Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.
It’s always changing, depending on the time of the year, whether I am touring, or have taken time off to write music or work on my live sets.
My ideal day is waking up at 7, spending time taking in the morning sun, saying hello to all my cats, doing some exercise, bathing, inducing in shringar (which means getting dressed up in a way that I am celebrating myself every day), then breakfast and then by 9 I am in the studio. I will make music until lunch.
Post lunch I spend time with my mother in her crystal room, always asking questions and learning more about healing with crystals (she has been working with crystals and teaching this for 30 years), then I will get back into the studio until 7 in the evening. Then I have time for reading, or on the rare occasion when I feel like interacting with other humans I will hang out. By 11 it is lights out.
Doesn’t always happen this way. When I was writing the EP I was in a cave, up writing all night, just about making the time to take a shower and eat something in the day.
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?
Sometimes I will be at a gig and if I’ve had a blast dancing, I will come back and start to program some music while I’m still in the zone.
One morning I came back home after a 12 hour set of DVS 1 and wrote a whole track, even though my eyes were almost popping out of my head. One of my unreleased tracks I play in my live set was written after a night of dancing to psychedelic music. In that sense I am like a sponge. If I’m in a super chill space, it will inform the music I am writing. Or if I feel strongly about something it will all come pouring out into the piece.
I like to work on multiple tracks at the same time. When I hit a wall with one, I shift to the next, and then the next, and by the time I come back to the first one I have a renewed perspective.
With my live sets I am always thinking: How can I make this more dancy, more banging for the dance floor. I will use elements of one track in another and then another, so if you pay attention you will find motives that run through the whole set, even though the tracks are different. I love that Ableton allows you to do this. I am a Logic X user actually, and learned Ableton last December to play live. It’s been so much fun!
Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?
Let's start by saying that I like to be in control, primarily because I have so much clarity on what I want to produce. I can be in a collaborative space with musicians and other artists, only when I trust them and their art completely. It is an opportunity to learn and grow, one that I value immensely.
Producing electronic music can be quite a solitary experience, but I enjoy not having to depend on anyone else but myself.
How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?
This is an always evolving debate I have with some of my closest artist friends. Art can be a reflection of the times we live it, a way to awaken people. It can also be an escape, providing the listener with an opportunity to shut out all the shit the have to deal with in this rough world.
I used to make a lot of graphic art, my earlier photo stories are quite grim. My track “Ayo Burn” is a great example of how I projected my anger at everything that was happening, throwing it all to the listener in a bid to evoke a strong emotion.
My mother used to tell me then: You cannot change people with anger, you can only affect them with love. It used to piss me off. Love? How to talk about the shit going on in the world with love?!
And now as I get older, I find myself softening. “Dakini” is a good example of that expression. It really is where the artist is in their life. What is moving them, what are they feeling.
Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?
“Don’t Be Afraid,” my first release as Kiss Nuka really helped me to deal with the idea of death. It strengthened my connection with nature. I had my brother and my father in the music video, playing themselves, while I died and was reborn into nature. It was heavy for the family, especially my brother. But it was also very beautiful. “Ayo Burn” was a release of all the anger I had against the system.
"Serpentine" has helped me shed my own expectations of myself, showing me that I don’t need to be so hard on myself, that I can relax with all these demands I have made on myself.
How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?
Music is frequency, and we can study and break this down in a very scientific way.
Since studying Quantum healing, I find myself being quite amused with science. Understanding that there are so many ‘theories’ but no practice actually to support these, and how we quote science as the last word on everything. I have a more spiritual approach to both these fields, and I find that I can sit on the border, taking what resonates from both with me, and applying it to my creations.
I would like to focus a lot more on creating music specifically around frequencies, but at the moment I am in a bit of an internal explosion, because I finally find myself with the skills and know how to produce all the music that’s in my head. So it's more of a release in that way.
Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?
The book Ikigai talks about a sense of flow. When we attach an outcome to a creative process, we lose a bit of the flow. Sadly, this is what has happened for me as a musician.
Whenever I start to write any music or jam, there’s always this ulterior motive of producing something from it in the end. Whereas when I am drawing or cooking, there isn’t any ulterior motive in regards to creating a final piece of my art. It’s more about being in the moment and letting it flow.
However, there is this adrenaline rush that I experience when I write or produce music that I consider amazing, and I have not found that with anything else.
Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?
Frequency is not just being absorbed by the ear, but also by the body. We are living in a ‘field’ (quantum physics explains this quite well), and everything is connected.
When intention is backed by action and emotion, it can be very powerful. It’s really that simple.
