission to just express that feeling and not be embarrassed about singing about how intense that state can be,” she adds. “Those were the records for me that set the ship sailing, got the boat in the water for this album.”

Her lyrics and her music have always felt emotionally genuine, candid and poetic, but not like Engine Of Hell. It follows her 2020 release, the deep, dark May Our Chambers Be Full with Louisiana metal band Thou, her third solo album On Dark Horses in 2018, and her harrowing 2016 sophomore album Marked for Death, largely informed by Rundle’s ongoing battle with adenomyosis – a condition in which damage occurs to the uterine wall, causing heavy bleeding and chronic pelvic pain, similar to endometriosis.

The LA-born and raised singer-songwriter’s musical career began in earnest when her mother took her to music store McCabe’s and allowed her to pick any instrument to learn. An adventurous choice – the Celtic harp – was swapped for a guitar, as well as the added bonus of 13 years working at McCabe’s thereafter. Her mid-twenties saw her enter a prolific period, self-releasing her first solo efforts Electric Guitar: One in 2011, and the darkwave-style Somnambulant, in 2013. Credited to The Headless Prince of Zolpidem, it revealed a new, disconcerting soundscape. She was also active in several bands at the time, with credits on four albums and two EPs across three projects: the Nocturnes, with Dave Clifford, Paris Patt and Julian Rifkin; post-rock quartet Red Sparowes; and Marriages with Greg Burns and Andrew Clinco.

But it was her official debut album Some Heavy Ocean (2014) that cemented her relationship with record label and management company Sargent House and its founder, Cathy Pellow. Rundle recorded it at the label’s in-house studio, taking up residence there during the sessions. It proved one of her most introspective, empowering experiences.

“I’ve been working with Cathy for over a decade. Cathy had my back and believed in me, in her way, since I was much younger. She took good care of me, she let me live in her house more than once… I’ve lived with Cathy five times because I’d been a mess and she’s always had the door open… that’s been invaluable in my life,” Rundle says. “For a long time, Cathy was my soul family – other than my sister, she was my person. I love her very dearly; our relationship goes so much further than business stuff.”

Rundle says Engine of Hell was hard for Pellow to hear. “It made her uncomfortable and she was concerned about how this might be received and if it would negatively affect my career, but she supported me,” she says. “Cathy and Sargent House never get involved… I make music, I turn it into them, and they have a reaction, which is incredibly supportive.”

While Pellow’s concerns are easily understood, Rundle’s discussions of mental health and revelations of trauma and addiction weave neatly into the cultural climate of the moment. Recurrent lockdowns and global fear and isolation have only amplified topics like these, already emerging in public forums and social media prior to the pandemic. To talk about these issues openly feels like a step toward recovering our collective emotional homeostasis. But to call the album cathartic would be too simplistic, not honoring its multi-tonal palette, its layers of memory, grief, healing, and suffering, and its deliberations of identity that can’t be neatly wrapped into lyrics and expunged. “I think it can be all the things without having to be just one,” she responds. “I feel like it has been cathartic. It was interesting writing it, then having finished it and listening to it now.”

She’s continued to expand on the album’s motifs by directing a pair of haunting videos: “Return” sees her playing both an Angel and Death; “Blooms of Oblivion,” co-directed with John Bradburn, offers some literal weightlessness to the song’s heavy subject matter. “There’s some catharsis there, especially making the videos and really getting to process these things in new and different ways,” she adds. Rundle’s been developing her own visual lexicon since she took up painting as a teenager; her most recent exhibition was part of a group show at London’s Parliament Tattoo commemorating the thirty-year anniversary of the release of iconic Hole debut Pretty On The Inside. One of thirty artists asked by Courtney Love to contribute work (which can be viewed in 3D here), proceeds from the auction benefit Treasures Foundation and Clean Break women’s charities.

No matter the medium, Rundle recognizes that achieving catharsis will be a lifelong quest for her. “I have some really intense trauma and tendencies towards some of the darker colors of the palette when it comes to mental health and emotional states of being that I don’t know will ever go away. It’s a thing that needs to be managed, and there’s maintenance involved… nothing is necessarily resolved,” she says. “I do think that making Engine Of Hell really helped me, in so many ways, transform my life. It was a quest to get back in touch with myself, where I came from, the context for my existence, because I lost touch with that, and I spent so long numbing myself out. I wanted to figure out what had happened and why, and why I was like this.”

Her candour on the album is liberating for herself and for this writer, and hopefully, for listeners too. The thrumming, pared back acoustic guitar on “The Company” is a plaintive ballad, wielding so much feeling in the spaces between notes, her sad humming lament. The guitar, melodically brighter and fuller on “Razor’s Edge,” is the tender caress to ease the sharpened edge of the lyrics, reflecting on the loss of youth, though it remains lyrically bleak. “There’s no need to check the weather as my winter never ends,” she sings. “I’ll be dancing on the razor’s edge, then.”

As they put the tracklist in order for Engine of Hell, Rundle and Diperri listened back to the songs once again. “It was startling to hear the album,” confides Rundle. “It was like, woah, am I really going to do this and let people hear this? It’s pretty intimate and a little bit uncomfortable to listen to. Later, I decided that’s exactly what I set out to accomplish, so that is a success. Whether it’s any good doesn’t matter. I had set out to do a thing and done it, without judgement. There was a goal, we set out to do it, we did it, there it is.”

Follow Emma Ruth Rundle on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Kult Kyss Nurture The Heartbeat of the Melbourne Dancefloor on Ultra Sound EP

From the first lush sonic textures and waves of synth on Ultra Sound, the debut EP from Kult Kyss out November 12th via TMRW Music, it’s hard not to envision a smoke-filled dancefloor. Vocalist Rromarin (Claire Rayner) and producer Haxx (Jack Arentz) have crafted a throwback to the big beat, anthemic dancefloor bangers of the ’90s; the Melbourne duo’s music is a delicious, shameless montage of building beats, thrilling climaxes, snaky vocoder-edged vocals, boxy beats and dubby, trap sounds.

“So Alive” epitomises their paean to the Melbourne dancefloor of the late ‘90s and noughties. The clever two-step foundation is fleshed out with a soup of synth bleeps and bloops, and a catchy vocal mantra (“I feel so alive”). Rayner traces their sound back to a surprising source of influence.

“Funnily enough, the closest thing to being my first formative dance banger experience was probably Savage Garden’s ‘I Want You.’ That track rocked my world,” she says. “I think there’s still parallels today, with my vocal sound and processing. You can hear things harking all the way back to that song.”

Since his partner is confessing to mid-90s crimes in musical coolness, Arentz confirms his own first album was from a series of trance mix albums that compiled relentless, ear-pounding remixes of well-known club tracks (think Bomfunk MC’s, Kylie Minogue, Craig David and Love Tattoo).

“My first CD was Wild Volume 13, during the Nick Skitz era of crazy mashup CDs. I remember rinsing it pretty hard! That was right around the time Da Rude ‘Feel The Beat’ and ‘Sandstorm’ were peaking. That High-NRG stuff,” he says.

Their tangible, deeper connection with dance music evolved more recently, with immersion into festivals and parties in Melbourne and beyond, explains Rayner. “The most formative years have been the last five to ten years of festivals and parties, and the experience of dancing as a collective. That’s the source of a lot of inspiration for Kult Kyss songs. Lyrically, you can hear that theme echo throughout our tracks – ‘Rituals’ specifically is literally that, the ritual of people coming together to dance. ‘God Is A Bassline,’ as well. A lot of Kult Kyss tracks are basically me worshipping at the altar of dance music.”

“Rituals” is a throbbing, bass-heavy groove number, in which Rayner’s croon slinks around the beats like an espresso martini on ice. There’s no sign of high-NRG, trance or Craig David, but the sexy smooth pop feel is – wonderfully – redolent of Savage Garden, though I wouldn’t have picked it if not for Rayner’s directive. There’s threads of more than one of Australia’s most commercially successful pop duos, though. Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again,” with its boxy synths, slinky vocals and simple keyboard progressions paved the way, as did Roisin Murphy’s early band, Moloko. “The Time Is Now,” with its clever layering of vocals, hook-filled choruses and unexpected use of flamenco guitar and hand-claps heralded an adventurous spirit of dance music when it was released in 1999, in which synths and live instruments opened up a welcome blending of genres and musical experiments.

Arentz and Rayner are emblematic of this cross-genre experiment working wonderfully both creatively and in life, generally. Arentz’s background was in live bands, while Rayner’s school and university years were dedicated to training in classical music.

“I was very heavily involved in classical music throughout high school then I went on to do Bachelor of Classical Music at the Melbourne University Conservatorium of Music, but I’d always wanted to be in bands and make contemporary music – pop, electronic, dance. When I met Jack, he helped me cross over to the dark side.”

It was an easy move for Rayner, but she admits, “everyone was very disappointed that I wasn’t continuing with classical music.”

Her instrument throughout university was the bassoon.

“Since I wrapped the degree, I haven’t picked up a bassoon because I so wholeheartedly wanted to move into a different realm of music,” she says. “I feel so grateful for that foundation… The only claim to fame for the bassoon is Howard Moon from Mighty Boosh!”

Arentz recalls, “I moved to Melbourne in 2010 to be in a rock band, which I won’t name for the shame, but that’s when I met Claire – around that time – and we started making music together. Originally, before Kult Kyss, [our music] was a hybrid of guitar, piano and electronic music. But it became progressively more and more electronic. Then we started running a rooftop studio together; we were having more rave events on the rooftop and that coincided with the birth of Kult Kyss and our love for ravier, electronic music.”

That studio is Joyluck, based in the inner northern suburb of Thornbury in Melbourne. Throughout the pandemic, the duo spent their time renovating it into a multi-arts venue for production and performance. It is the culmination of years of organising events, producing for other artists, performing at festivals and DJing.

It was their DJ sets that first attracted the attention of one of Australia’s most prestigious dance music duos. Kult Kyss covered The Presets’ “This Boy’s In Love” at the end of 2016, attracting the attention of the Australian band, who inveigled them onto their national HI VIZ tour of 2018. “Shout out to The Presets, who were a huge influence, and particularly for me,” says Rayner. “Obviously, that’s why working with them and touring with them was a dream come true, because we’ve been listening to them for a very long time.”

That influence simmers away in “God Is A Bassline,” which is cinematic, throbbing along like a futuristic Batmobile heading into the night with heroics in mind. It’s the sort of pulsating beat that convinces a fluffy-slipper and tracksuit-panted Melbournian that they can swipe some glitter over their eyelids and bravely get out of their apartment. Perhaps to the dancefloor, as restrictions loosen.

“The place where I feel most connected to strangers is on a dancefloor,” says Arentz. “That’s what really drew us into dance music the most, having these friendship groups running their own raves and events around a fire or on a rooftop. You get involved in music because you want to be connected. At its best, it’s like a fantasy world where you make friends on the dancefloor… all these people you’ve never met before have everything that you need.” Adds Rayner: “I feel like we’ve been off dancefloors for so long, but the community in Melbourne has been incredibly loving, kind, welcoming and safe.”

Follow Kult Kyss on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Linda From Work Rail Against Soul-Sucking 9-to-5s at Cafe Racer Gig This Weekend

Like many of us, Hilary Tusick, lead singer and songwriter of Seattle band Linda From Work, has had her fair share of shitty, soul-sucking 9-to-5 office jobs. But while many of us can only continue to seethe with our unresolved job-related bitterness, Tusick’s found some catharsis.

Her years of lukewarm coffee, dull coworkers, and email cc’s have become the lifeblood of her witty garage rock band and their last two releases—2019’s Two Week Notice, and last July’s Burnout. This Saturday, November 6th, Linda From Work will be out-of-office when they play the new Cafe Racer in Capitol Hill.

<a href="https://lindafromwork.bandcamp.com/album/burnout">Burnout by Linda From Work</a>

Looking at Tusick’s account of her own childhood, her unlikely journey from desk to stage makes sense. Tusick, originally from Cleveland, Ohio, says the first thing she can ever remember wanting to be was a musician.

“Even as a kid, [I was] performing Disney songs for my mom and setting up stages to perform for everybody,” Tusick remembers. “I did a lot of musical theater once I was in middle school and high school, just to have an avenue to perform. I was also taking piano lessons, guitar lessons, from an early age.”

Still, despite her dream, she says she was fairly “introspective” about her music, and went on to study English at University of Texas in Austin. Even in the “Live Music Capital of the World,” she didn’t share her own work much because, as she notes, her vibe was different. “I enjoyed that area for a while, but really wasn’t as into the music scene down there. It’s a great scene but again, I was just not meeting the exact right people for me,” says Tusick. “Then I tried Chicago for a bit, but it also wasn’t panning out in the way I’d hoped.”

She did meet her husband (and drummer in Linda from Work) Sam Nowak at University of Texas, and eventually, they decided to give Seattle a shot. Tusick says it’s the best decision they ever made. “I’ve always been really big into Riot Grrrl—Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney —that whole vibe. I love a lot of grunge, too, like obviously Nirvana and Sound Garden and so I [already felt] connected to music scene here,” she explains.

Sure enough, things progressed fairly quickly once the pair arrived in Seattle in 2015. Soon after landing in town, Tusick and Nowak met and begun collaborating with bassist Mary Robins, who Tusick calls their “missing puzzle piece.” From there, the band played several shows in 2018 and released their first EP, Two Weeks Notice, in February 2019.

Still, all the while, Tusick was working a mind-numbing job as an office administrator in an architecture firm to supplement her music income—but it wasn’t going well. “I don’t feel like I fit very well in the 9-to-5 corporate world,” Tusick admits. “So the first album was all about a lot of the frustrations and anxieties and difficulties of having a job like that.”

Going into the writing of their newest album, their debut full-length, Tusick hit the breaking point while still working her office administrator job. She poured it all into 2021’s Burnout. “I was working this 9-5, I felt overworked and underappreciated and I have some pretty severe anxiety and so the combination of all of that, and you know, being an insomniac on top of it all, just led me to a lot of really stressed out moments, a lot of low moments, a lot of frustration, anger,” Tusick says. “This album is called Burnout for a reason.”

Her distress is apparent on tracks like “Teeth,” which begins with a lone and unsettling guitar line and builds from there. The song chronicles a particularly upsetting experience that happened to Tusick at the height of her stress. “I was in multiple bands, I wasn’t sleeping much. I was like, okay, once I’m less stressed it’ll go away. I’ll be fine. And I kind of ignored it which I shouldn’t have, because one night, as I was just about to fall asleep, I felt something hard, like a rock or something in my mouth, and I started to wake up and feel what it is – I had bitten my back molar in half,” says Tusick. “Luckily it didn’t hurt but it was terrifying. I immediately started screaming. It’s like all those nightmares you hear about where people are losing their teeth, but this was actually happening.”

“No” is another song that stands out on Burnout, particularly because of the force and direction of the melody and the clarity and self-possession apparent in Tusick’s lyrics. According to Tusick, that’s by design—this song is all about finding your voice and learning to set boundaries—whether with a coworker or a lover.

“I feel like that song’s directed to a lot of people in my life,” she says. “I feel like personally people don’t say ‘no’ enough. You try to be nice and you’re trying to acquiesce to people but there’s certain times where I think it’s really beneficial to put up those boundaries and be like, no, I’m not going to do that. No, I’m not taking care of you. No, I’m not doing this. So I wrote that song from that place, for people over the years that I felt like I should have been saying no to.”

Still, Burnout is anything but depressing and hopeless—it’s high-energy, relatable, clever, and up-lifting. It’s the kind of music you pipe into your ears for motivation during another monotonous day at the office, and it also offers the perfect ambiance for a beer-soaked house party. Actually, the latter circumstance is actually pretty close to how they conceived their band name.

“We were actually at a Christmas party with members of my family, talking to my cousins, and [we thought], you know, we might as well just open this up and see if anybody stumbles on something good,” says Tusick. “None of them are musicians so they just kept throwing out ideas that were really metal and not the right vibe at all. So, we were like, what is the least rock ‘n’ roll thing you can think of? And one of my cousins goes, ‘Well, okay, you just made me think of this story—so the other day, Linda from work…” I was like, ‘Stop right there, that’s the band name, we got it.'”

There is definite irony in the fact that they named their band after the “least rock ‘n’ roll thing” they could think of, because Linda From Work is one of the better rock bands performing in Seattle today. Tusick says the history of the name isn’t meant to be self-deprecating; she just wanted a name that encapsulated the mundane work environment that was inspiring her musical output.

“If you have a more traditional job and you’re working around other people, there’s almost always one coworker that you’re just like, ugh, okay, I don’t need to hear about your vacation, or I’ve already seen 16 pictures of your new dog. ‘Linda From Work’ seemed like it was something that is kind of a memorable name, and something everyone can relate to, like, oh, yeah, my Linda from work is named Gloria, or ugh, Mark,” says Tusick.

Still, Tusick says they don’t plan to write about the office forever. In fact, they’re in the process of writing a new LP as we speak, with new inspiration and direction. After all, Tusick is in a much different place now that she was in the summer of 2020, when she wrote the bulk of Burnout.

“I feel very much recovered. I actually quit that job about a year ago this month. I’ve been able to take the last year luckily to focus exclusively on music and we’re already working on our new album,” Tusick says. “I’m growing as a songwriter. I think we’re even more comfortable as a band in our sound that we kind of developed with the last album. And the material—I mean, I still have anxiety, I still get angry, I still have, all the feelings. But they are directed at different things, it’s coming from different places, so it’s really exciting to explore new topics in my songwriting.”

Follow Linda From Work on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Quiet Takes Weathers Wondrous Dreams On ‘Weekly, Weakly’ EP

Sarah Magill has the strangest dreams. Quite recently, the Quiet Takes singer/songwriter imagined herself singing backup for Wilco, but “I didn’t know all of the words,” she recalls. Guitarist Nels Cline turned to her “with a big smile on his face and said, ‘It’s okay—we’re making music and that’s the important part!'”

Her dreams serve not only as a source of great amusement but thematic material for her songwriting. On “Guess Who Showed Up Again,” an essential cut on her new EP Weekly, Weakly, Magill pulls a recurring dream character into the real world. “Met you at the car wash/Trading Bisquik recipes,” she unspools. “Told me it was no loss/No one else I needed to be.”

“Mostly, my dreams are weird or disconcerting—but once in a while, I have dreams that are very reassuring,” she explains over a recent phone call. “So, this character just shows up, and we’ll do something really silly and symbolic, like we’ll be walking down a cobblestone street and we’ll stop and open up a little lockbox and there’ll be a key inside and it’ll hand me the key. It’s really kind of ridiculously beautiful moments. That character just shows up a lot, and I started writing that song after one of those dreams.”

Magill has been dream journaling her whole life, but she didn’t start chronicling her midnight reveries in earnest until early 2020. “I find my dreams really entertaining,” she laughs. When truly inspired by a dream, she’ll sit down at her computer and use the website 750 Words, “a fun idea based on Morning Pages,” she says, “so that every day you go in, they’ll tell you when you get to 750 words. It’s great if you have an actual writing project, and you want it to see the light of day. But it’s also really good if you just need to get all your stuff out in the morning.”

“So, now, I’ll wake up, and I’ll just type everything out real quick, if I can remember my dream, which is most days,” she adds. “It’s been a really good practice for me.”

Weekly, Weakly (co-produced with David Bennett) whirls round and round with dreamy arrangements and blurry-eyed production, casting the listener into a deep trance. Regret and loneliness vine together to culminate in a moody, sonically-seductive EP, born out of the weekly tradition, referenced in the title, Magill and Bennett started last summer. Each Friday, the two would meet up in the studio to play and tinker around with lyrics and sounds. “We basically did that for about 11 months, until this summer, which is not an efficient way to make music at all. But it was kind of necessary for the time we were in. It was efficient for mental health in having a place to go and a job to do.”

<a href="https://quiettakes.bandcamp.com/album/weekly-weakly-2">Weekly, Weakly by Quiet Takes</a>

While the six songs drench in “the emotional and mental fallout of the pandemic,” as she told Dusty Organ earlier this year, she had already been in the throes of such probing work. “Some of the themes I was already dealing with were just heightened. I was already writing a lot about loneliness and social insecurity and trying to find where you belong before the pandemic.”

But the lockdowns put “all those feelings on steroids, and then all of a sudden, it wasn’t just me thinking about it. It became a topic where we were all talking about a lot more,” she reflects.

“Talking to Album Covers” crunches layers of percussion together, as if Magill is flipping through a crinkled, yellow-paged storybook. Within its flecked melancholia, she attempts to make sense of a world shrouded in the darkness and isolation. “I literally put up some album covers that feature full face photos on my vinyl shelf, and I would talk to them. It was a real low point,” she admits. “It’s not like I didn’t ever talk to humans, but in that first stretch of three or four months where I was being really careful, I would only see friends on walks.”

Her loneliness hung like a funeral veil, closing off her world with a somber, chilly tint. “I think what was difficult with this batch of songs was I was trying to finish them during the pandemic. I was living alone. Everybody had different challenges, and so I felt like I was just really struggling to communicate what I was feeling and doing that in a musical way that didn’t feel trite or overwrought or cliché.”

“It wasn’t writer’s block; it was writer’s sludge. I remember one day at the studio, I was sitting on the concrete floor and trying to rewrite some lyrics, and then finally giving up and being like, ‘Yep, I got absolutely nothing. I have no thoughts in my head today.’ And that’s okay. I just needed to go home.” Laughing, she quickly adds, “You can get in the habit of writing and journaling and going to the studio — but you also have to know when it’s just time to take a nap.”

Ultimately, Magill has achieved a kind of timelessness and universality with this body of work—any worry that it might sound trite or cliché proves to be unfounded with relatable, candid songwriting. On “What I Should Have Said,” she strives to find peace within herself from a mangling of regret and sorrow. “There’s a lot of layers to [this] one. The main emphasis being I wish that I would have said something to a friend that I never did,” she says. “And I think we all have those. We all have those moments of regret when we look back on a situation.”

“Funny, I was talking about regret with some friends this weekend. We were driving around and going to a show, and one of my friends is very positive. I was talking about regret, and I think she was worried that it was going to make me depressed,” continues Magill. “I fully believe in [having] regrets, because they teach you, if you’re willing to learn from them. I’m deeply motivated to not make certain mistakes in my life anymore. I have sat with that regret, and I know what that feels like. I see moving forward. I was joking, ‘That’s going to be on my tombstone 一 just regret.’”

Throughout the process, and in navigating the ebb and flow of mental health, songwriting has anchored a growing understanding of her emotions. “I’m basically writing so I remember something I need to remember. In ‘What I Should Have Said,’ I’m trying to remind myself to say what you need to say, be present, and don’t feel regret like this again. That’s how I’ve learned about myself. I’m hoping as I learn more and get deeper into the craft that it will hopefully not just be about me anymore, and I’ll be able to tap into the more universal experience. And I’ll get better at learning from other people, too.”

On a more technical level, Magill has become better-equipped in understanding what works in the recording studio and is honing her vocal technique. “I’ve started to add some little pieces to my own, so I can do better demos at home, like getting a good preamp and a compressor,” she says. “On this album, I’m continuing to learn how to sing in the studio better and finding what mics work for me. I think I’ll be learning this forever, but I’m learning how to give a technically acceptable take. I have a lot of mouth noises, and I’m trying to figure out how to get rid of my mouth noises.”

With Weekly, Weakly, Magill marks this time and season of her life with a strong, thought-provoking body of work and invites the listener to show up for themselves, even when times are tough. “This is to remind myself and other people that you don’t have to go into any project knowing what you’re doing,” she offers, “and you don’t have to go into it feeling strong. I’m definitely a perfectionist, and that can be a defense mechanism for me.”

“Even if you’re weak, even if you think you have nothing to give, showing up is the important part,” she adds. “If you just keep showing up, something will come of it. The discipline is showing up despite feeling like you have nothing to give.”

Follow Quiet Takes on Twitter and Instagram from ongoing updates.

Caroline Romano Captures Messy Teen Romance With “Ireland in 2009”

Caroline Romano is a self-professed people watcher. “I do a lot of people watching. I’m a big observer,” she expresses. “Something that I don’t know that everyone else would notice, I like to write it down. Observing life, everyone has a different lens through which they look at it. If I journal my own experience there’s something unique to learn in that.”

Growing up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi as a quiet, shy student who had difficulty connecting with her peers, Romano found sanctuary in her journal where she’d share her innermost thoughts and feelings. When she started putting these emotions to music, it became clear that she was a natural born songwriter. Her parents gifted the aspiring artist a trip to Nashville for her thirteenth birthday, and like a scene out of a movie, she booked a coveted slot at the famous Bluebird Cafe. “I fell in love with performing and I felt very called to do this with my life,” Romano recalls to Audiofemme of the pivotal trip.

Her parents’ decision to allow her to leave school and pursue music certainly paid off, Romano finding herself inside the Top 15 on the Billboard Dance chart in 2020 with “I Still Remember (ft. R3HAB),” the video alone amassing over one million views. Her subtle writing draws the listener in with its tender renderings of everyday nuance, and she’s steadily released a string of alt-pop gems over the last year – most recently “Oddities and Prodigies” (with b-side “Lonely Interlude”), “The Hypothetical” and “PDA of the Mainstream.” She is actively working on new music, with plans to release an album in early 2022.

But for now, she returns with “Ireland in 2009,” premiering exclusively on Audiofemme. This time, the observant creator drew inspiration for the fanciful track from 2009 indie film Cherrybomb, starring Romano’s favorite actor Robert Sheehan, and Harry Potter star Rupert Grint. Filmed in Belfast, the movie follows the two on a journey of debauchery as they try to catch the attention of the same girl. Romano felt compelled to write a song around the theme of tragic teenage romance, a la Romeo & Juliet “if they hung out in parking lots and smoked cigarettes all the time,” she says.

Caroline Romano · Caroline Romano – Ireland In 2009 (Private)

Though Romano was just eight years old when Cherrybomb was released, it informed her perspective on romance, alongside other movies she watched at that age, like Notting Hill, Letters to Juliet, and The Notebook. “I wanted to write about the kind of love that doesn’t get written about in story books: the things that dissipate over time and probably only two people will ever even remember,” she explains of the song’s inspiration, noting that the setting of Cherrybomb “gave me everything I needed.” “I wanted to get in on that action of oversimplified, high school storytelling in a way that I missed out on because I was so young during that time, but it’s what I grew up watching and thinking about when I thought of romance.”

Romano sets the scene of an ill-fated teen romance that will ultimately end in demise, yet is still filled with wonder and intrigue for the two main characters. She accomplishes this through lyrics that capture the messy, yet free-spirited nature of young love, like “Look at you asleep on the floor/By the mattress in the middle of the door/I just woke up from an all night war/In my school clothes from the day before.”

“When you’re young, everything is so dramatic and the end of the world and everything has so much meaning, but it’s all these small little things. I thought about how I could make these two characters and their lives in this desolate place in rainy Ireland sound deep and dramatic,” the Nashville-based pop artist explains. “This is messy, but it works, and it’s not going to end well, but it’s pretty to them.” The image-driven lyrics capture an imperfect love story that looks beautiful to the people inside of it. It’s a story steeped in youth, particularly as Romano chants, “Broken glass and empty bottles/Our 21st century fossils/Shattered dreams instead of dollars.”

“I think there’s a lot of expectation with every kid – you grow up with dreams and you think at that age that you’re going to be something really big, but at that time, everything is so small, and all you have are these literal fragments of dreams you’re trying to piece together to make life happen,” she analyzes. “When you look back sometimes on that, I think that whether you were successful, whether you had money in the future or not, those times of poverty and recklessness was the best it ever gets.”

Romano adds a personal element to the song with the line “for a quiet girl you’re awfully loud,” an observation a friend made about her. Romano recalls her friend telling her, “You don’t say a lot, but when you say something, it means a lot and it has depth,” validating the shy girl who also harbors a powerful voice that commands attention.

“I’ve always really cherished it and I wanted to put that in the song somehow,” she says of that compliment. “I think a lot of the times it is the quiet ones that say the most. I felt very seen. I felt that people do recognize that I’m quiet and reserved and shy, but maybe I do have something worth saying after all.”

“Ireland in 2009” also reflects Romano’s unique desire to live out experiences she’ll never have, crafting a narrative she can only live vicariously through her characters. “I’m someone who definitely has a fear of missing out on experiences and missing parts of the world because I realize that my world is so small and there’s so many people I’ll never love or know, and that scares me,” she confesses. “I find comfort in other people’s stories, or at least imagining other people’s stories. I think everyone feels that way, so writing about it definitely helps and gives me a taste of it.”

As someone who walks through the world with eyes wide open, Romano hopes that the song transports the listener to their own version of “Ireland in 2009.” “I find very ugly things beautiful a lot of the time, or very sad things beautiful. I write about love in its purest form,” she professes. “I hope that they see an ultra-specific place… that they’ve known in their own life. I hope they imagine certain people living that out. I hope it reminds someone of a past love that was similar in some way. I hope it brings them somewhere I was trying to create for that song.”

Follow Caroline Romano on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for ongoing updates.

Zzzahara and Ynes Mon Join Forces on Debut U.S. Velvet Video

Like mixing baking soda and vinegar in a science fair volcano, L.A.-based musicians Zahara Jaime and Collin Davis couldn’t help but react explosively once their powers combined.

Jaime has been hard at work on their solo project under the moniker Zzzahara, as well as playing guitar with Eyedress and in The Simps (both with Idris Vicuña). Davis makes expansive ambient soundscapes as Ynes Mon, releasing his debut LP Holyhead in March of this year. But once the pair started bonding over drum machines and post-punk, their combustible collaboration as U.S. Velvet began to take shape, and last week, they released a video for their eponymous single, directed by Brother Adam Willis.

Angular dance punk guitars, disenchanted attitudes, and a skronky sax solo from the mysterious Folerio soundtrack the world’s weirdest pool-party, populated mainly by cardboard cut-outs that stand in for a bygone era of idealized Hollywood glamour. “To me, the song is this hedonistic embrace of nihilism in present day America and the video reads almost like the opening scene from Blue Velvet… playing into the white picket aesthetic of the MAGA ‘American Dream’ while exposing true darkness that is hiding underneath,” explains Davis. “Then there’s Z and I, subverting and wreaking havoc upon it, like the slasher in a ’70s horror flick.”

“We live to erase/Take me to a far gone place,” the duo shout-sings, building up an arsenal of surrealist imagery along the way. Their nihilistic critique of modern-day struggle comes from observing it first-hand in rapidly gentrifying Highland Park. Jaime was born and raised there; Davis migrated from the Bay Area after dropping out of college to pursue music. “Z and I both worked service industry jobs on the same block. I had known Z very casually for a couple of years and we would just give each other free drinks at our wack jobs,” Davis remembers. “I think Z thought I was Billie Eilish’s brother for a long time because he was also a regular.”

“Collin was so friendly – every time he’d come up to me and be super smiley, and I’m just like, dude… why are you so happy all the time? Like, I’m fuckin’ miserable in my life, why are you so cool?” Jaime says with a laugh. Davis suggested they go to The OffBeat’s regular Monday night drag open mic, and though Jaime scoffed at the idea initially, they both eventually wound up there.

“Looking back I was pretty persistent on hanging out in the beginning but now they are one of my closest friends and collaborators so I’m glad I did,” says Davis. “I just always thought they had such a cool vibe from afar and then my good friend booked them at a show so I knew they were homie verified.”

By then, Davis had started working as a producer and sound engineer at Stones Throw Studios, a job he got through a mutual friend after working in a couple of different studios around L.A. “Working with all the artists who come through has been a huge blessing,” he says. “I’m always peeping game in studio sessions and learning from other artists’ process.”

It was a blessing for Jaime too, who had been recording at home for years, to finally have access to a studio setting – and their musical chemistry was on point. “Collin has taught me so much about audio stuff,” they say. “He can just read my mind and that’s why I love working with him so much. He’ll be like, ‘I feel like you need to tap into a more emotional riff…’ He brings out the better musician in me and I think I bring it out in him too because we feed off of each other. We could put together [ideas] and it becomes this poppy dark wave instrumental and it’s so sick.”

Still, Davis says, he and Jaime had no intentions of starting another band at first. “We went into Future Music on York Boulevard to browse and I pointed out a cool drum machine. The next day Z showed up at my door with the same drum machine in hand. Within 48 hours we had recorded two U.S. Velvet tracks,” he recalls. “Z and I have pretty different taste in music but we both love late ’70s and early ’80s post punk and goth so even though it was never discussed I think that became a natural jumping off point for our sound.”

Last year, they released debut single “Sleep Paralysis,” which sprawls gorgeously into the goth territory of songs like The Cure’s “Lullaby.” While “U.S. Velvet” is decidedly more boisterous, making use of cool audio tricks like a chopped up, backward vocal, both provide a nice entry point for the band’s sonic touchstones. The version of “U.S. Velvet” posted to Bandcamp is a full minute longer than the cut used for the video, thanks to a chaotically transcendent guitar solo bridge that somehow conveys just as must angst as the song’s despondent lyrics. And yet, the overall sound is nervy, infectious, and perfect for an apocalyptic dance party.

Regardless of the darker influences and motifs they’re drawn to, Jaime and Davis clearly approach U.S. Velvet from a place of wanting to have fun with it, and they develop songs for the project on a rolling basis, not worried about where they’ll go. In the meantime, Liminal Spaces, the debut album from Zzzahara, will be out on Lex Records sometime next year; Davis says he has been working on “a good amount of psych-R&B where I’m singing, and at least two instrumental albums made in collaboration with a therapist for psychedelic assisted therapy.” He will also release a song and video called “Sun Eyes” as Ynes Mon soon, with “a couple full projects done waiting in the wings for the right time.” When it comes to U.S. Velvet’s prescient dark-wave nihilism, it feels like there’s no better time than now.

Follow U.S. Velvet on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Vakili Band Call For Compassion With Reworked “Dreamy Dreamer”

Lily Vakili once asked her mother, “What do you want me to be?” She was never one to give “easy answers,” as Vakili recalls, and her response propelled the singer-songwriter to question her place in the world. “I want you to be a compassionate human being,” she told her daughter. Vakili’s mother died from Alzheimer’s disease, and in many ways, the long goodbye served as the catalyst to revisit a previously recorded song.

“Dreamy Dreamer,” originally appearing as “Dreamy Dreamers” on the Vakili Band’s 2018 LP Oh Alright, wound itself around Vakili’s brain. “My mother was a dreamy dreamer, a deeply ethical and compassionate person,” she muses. “In some ways, she’s a catalyst for everything that I do, creatively – not the only catalyst, but a catalyst.”

With “Dreamy Dreamer,” Vakili and bandmates Ben St. Jack (guitar, songwriter), Joel Dorow (harmonica), Gordon Kuba (drummer), Jim Tyndall (bass), and Matt Jovanis (bass) worked with producer Dave Amlen, who suggested a back-to-roots adaption. “This is a great thing about collaborating with other artists and friends and just listening to people paying attention,” offers Vakili.

In their creative endeavors, she discovered a vocal approach “that changes the way I feel about it, and I think it changes the way the listener feels about it.” And “Dreamy Dreamer” exemplifies the best of Vakili’s work, often calling to touchstones like Patti Smith and Brandi Carlile. Her voice is as butter on a hot tin roof, just enough sizzle to drive home the emotional anvil.

Initially intended as a social justice meditation, the song’s transformation into a universal plea for love in all its forms, even the damaged and broken, was reaffirmed recently when Vakili read a piece on Ashley M. Jones, named the new Poet Laureate of Alabama, a role she’ll hold from 2022-2026. What struck Vakili deep in her soul was Jones’ description of love, felt like unshakeable tremor, that now guides every facet of Vakili’s life. “The biggest thing that I learned moving away is that love is a complete word,” Jones explained. “It’s not just, ‘I like this thing, it’s always good to me.’ Love means also understanding what’s wrong and committing to change for the better.”

In the last few years, she has been doing much of this deeply personal work in her life, confronting herself in the mirror with a searing honesty. “I guess, sometimes it’s about change, and sometimes it’s about honesty,” she says, recognizing “that there’s probably much more that I can do as an individual” and understanding “where I am in society and what I am able to do and contribute, so that I can approach people with a greater sense of compassion.”

The role of grief appeared as an integral thread to the song’s thematic fabrics of love and empathy, as well. “My son was diagnosed very young on the autistic spectrum, and had an underlying medical condition. That’s pretty serious. That puts you in a whole world that one never anticipates,” she reflects. “As with a lot of grief, you can either shut it off and proceed as if it isn’t altering you at a cellular level, or you wade in and experience it. There is one solution, and it’s exactly what I wanted to end up singing about in the song, which is love.”

“Within that world of great grief and exhaustion, there is the physical challenge of being a character,” she continues. “There are these extraordinary gestures of kindness and solidarity and compassion, and my son’s been the beneficiary of those things. So, I’ve witnessed the way any elder hopefully can teach someone else in how you do this. This is how you’re kind. This is how you ease someone’s mind for a little bit. This is how you show solidarity.” Those experiences served as the blueprint for the song’s rousing refrain: “I stand with you in your quest to believe in justice/Tempered by compassion/Yeah, truth without deceit/Where everyone can say without hesitation/Love is all that matters.”

Her father, an Iranian immigrant who became a plant geneticist in Honduras, and her mother, an Irish-American librarian, believed in the power of music, words, and dreaming beyond the here and now. Vakili first began writing poetry for her mother when she was only six years old, and despite not quite understanding the gravity of her work then, it became evident she was onto something huge. “I didn’t even characterize it as poetry. I loved her, and I was a writer, so I wanted to express myself. Then, I started to realize that the things that I’d written were all stories, fundamentally,” she recalls.

Spending part of her childhood in Puerto Rico, home life was filled with a “wild mix” of sounds which included the West Side Story soundtrack, traditional Peruvian music, R&B, funk, honky-tonk, and Merengue music. “These rhythms were just everywhere, and I was like a sponge. I love music. I love rhythm and percussion,” she says. “Of course, the acoustic guitar really is in its essence a percussive instrument.” She picked it up around the age of 14, when her older sister left for college. “I am a believer that strange things happen all the time. Sometimes, you don’t know until much later what that thing was that unlocked what you’d maybe been seeking or hoping to explore. Playing the guitar was a mixture of an escape of sorts and meditation, a way of being super present.”

Now a biotech lawyer by day and a musician by night, Vakili is more present than ever. With two previous solo records and one band LP to her credit, her love for words and music-making is only growing stronger and brighter with each project. “I love writing. I love words. I love intentionality. And I love listening. So, I try to make myself available,” she offers about her growth as a songwriter over the years.

Her favorite words? “You mean, other than curse words? I am embarrassed to say, but I just have a phenomenally filthy mouth,” she says with a laugh. “I think it’s because curse words are highly percussive.”

More seriously, Spanish, her native language, is home to many of her favorite words and phrases. “I love ‘te adoro’ — I adore you. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Spanish itself is such an incredible language to listen to,” she says. “As my mother went further and further into Alzheimer’s, one of our favorite pastimes was, I would bring a dictionary or a newspaper, and I would read it to her. I would read simple things that I knew she would appreciate. She still loved words so much.”

“Dreamy Dreamer” arrives as not only an important marker of the past, its emotional messaging scrawled in acoustic tears, but a bellwether for the band’s future — one carved in compassion and musical excellence.

Follow Vakili Band on Twitter and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Transformation, Rebirth, and Unsolved Mysteries Inspired Latest Marissa Nadler LP The Path of the Clouds

Marissa Nadler binged Unsolved Mysteries during lockdown. Among other things, obviously – the Boston-based “dream folk” songwriter took piano lessons, and wrote, recorded and produced her ninth solo album The Path of the Clouds, out October 29 on Sacred Bones/Bella Union. These activities are less unrelated than you might think, as the long-running true crime show inspired several songs on the record.

The implied brutality doesn’t track at first, set against the notion of Nadler’s sparse acoustic riffs, carried higher into the heavens by her now-iconic mezzo-soprano. She notes, though, that the stories that inspired her most were not necessarily the most violent, but rather, perhaps, the most mysterious: the ones of those who disappeared, never to be found.

“That concept of starting a life again was something I found very interesting, and personally related to,” she explains. “Just the concept that maybe if these people did make it, that they were able to recreate themselves. In some ways, I’ve gone through some transitions in my life that made the overlaps kind of clear.”

<a href="https://marissanadler.bandcamp.com/album/the-path-of-the-clouds">The Path of the Clouds by Marissa Nadler</a>

That idea of transformation, of being reborn, plays central to the record. Acclaimed for her brilliant guitar playing and haunting vocals over the course of her nearly twenty-year career as a songwriter, she’s got some consistently big shoes to keep filled. Music critics (perhaps worth noting, male critics) frequently ascribe the siren narrative to her: Pitchfork wrote in a glowing review for 2004’s Ballads of Living and Dying that hers was “the sort of voice that you’d follow straight to Hades,” and in a 2006 article, The Boston Globe said, “She has a voice that, in mythological times, could have lured men to their deaths at sea, an intoxicating soprano drenched in gauzy reverb that hits bell-clear heights, lingers, and tapers off like rings of smoke.”

Without projecting anything onto Nadler myself, I can imagine that such consistent, albeit well-deserved praise, praise evoking the divine, might weigh one down with a certain type of pressure to perform, to repeat successes. Which, I think, is what makes The Path of the Clouds not only special, but perhaps Nadler’s most impressive album yet. Her yearning for transformation, for definition on her own terms, shines through with the experimental risks she took not only in the lyricism itself, but in the scope of the instrumentation too; the album features piano, woodwind and synthetic elements, what she calls “a return to some of the spacy stuff that I’ve always liked,” i.e. the Pink Floyd records she grew up on. It’s ambitious and complex, evidence of an artist in constant evolution.

Despite the inherent anxiety and downsides, the pandemic offered her space to try new things time to be “very creatively fruitful.” Thematically, it strays from earlier work. “A lot of these songs are more about personal growth and change, instead of some of my early records, [which] were lovelorn, heartbroken,” she says. “There’s a lot less of that on this record, and more about a personal journey.”

Meanwhile, her experimentation with other instruments played into the LP’s different sound. Though her piano teacher Jesse Chandler ultimately played keys on the record, she wrote much of it on a piano. “If you’ve been playing an instrument like the guitar for a long time you get stuck, or you gravitate towards certain chord progressions,” she explains. “But when you sit at a piano, your fingers go to different places. Chord progressions that are harder to play on the guitar are easier on the piano, and little things like that gave a lot of melodic inspiration to me.”

We are left with eleven songs about “metamorphosis, love, mysticism and murder.” While the fresh instrumentation is best displayed with the sweeping grandeur of tracks like “Elegy,” the lyrical storytelling shines on the Unsolved Mysteries-inspired tracks. On “Bessie, Did You Make It?,” she asks just that: “Did you make it on your own?” She inverts the traditional murder ballad narrative, one where victim becomes survivor in a stunning journey of resilience. Similarly, the title track tells the story of plane hijacker D.B. Cooper who famously hijacked a Boeing 727 in 1971, escaped by jumping out and purportedly faking his own death. In Nadler’s hands, it becomes a tale of mastering your own fate and going out on your own terms.

In many ways, perhaps that’s what the pandemic offered Nadler: the chance to disappear and start over. And she did, subverting our expectations to give us something fresher, fuller. This didn’t just apply to her musical practice – a RISD-trained fine artist, she’s honing her painting practice and seeking gallery representation as a visual artist, training she’s also applying to her music videos, while also exploring the idea of film scoring, an intuitive next step for music so cinematic and rife with drama. Considering what the first twenty years of Nadler’s career have offered us, I look forward to what she brings us with the next twenty, with each reborn version of herself.

Follow Marissa Nadler on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Anna Lunoe Focuses on Inspiring, Hopeful Conversations About Creativity with New Podcast

Need a little inspiration to get you started on your next project? Anna Lunoe has a podcast for you. Back in September, the DJ/producer launched Create/Destroy, a series of in-depth, process-centric interviews with fellow artists.

Lunoe had been wanting to do a podcast for quite some time. “It’s been on my board, waiting for a window when it felt right,” she says in an email interview. “I kind of had the idea for a while, and then, after what was meant to be a really quick five-minute interview with Porter Robinson went for 45 minutes and got super deep, I really thought, damn, I have to do this! These conversations would be so crucial for people who want to make music and just generally live their passions! I have to do it. I will make the time somehow!”

At the time of this story, Lunoe had already released two episodes of the new show. The first featured British DJ and producer Chris Lake, with whom Lunoe had previously collaborated on the 2015 track “Stomper.” The second focused on an interview with TT the Artist, director of the documentary Dark City Beneath the Beat, whose work includes music, film and visual art.

“I considered people from all avenues of music with different but incredible stories to tell who could shift perspective and speak to people deeply about creative life,” Lunoe explains. “This season I went for people I knew so I could work out the flow of a conversation like this, and make sure each chat was natural. But in the future I would really like to flex into all kinds of creative fields!”

Create/Destroy isn’t about pursuing music as a career. It’s not even really about music; the subjects tackled here could be applied across disciplines. Instead, Lunoe is digging into creativity as a necessary part of life. She says that talking about the connection between creativity and self-care, or “how linked creativity is with mental health and feelings of well being within ourselves,” really struck a chord with her. “We must constantly work towards it and realign with our values in order to maintain productivity and flow,” she says.

Lunoe, whose career began in Sydney’s club scene of the early ‘00s, says that her own approach to creativity has shifted throughout the years. “I went from having a desire to create, lumped under a big pile of insecurity that was stopping my productivity, to learning how to ditch the load and be able to access and apply it with much more ease,” she says. “That process is heavy work and guidance is necessary!”

Even now, though, good things can take time. Lunoe’s recent single, “Back Seat,” which features Genesis Owusu on vocals, began to take shape back in 2019. “I had the core three elements – bass, synth motif, and defining beat groove – within the first twenty minutes, and the rest took nearly two years to fall into place!” she says. The track was put on hold for various reasons. In the meantime, Lunoe herself experienced a major life event with the birth of her second child right before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Perhaps I needed all those changes to find the version of the song that I have today,” she muses. “Genesis came on board this year and it finally felt done!”

Lunoe says that the pandemic has changed her approach to creativity in some ways. “It has allowed me a deeper dive into a few things that touring did not allow me,” she says. “I don’t have access to resources I once had, or at least not in the same way. It’s been good and challenging at times. On a personal level I’ve deeply investigated the other sides of myself that don’t apply to touring and performance, and what’s important for me to foster without that. Hence deciding to do this podcast!”

And the podcast comes at a great time, bringing a message of hope after nearly two years of pandemic-related upheaval. The hopefulness in Lunoe’s podcasts is part of the point of the series. “Life is challenging right now. We know that,” she says. “Hope is necessary to creation and vice versa.”

She continues, “There are many loud scary voices telling us there is no hope, so it’s up to those still with hope in their hearts to be very loud right now. If you have it, USE it. We need every loud voice screaming for potential and beauty to make the world a better place to be.”

Follow Anna Lunoe on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for ongoing updates.

Dami Im Sheds Every Illusion on Sixth LP My Reality

“I feel like this is [the] dream album that I’ve always wanted to make since I was a teenager, so I’m really looking forward to having it out there,” says Korean-Australian pop singer Dami Im of her latest LP, My Reality. With five previous albums and a decade of music industry experience propelled by her success in reality television singing competitions, that’s no small claim. Each step of Im’s journey brought her closer to fully manifesting her artistic vision – honing her voice, sharing her views, building her contacts, and weaving the threads of her identity into one cohesive album. Along with its October 29 release comes a sense of liberation and empowerment, too.

“I needed to understand how to achieve it. I feel like now, I’m at a point where I do have the drive, the maturity and the skills to be able to create what I actually hear in my head, and to try to make the vision come to reality,” Im says. “You can know what you want in your head, but executing it is a different question… I didn’t know how to get there, and work with the right people, collaborate, and follow through with that vision to the end… I feel like I now have that confidence and the strength to do that.”

My Reality is musically-rich, multi-textured pop, drawing from Im’s love of electro, rock and dance and her background in classical and gospel music. Hip-hop and pop producers Andrew Burford, One Above (Hilltop Hoods, Illy), Andy Mak (Vera Blue, Tina Arena) and Konstantin Kersting (Tones And I, Spacey Jane) were all on board for the project. While the album’s title is a cheeky reference to her reality TV fame in Australia, it more importantly illuminates the contrast between knowing someone from the hour or so each week that you see them through a screen, and actually, really knowing someone.

“What I consider to be my reality may be different to how other people perceive it,” she attests. “It’s factual and a fantasy all at the same time. Because of all the television and reality TV shows, people assume they know me and they know me a certain way but I don’t think they know me all the way, all the different ways.”

In Australia, Dami Im first became a household name on the fifth season of popular TV show The X Factor Australia in 2013. In 2016, she represented Australia at Eurovision, becoming the highest scoring Australian entry ever with her “Sound of Silence.” Two years later, she performed at the Commonwealth Games Closing Ceremony. In between, there’s been five albums, a reality TV dance show (Dancing With The Stars) and a reality TV cooking competition (Celebrity MasterChef), and number one albums and singles.

But Im’s love of music stretches back much further, to her childhood in Seoul. “My mum was trained in opera and classical singing, so we always had lots of music in the house, lots of classical music. We couldn’t not play music, me and my brother. My dad loved playing a lot of instruments as well, and singing,” she recalls. She began piano lessons at the age of 5, later singing and writing her own songs. When the family moved to Brisbane, music provided a sense of belonging and connection in Im’s new and unfamiliar surroundings.

“Playing the piano was not only helpful for me musically, but I think that’s what gave me some kind of identity and confidence when I first came to Australia,” she says. “I couldn’t speak English very well, so I felt really dumb…[but] whenever it came to music, I could play piano and at that really tiny school, everyone thought that I was the best. I felt really proud as a little kid. Music gave me this other language that I could use.”

By age 11, Im began studying piano at the Young Conservatorium of Music program at Griffith University in Queensland, later becoming a national finalist in the Yamaha Youth Piano Competition. In 2009, she graduated from the University of Queensland with first class honours in a Bachelor of Music, and also completed a Masters of Music Studies degree in contemporary voice. Her formal schooling might have pointed towards a classical career – especially given her mother’s success in that realm – but the art and science of making pop music held heightened allure. Im’s thorough understanding of theory allows her to convey her vision to collaborators and fully realise it, knowing what is technically achievable.

“There’s a lot more to it than musical skills,” she counters. “I got thrown in to the industry pretty quickly through The X Factor and even though I had been making music all my life… it was different when I had to do it on a really big scale, and I had, suddenly, so much pressure… All of a sudden, I had to make something that would be played on radio, and what does that even mean?”

A condition of her X Factor win was signing to Sony Music Australia, which provided her with a recording and management deal after she won with the single “Alive.” She left Sony last year; last month, the label made national news in Australia for an investigative TV revelation on ABC’s 4 Corners of decades of abuse, harassment and systematically firing women when they were on maternity leave.

“I did watch it and yeah, yeah, that’s where I was,” says Im with a nervous laugh. “Whatever the staff experienced there, the artists also experienced…for me, I don’t think I’ve ever been silent about it. I’ve always said things about my experience and I guess people didn’t pay that much attention until now.”

It’s not surprising that artists have been less willing to talk about their experiences with Sony – especially those that still feel indebted to the label, whether emotionally or contractually. Im not only feels she’s paid that debt, but that Sony’s insistence on pushing her to record covers rather than originals sold her extremely short as a creative force, ultimately driving her to sign with competitor ABC Music. “All I can say is when I was at Sony I had some really great opportunities and really great experiences as well… [but] on a creative level, I felt that I needed to have more control,” she admits. “I learnt that I like to be the boss when it comes to my songwriting, so for me it was time to leave.”

There were certainly clues to her struggle in the first singles she released independently, beginning with 2019’s “Crying Underwater,” which addressed the pressure to look content while secretly suffering. Then, in January 2020, “Kiss You Anyway” revealed the more emotive route Im would be taking; she recorded a Korean version in November last year. The third single, “Marching On,” was a love song from a daughter to her mother, anchored by piano and hand-click-style percussion.

After signing to ABC and dropping “Paper Dragon” last year – a siren song that declares her newfound confidence – she followed up with the mid-tempo, sunshine pop of “Lonely Cactus.” A twangy bass line roots the song, layered over with synth claps, funky drums and Im’s lyrical paean to being alone, prickly and defensive. “I try and go to those uncomfortable problems and thoughts and experiences, because I think when I go to those dangerous places, people relate to it more,” she confesses.

All of these songs appear on My Reality, showcasing Im’s emotional versatility. But her latest single, album opener “Pray,” is perhaps one of the most powerful. Im’s literal faith has always been front-and-center in her career, but “Pray” is, perhaps even more poignantly, a celebration of Im’s faith in herself. Never faltering in that belief has resulted in an album of funky, rhythmic, danceable pop that both addresses and unites us in handling everyday injustices and micro-traumas of life – one that Dami Im has every right to be proud of, now that she’s made it a reality.

Follow Dami Im on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Poly Styrene Battled Breast Cancer But it Wasn’t the End of her Legacy

Poly Styrene / Photo Credit: Falcon Stuart

As October—named Breast Cancer Awareness month—draws to a close, our thoughts turn to the extraordinary women in our personal lives and in the public sphere who’ve faced the disease. Musicians Minnie Riperton, Carly Simon, and Melissa Etheridge, designer Betsey Johnson, comedian Wanda Sykes, photographer Linda McCartney, feminist trailblazer Gloria Steinem, and author/advocate Audre Lorde, legends all, are just a few who’ve received this diagnosis.

Riperton, McCartney, and Lorde died of breast cancer—but not before sharing their remarkable inner strength with the world. Riperton filmed a public-awareness TV segment about her diagnosis in the late ’70s, speaking out to help other women at a time when public discussion of the disease was rare. McCartney attended one of her daughter Stella’s fashion shows toward the end of her life, in 1998; the physical frailty she allowed cameras to capture was nothing compared to the pride in her face and the message she conveyed: Until we die, we must live. And Lorde’s writing on cancer, such as in 1980’s The Cancer Journals, was so ahead of its time that it could have been published last week. She led the way in discussions of sexuality, environmentalism, and personal agency in relation to breast cancer, displaying power rather than victimhood even as she confronted a disease that would prove fatal.

And then there’s Poly Styrene (born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said), of punk band X-Ray Spex. Though she died of breast cancer in 2011, at the too-young age of 53, the marks she made on the world in her lifetime have proven indelible.

Styrene, who grew up in London, founded X-Ray Spex in 1976. She was the visual center of the band; her creative fashion sense and personal style made her hard to miss. Notably, she was also a woman of color—her mother was from England, her father from Somalia—in the primarily white and male punk world. But being an outsider was not new to her; Styrene’s daughter, Celeste Bell, has stated that the singer faced racism, poverty, and physical and sexual abuse during her lifetime; and some of Styrene’s songs explore these issues.

Wanting to branch out, Styrene left the band at its peak, in 1979. Next up was a solo album, 1980’s Translucence, on which she explored different musical styles—but as often happens, the world seemed to be expecting more of what she’d already done, and the album had only modest sales.

A few years later, Styrene took Bell to live in a Hare Krishna commune in the county of Hertfordshire. Her connections to the religion and to her spirituality lasted the rest of her life; her final album, 2011’s Generation Indigo, includes a track called “Electric Blue Monsoon” in which she honors Krishna traditions.

Styrene recorded several more solo albums after Translucence. And she appeared with X-Ray Specs for a reunion performance in 2008, from which came a live album, Live @ the Roundhouse London 2008.

Generation Indigo was written and recorded by Styrene in the years leading up to her death; her daughter and her sister provided backing vocals. Socially engaged throughout her life, Styrene included songs about racism, poverty, and protest on the album, which was released one month before her passing.

In 2018, Dayglo: The Poly Styrene Story was published in oral-biography form, cowritten by Bell and music journalist Zoe Howe. A documentary about Styrene, I Am A Cliché, is currently streaming in the U.K., Ireland, and Finland; it will be released in the U.S. and Canada in February 2022, with other countries to follow. Far from being forgotten, Styrene and her work are reaching even broader audiences through these projects, ensuring her legacy.

Her memory is honored; her light remains.

Author’s Note: Take care of your health by talking with your doctor about when you should begin breast screening, staying on top of the screenings that are recommended, and being aware of what is “normal” for your breasts. If you notice any changes, such as a new breast lump, a change in your breast shape, or any discharge from your nipple, make sure your gynecologist sees you promptly and that your concerns are taken seriously, regardless of your age; younger women can and do get breast cancer, but their diagnoses are too often delayed. This happened with my own breast cancer diagnosis, in 2008, which was delayed for several months after I found a lump. I wish someone had told me at the time to make more noise on my own behalf. But I have remained cancer-free in the years since my treatment—and I have learned that just as we stand up for all the causes we support, we’ve got to stand up for ourselves.

Sam Evian and Hannah Cohen Found Time to Melt in Their Catskills Artists’ Retreat

When Sam Evian and Hannah Cohen shifted their lives from bustling Brooklyn to the wilderness and open landscapes of the Catskills, it was with the vision of an artist’s sanctuary in mind. Their spacious and warm home, known as Flying Cloud, provided both a working space and a comforting retreat for their collaborators and friends. Only months after moving in though, pandemic restrictions forced the revolving door of houseguests to stay shut. Evian (producer for Blonde Redhead, Cass McCombs, and Widowspeak) and singer-songwriter Cohen used the time out from touring and hosting guests to work on their own respective albums, though never without the other’s input; Evian’s Time To Melt arrives first, on October 29 via Fat Possum Records, following his 2018 LP You, Forever and 2016 debut Premium.

When they talk with Audiofemme from their Catskills home, they are joined by their (very beloved) dog. Cohen is in the midst of baking. There’s a sense of ease to their conversation, in which they sweetly finish each other’s sentences and bat questions between them. The couple had become accustomed to the grind and hustle of city life. Evian’s touring and Cohen’s extensive travels as a model from the age of 17 had instilled a weariness in them.

“We were in Brooklyn before this, so it’s pretty much 100 per cent different,” says Evian. “We were living the city life and grinding and paying rent and just trying to survive day to day… It’s been amazing to have a space to open up as artists and bring other artists here to collaborate. Escaping the city, [we’ve been] getting out into the woods to reconnect with ourselves and nature, and how we want to live our lives.”

Cohen is currently working on her next album. It will arrive almost a decade after her 2012 debut Child Bride, though only a few years after Welcome Home (2019), redolent with folksy acoustic ballads that reveal bloody-edged truths about love and loss.

“Usually, I start writing something on my own and once I’m feeling good about it, then I’ll bring it to Sam. But I’ll work on a song for two weeks, I’ll send Sam a voice note, then I’ll run away or something! I’m like, ‘Is this cool, or maybe it’s not?’ Sometimes I’ll only have part of a song and then Sam will come in and help me pull together a bridge or a new verse. It’s very collaborative,” she says.

She will record it, as Evian did Time To Melt, in their home studio. The plan is to create a clearer divide between their home and work lives, though. “There’s a barn on the property that we’ll be moving the studio into, but we’re in the early stages of doing that,” Cohen explains.

“We’re renovating the barn so we can make a bigger working space for music and also separate work and life a little bit,” adds Evian. “We just need, maybe, fifteen feet of separation. It’ll give us more space to have multi-dimensional art projects happen. If anyone wants to do a retreat, it will be a good space for that.”

<a href="https://samevian.bandcamp.com/album/time-to-melt">Time To Melt by sam evian</a>

Their artist friends and collaborators have already begun to make the 2.5 hour drive from New York, or to arrive by plane, train or bus from elsewhere. Everyone they work with is vaccinated and when guests arrive, they are cooked for and cared for, only leaving the house to hike or forage for wild plants and mushrooms. But, it was during the lockdown period through 2020 that Evian found his footing as a solo artist and recruited Cohen as a collaborator, when she wasn’t writing for her own album.

He took a deep dive into the demos he’d recorded over the two years prior. The 60-plus instrumental tracks revealed the magic and majesty that the patina of time had enriched. Evian and Cohen began to mould the tracks into songs and gradually they amassed a cohort of friends to collaborate from their respective homes. Spencer Tweedy, Chris Bear, Jon Natchez and social media fans submitted their input. The resulting album, Time To Melt, is both a throwback to the soundtrack of good times and gatherings the couple missed, but also a lyrical inquiry into the many injustices Evian was witnessing via relentless news reports.

“I’d always had the goal for this record of going down the rabbit hole by myself because I’d never let myself do that,” he says. “My goal with this record was to test myself and my abilities with the different studio techniques and get obsessive over arrangements for things, like the saxophones on ‘Knock Knock.’”

Evian describes himself as a “jack of all trades and master of none” when it comes to his instrumental skills. He undersells himself.

“I would play along to a drum machine and build from there. I did most of it alone, then I’d have certain musicians send me performances because it was the deep part of COVID when no one was seeing one other… I’d have a friend record some drums and send it to me and things like that,” he shares. “I play mostly everything on the record except for the drums… bass, guitar, saxophone (the instrument that I studied in school), keyboards, some clarinet…”

“Flute?” offers Hannah.

“I don’t play flute,” laughs Evian. “I wish I could play a flute! I’m trying to get instruments under my belt that people usually want on records. Music is a language and if you can hear it in your head and communicate it with your voice then it’s usually pretty easy to cross-communicate with different instruments.”

Evian was very specific with the sequencing of tracks, and it is the first five tracks that are his pride and joy. They are designed to seamlessly flow into each other, much like a DJ set. They are funky, downbeat disco numbers, slinky and sequined, sultry with a distinctive R&B soul groove to them. Cohen’s gorgeous harmony on “Dream Free” shows off her lovely voice, which is both smoky in the lower ranges and gorgeously warm and bright through the midrange. It partners perfectly with the deep, anchoring bass line and trembling, sunshine-blinding, woozy atmospherics.

Evian and Cohen want to perform live, but both have also had time to reflect on how touring could be a healthier endeavour. “It was interesting because we’d been hustling so much, Hannah and I, touring and having people here to make records…then everything stopped…” Evian muses. “Maybe going on a five-week tour is not the healthiest… it can be really destructive.”

“For me, touring has always actually been an expense that I write off on taxes, but touring has always put me in debt and Hannah too, has just paid off her debt from touring before COVID. I don’t think people realise how crippling it can be to tour,” he adds, rattling off the litany of travel costs, paying musicians, hotel costs, venue bookings, insurance and feeding everyone. “Touring is really for the 1% of the music industry. It’s for huge venues and stadiums.”

“Bigger artists in the industry do really well, but we’re not that big, so… we’d both end up going into debt,” he concludes. “We both love playing and it’s been hard not having that catharsis of just playing music and speaking that language out on the stage with our friends and sharing that connection with people.”

Evian does have some shows lined up in New York, Washington, Philadelphia and Chicago. In the meantime, he and Cohen are cooking, dancing and playing with their canine “pandemic baby” to the soundtrack of Time To Melt.

“Time To Melt is like a party, a disco. It’s so funky… it’s such a fun record,” says Cohen.

Adds Evian, “Most records I usually get tired of, but this one I still get a kick out of listening to.”

Follow Sam Evian, Hannah Cohen, and Flying Cloud Recordings on Instagram for ongoing updates.

W.S.A.B.I. Radicalizes the Natural World with Red Hook Farms Mixtape

When’s the last time you considered your relationship to the land you live on? For those of us living in cities, it can feel particularly challenging to cultivate a connection with the natural world, given that in our context it’s been largely paved over. But to Brookyn-based artist and musician Jennae Santos, who creates under the moniker W.S.A.B.I., our urban setting is all the more reason to consider this question.

To Santos, there’s something radical and subversive about communing with the natural world on a more intimate level. W.S.A.B.I. itself stands for Warped Sanggot And Boss Interior, which she describes more specifically in an artist statement: “The Sanggot is a Visayan Philippine hand sickle— a farming tool and martial arts weapon that guides W.S.A.B.I.’s artistic, political, and emotional practice in the harvest of love, community, and subsistence, and the fight for the oppressed body. Our blade is warped from the ongoing work at hand: decolonization, abolition, and warrior pedagogy, fight songs against white supremacist patriarchal capitalism, love songs stoked in multi-sensory radical commitment. Boss Interior means inner strength through the work, and acknowledgment of both the oppressor and the spirit of resistance within colonized identity.”

Santos’ musical style is highly technical and at times jarring, a genre she’s come to define as “art prog.” And by that, she means to synthesize the angular, sometimes unpredictable acuity of art rock with the ambitious composition and repetition of progressive rock. Her most recent release is the Three Houses (Live) EP. Attributed to the WSABI Duo of Love featuring Alex Goldberg, live from quarantine, the three songs were written and recorded over what she describes on her website as “transient overhauls” at three different houses over the course of the initial COVID lockdown. Minimal and lacking the jolting angularity of her work with a full band, they reflect her newfound experimentation with field recordings that led to the walking mixtape, though they do have their heavier moments.

<a href="https://wsabifox.bandcamp.com/album/t-ee-o-e-live-ep">TᕼᖇEE ᕼOᑌᔕEᔕ live EP by WSABI Fox</a>

Like many musicians, her practice became more of a solo endeavor when COVID separated her from her bandmates, and her creations became more experimental. A winner of Audiofemme‘s 2020 Agenda Artist Grant, she took the opportunity to expand her artistic acumen to something new and different: a “walking mixtape” exploring the concept of harvest, made in collaboration with Red Hook Farms, where she is a CSA member and volunteer.

She took field recordings to include sounds from the farm, plant meditations and personal accounts from the youth farmers she supervises – many of whom are neighborhood teens with little existing connection to the natural world – and converted the sound samples into beats inspired by the energy of the farm, creating a site-specific musical walking tour that visitors could access by scanning a QR code at the Saturday farmer’s market.

“I have like 200 recordings on my voice memos,” Santos shares when I ask how she takes these field recordings. They require nothing more than an iPhone, allowing Santos to record sounds whenever inspiration strikes: for example, for a recent commissioned piece on climate change, she went out to Far Rockaway and Dead Horse Bay to document the sound of tiny bits of glass washing in on the tide.

Santos began volunteering on the farm as part of her CSA membership, the first time she had ever harvested her own food, and found the practice grounding. She took to studying the larger socio-economic issue of food insecurity over the pandemic and became all the more inspired.

“It’s such a global issue, food insecurity, and the rights of farmers, from migrant farmers to just people of color having food sovereignty and land sovereignty, so combining that with my artistic passions has been something I’ve been trying to work on for the past year,” she explains. “It’s coming from this wanting to see how we can inform each other, and land is such an experiential element that a lot of humans in cities seem to forget, especially if you’re not having to grow food for yourself.”

Issues of food insecurity and the inaccessibility of fresh produce to underprivileged neighborhoods have always plagued major cities, and New York City is no exception. Even when you have the privilege of affording fresh foods, the hustle of living and surviving in a major city can often leave you reaching for whatever foods are the fastest and most accessible, regardless of how unhealthy or processed they might be.

“I’m trying to bridge those practices of taking time to connect to food and to your health and well-being, through land, and I think that art is an access point for that, if not food itself,” she says. “What I was saying before in terms of land being very experiential, sound is also very experiential. Both of those elements really inform the human condition and remind us that we’re not just machines in an economy, we’re animals — we’re humans of the earth.”

As a self-described “decolonizing Filipinx,” Santos found great inspiration in the agricultural heritage of the Philippines, particularly a rice winnowing song recording from the Kalinga mountain province, and folk dancing based on different baranguays’ (the native Filipino word for village, or district) agricultural specialties and goods. She notes that there has always been a sacred relationship between art and nature in pre-colonial cultures, something she hopes to revive in her own contemporary community of Red Hook, Brooklyn. She conceptualized the project from her own moral exhaustion with the capitalist commodification of both the music and food industries, hoping that she might begin to heal both by synthesizing them with an immersive experience.

By thinking so critically about these issues, Santos has led others to reevaluate their relationship to the land they live on, namely the youth farmers she works with. She references Braiding Sweetgrass by scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, how “finding your own indigeneity is about getting to know the land you inhabit.” Her exercises ask the youth farmers to consider their relationships to art and land, and encourage them to explore their ancestral agricultural heritage by asking elder family members about the family’s historical relationship with land. This aims to undo some of the damage wrought by capitalism and colonialism, particularly the way the latter can limit the depths of ancestral knowledge for people of color. Ultimately, though, it’s meant to unify, a reiteration of Santos’s earlier point, that “we are humans of the earth,” which she does in part by recording these exercises with the youth farmers and incorporating them into the mixtape.

“It’s supposed to evoke a sense of grounding and wonder, as it relates to land, especially in an urban environment, [where] we tend to lose that sense. We have to venture out to go hiking, out of the city, when it really is all around us, so it’s meant to be a reminder of the importance of city ecology also,” she explains, describing the interesting juxtaposition in her field recordings of construction sounds coming from the Amazon distribution warehouses across the street from the farm with its own lush, peaceful sounds. She takes this vast array of sounds and imports into her drum kit and uses them to create the beats that accompany the other sonic elements of the mixtape.

“There’s a pulse to the city, especially when there’s construction nearby. There’s a rhythm to the different seasons, and life cycles of plants,” she continues, explaining how this rhythm is aesthetically similar to the guitar loop-laden durational pieces she typically works on. The repetition in these pieces, she says, makes you “feel time differently.”

“I think I’m trying to bring that type of patience, that kind of patience [that] also happens when you’re on the farm, just the way that people interact with each other and the space that’s there. It just feels like time, the New York hustle, slows down a bunch, and is more present with this newer rhythm, which is vastly different than just navigating the city.”

While the pandemic has forced all of us to slow down in one way or another, the mindfulness and intentionality Santos brings to her Red Hook Farms project is very welcome as society slowly circles back to whatever version of the status quo will remain in the wake of our present turmoil. Many of us don’t want to go back to the way things were before, rushing through our days as we juggled a seemingly endless cycle of jobs, tasks and errands.

Santos does want to return to normal in the sense that she misses playing with other musicians. On October 28, she’ll participate in a performance dubbed “The Great Rat Summoning” at the Sultan Room, with EVOLFO, Castle Rat, Reverand Mother, and DJ Miss Hap Selam. She’s also heading into the studio with a full band to record the first full length record for the W.S.A.B.I. project, but her connection to the natural world remains; she participated in a harvest ritual at O+ Positive Festival in Kingston, NY earlier this month. I’d imagine that once you hear the rhythm of the natural world around you, it’s difficult to unhear it.

Follow W.S.A.B.I. on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Ryan James Brewer Crafts Liberating Debut LP Tender

With his debut LP, Tender, Ryan James Brewer finds liberation from his past.

Raised in a rural country town in Australia, Brewer admits it was difficult growing up queer in a conservative area. Brewer developed depression and anxiety at an early age that he is still working through today, with therapy and music serving as a healthy combination to help process these complex experiences. “I ran up against a lot of bullying,” Brewer shares with Audiofemme of his upbringing. “Especially as a teenager when you’re finding out about your own sexuality, the general ideals and values there didn’t really help with that. I think as a result of that it took me a long time work through a lot of that and I think I suffered a lot.”

The budding artist eventually migrated from his small town to the bustling city of Melbourne, where he cut his teeth as a singer and songwriter. In need of a change of scenery and a desire to connect with his contacts in the alt-country and Americana realms of music, Brewer made the 9,000 mile trek to Nashville for a fresh start. It’s here he planted the seeds for Tender, a 10-track exploration of sounds as intricate as the stories they’re wrapped around that masterfully weave together in a avant garde pop masterpiece.

“The record does try to address my struggles as openly as I can possibly be with it all,” he expresses. “[I’m trying to find strength in vulnerability, and challenging the archetypal masculine idea that vulnerability is a negative thing, which I think it’s actually quite the opposite.”

Brewer rejects this norm in “Limits of the Heart,” wherein the song’s carefree spirit is backed by an intoxicating beat of synth pop sounds that create a dreamlike effect. The song is years in the making, as Brewer had begun writing the track inspired by “unsuccessful courtships” and the struggle of embracing his place on the spectrum of sexuality while living in Melbourne in 2015. After five attempts, Brewer tore the song down in order to build it back up again while writing with a friend in Nashville before he landed on the final adaptation.

“I was definitely grappling with my sexuality and figuring out what sexuality meant for me at the time, coming to grips with my identity as a bisexual man – because in my past I had been conditioned to think that was a bad thing,” he explains. “Part of writing that song was working through a bunch of my internalized homophobia. It was a way of releasing that in a sense.” The line “one breath dispels the limits of the heart” is one of Brewer’s favorites – he drew inspiration from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, “Ordinary Nocturne,” which he came across while fine-tuning the track. “To me, it speaks to a freedom within vulnerability,” he notes of Rimbaud’s work.

“One Another” acts as a “companion song” to “Limits of the Heart,” addressing the push and pull Brewer felt between his own feelings and rural Australia’s close-minded views; trying to reconcile the two practically required multiple identities, and had an impact on Brewer’s sense of self. “I identify with that in a strong way, especially in terms of sexuality coming up against a negative association… that had been engrained from a super young age because of the place I grew up in,” he analyzes. “That song is working through that aspect.”

“Just Don’t Let Me Go” is a reflection on perfectionism, and “Ministry of Love” follows suit, serving as a tongue-in-cheek critique of social media where the narrator has an “erotic relationship” with an algorithm.

Like many, Brewer’s world started to shift with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just weeks before, Brewer was on tour with Nick Lowe in Australia and New Zealand. Soon after his return to the U.S., the shelter in place order was instituted. Initially plotting to make an album completely on his own, Brewer quickly came to the realization that a task that massive was beyond his capability and knew he needed help. “That prompted a mental breakdown of sorts that combined with everything that we’re all living through at the time, and still are,” he recalls.

Soon after, Brewer followed his gut instinct to San Pedro, a small coastal community in Los Angeles, to work with producer Jon Joseph, the two building a body of work that is electric, yet moving and powerful. They pulled in unique elements to add texture to already vibrant songs. On “Taps/WMDs,” the moody instrumental blends bass guitar and crying trumpet with the sound of Brewer’s dripping faucet, recorded during an unusually cold night in Nashville when he had to keep a slow stream of water running to stop the pipes in his house from freezing. “Things like that excite me – something that’s sort of a plain and interesting rhythm in time that’s not something you would typically associate with music, like a dripping faucet,” Brewer says.

Likewise, “Chercher La Petite Bête” features snippets of a conversation between friends Brewer overhead on a train in Paris, enchanted by their accents and cadence. “That can be a really interesting rhythmic element that you don’t really associate that directly with music,” he muses. “I like those moments of tenderness.”

These effects bring moments of playfulness to an album that deals with heavy subject matter, like album opener “End of a Life.” Brewer describes it as a “direct confrontation with the idea of suicide or suicidal thoughts.” Partly based on Brewer’s own experiences, the song was also inspired by the death of Mark Linkous, the former frontman of indie rock band Sparklehorse, who had lived with depression for many years and committed suicide in 2010.

Admiring Linkous’ writing style and openness in talking about his mental health struggles, Brewer says he felt “seen” in Linkous’ work, and hopes listeners feel the same with his music. “End of a Life,” in particular, was written with the intent of inspiring much-needed conservation around the topic of mental health and suicide. Its free-wheeling sound cradles Brewer’s potent lyrics: “And I believe/I’m intimately afraid of the energy/Can’t make it work for me anymore/With the weight filling up my hands/In the shape of a lonely man.”

“I wrote it so that the depressive idea of suicidal thoughts is personified and structured like a relationship breaking down. I think that song is me working through suicide and the idea of that and trying to normalize the discussion around it. It’s important to be able to talk about that. That’s why I wanted to juxtapose a pretty heavy theme with an upbeat, sunny sounding track. I wanted to have some sort of accessibility there,” he observes. “That song is a way of working through those things. Hopefully in an ideal world you’d be leaving the listener with some insight so that they can identify with it on that front as it relates to depression and suicide.”

But Brewer intentionally ends the album on a “Tender” note with the title track that features him in a solo piano moment. It captures the spirit of freedom and vulnerability channeled into the album that sets Brewer’s past self free, while setting the path for a bright future ahead. “This is a super personal record and it’s my way of working through a lot of things for myself. But the ideal outcome is that I would leave whoever’s listening with some insight and something that they can identify with and carry forward,” Brewer conveys. “The final result is quite liberating.”

Follow Ryan James Brewer on Instagram, Twitter and Tik Tok for ongoing updates.

PREMIERE: CHYL and Melissa Brooks Team Up to Reclaim “Barbie”

To some, the Barbie doll has come to represent many of the evils of patriarchy, from stereotypical gender roles to unrealistic beauty standards. But in her upbeat, danceable electronic single “Barbie,” electro-house DJ/producer CHYL reclaims the iconic toy as the symbol of a woman who goes on adventures and wears many shoes, both literally and figuratively.

Against a mix of heavy house and hip-hop beats, Aquadolls vocalist Melissa Brooks, who collaborated with CHYL on the bass house song, repeats the sassy monotone refrain: “I’m a real life Barbie.” Contrary to many people’s conception of the Barbie, she sings about flaunting her wealth, being busy with phone calls, and not needing a man: “Wanna talk to me now/You should call me later/You know I got a lot to do/And you should know that I don’t trade that.”

CHYL · Barbie (feat. Melissa Brooks)

“When you listen to the first couple lines of the lyrics, you might think that me and Melissa are talking about being a pretty girl,” says CHYL. “But it’s not really about that — we’re talking about being a girl who is a badass but also really cute. Who says you can’t be a cute girl? Who says you have to be a cute girl but also be dependent on men? So we wanted to talk about being a girl who’s independent, who makes her own rules, who plays a lot of roles, and people can respect that.”

That’s a persona CHYL felt that Brooks represented, which was why she sought her out to sing the lyrics. “She’s a very independent, very strong girl but also looks good all the time,” she says. “She’s very cute in person, she’s very humble, and overall a very high achiever, so I love her style and thought she’d be the perfect person to be the vocalist on this song.”

Featured “Barbie” vocalist Melissa Brooks

CHYL conceived of the song to fill a void in the male-dominated electronic music genre, where she noticed a lack of feminist lyrics. “There aren’t that may songs celebrating women and girls in electronic music,” says CHYL. “Most of the songs just talk about being in a club or people falling in love, and I wanted to break that boundary of having a song that celebrated being a woman.”

Given that under three percent of producers are women, she hopes the unabashedly feminine song might inspire other women to become producers.

CHYL, who grew up in China and Canada but is currently based in LA, produced the instrumentals first then collaborated with Brooks on the lyrics before recording the vocals with her, a process she says took several months. “It took me a while to come up with the bass line that I’m satisfied with, the beats that we’re actually comfortable releasing,” she says. “We recorded so many different versions of the song.”

The end product is a fun, choppy mish-mash of house drums, subtly auto-tuned vocals (she used a plugin called Fresh Air that brings out the high notes), and dreamy bells and sprinkling effects in the dramatic drop. “I tried to put a girly touch, and I feel like you can hear that,” she says. “The effects were very sparkly and fun.”

CHYL has released six singles so far, all this year, and is working on a number of others. She hopes to release an EP in the near future but for now is focused on two singles called “Bestie” and “Bitch Mode,” which she likes to think of as complements to “Barbie,” since they’re all “female-themed” and feature female vocalists she hand-selected.

CHYL — a moniker that came from the second syllable of her first name, Rachel — began listening to EDM while she was studying economics in college, but she didn’t think initially about doing music professionally; she went on to work on Wall Street instead. “I was mentally suffering a lot from the job and getting a little bitt depressed,” she remembers. “Over the course of two years in finance, I realized that electronic music is my true passion.” She began DJing at clubs but decided she wanted to produce the music herself, so she attended a year-long intensive music production program in LA, and graduated in April.

Having switched seamlessly between the roles of businesswoman, DJ, and producer, she’s a fitting model for a “real life Barbie” — something every woman has perhaps been in some way, at least by her definition.

“I just hope the song can reach as many girls as possible around the world, and I hope girls can feel empowered and uplifted while listening to this song and also have fun with it and dance with it,” she says. “It’s meant to be a fun, empowering anthem for women.”

Follow CHYL on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Year: 2021