#49 Deeper Into Outer Space | KÁRYYN
We tune into the operatic electronics of Armenian American auteur KÁRYYN and her wonderful album, PHYSICS. UNIVERSAL. LOVE. LANGUAGE...
“Everything began with my voice,” says producer and creative instigator, KÁRYYN. “I turned it on at an open mike in Haight-Ashbury and met with this big emotion - everything in the room stopped, I felt this power and all my fears melted away.”
“Afterwards I called my parents, told them I wasn’t going to be a surgeon on the course I was studying and I’d got my labret pierced. Everything changed.”
Speaking from her LA-base, producer KÁRYYN’s room is adorned with TVs, and Buddhist rugs, a decor of contrasts that reflects the emotive, machine-driven musical universe she has created on ‘PHYSICS. UNIVERSAL. LOVE. LANGUAGE’ (PULL), a new album for electronic legends, Mute.
We’re talking about its genesis and how she found her sense of musical self, how she created the world of the album she invites listeners into. As KÁRYYN says, there’s this field of opposites smashing together and co-existing within the ten tracks. Built with producers James Ford and Hudson Mohawke, these partners acted as bandmates to help her bring a distinct vision to life.
“I was lucky, I said I wanted to be the weakest one in the room and wanted to learn from my collaborators even though it’s my vision,” KÁRYYN says. “The record became more focused through them, I listened, I took, we rubbed up against the thing and we moved forward.”
“This album has made me and it’s just the beginning - I am now ready to do so many things -it’s a real world, a universe, it’s a framework.”
Starting out
KÁRYYN’s background is a diverse one. Although born in Alabama, this Syrian-Armenian spent much of her childhood in a small town in Indiana. When she was 10, the family moved to LA with holidays spent visiting family in Aleppo. From music lessons, she started engaging with sounds and playing the piano at school as a teenager.
“When I started to actually make music as an outlet, I was 12 or 13 and would slip into the gym where they had a piano, I would sit in the dark and play,” KÁRYYN says. “I was sensitive to what was around me and felt that when I was on the piano, I was expressing something I had to do. There was no intention, just a pressure valve that I needed to pull out.”
Influence was taken from across pop culture’s history - from Nirvana to Nat King Cole via Arabic music alongside the rural environment all feed into her approach.
“The bristling sound of the cornfields where there’s nothing else around, that was a big inspiration to me,” KÁRYYN states. “You just went out and came back when the bell rang - I spent so much time in nature.”
Mills College and Oakland
KÁRYYN initially went to Mills College in Oakland to study medicine but she didn’t bargain on the institution being a hub for electronic music where creativity opened up to her.
“I could take classes exploring recording with tape, I’d walk into a room and there would be a Moog in there the size of a wall,” she enthuses. “I signed up for this class, Women in Creative Music, with tutors like Pauline Oliveros and Maggi Payne. It started with a bunch of TVs in a circle where we would sit and listen to white noise.”
Ani DiFranco’s ‘Dilate’ and Bjork’s album ‘Post’ were key touchstones for KÁRYYN to jump off, with the latter the first time she became aware of what she describes as “the jolly rancher juiciness of electronic music”. It was after playing songs to an A&R that she found the guitar to be lacking in translating the sounds she was hearing in her head.
“I just thought my guitar wasn’t cutting it and had this Casio keyboard that had been circuit bent by a friend, that was the beginning for me,” she says. “I started using this Casio, that turned into sourcing a Juno 106 and this whole new way of expressing myself.”
“I could design a sound, effect a sound, shape it, do this and together I really expressed how I felt.”
KÁRYYN suddenly had this new way into experimenting with her vocals, cutting sounds up and playing with a Korg KAOSS pad in her bedroom. This spilled out into experimental, improvised shows where she’d be as likely to smash up lightbulbs as rinse effects from a tape machine or loop pedal.
“This was the natural way for my voice and to use it as an instant way to compose,” she says. “Getting to soft synths and MIDI, there was always a disconnect for me, I always want more tactile ways into my music.”
“I was born in ‘84, I understand the joy of physical media, that is part of how sound and emotion are physical matter for me. To twist things and feel how that splats and diffuses my voice, it’s such an integral part of my musical experience.”
PHYSICS. UNIVERSAL. LOVE. LANGUAGE
‘The Quantas Series’ is KÁRYYN’s debut album, a record that landed back in 2019. Many of the songs on the follow up, ‘PULL’, precede it and have been percolating for years. Conjuring echoes of Rosalia or Bjork, there’s something weirder, bigger and more heart-stopping going on. Put together with James Ford and Hudson Mohawke, and made over more than a decade, it’s been an obsession, a record she had to complete.
“The way I work is that you have a skill set that I don’t have and I love what you’re doing so I take all the inputs of that person’s experience, I work out how they can fit in my sandbox, “ she says of her collaborative approach. “You can add to this vision, within that you get to be free and play, and from that I take a bit that can be massaged into the bigger piece."
James Ford came into her life during a stint living in London. At the time, KÁRYYN held a residency at the city’s Laylow venue where she would host a weekly improvised show and invite collaborators like Laura Misch to perform with her. Meeting James there proved to be a pivotal moment in ‘PULL’’s journey. Known as producer for Blur, Arctic Monkeys and more, he’d also long ago been behind the electronics of duo, Simian Mobile Disco.
“He really understood the melodies, sense of rhythm and what I was trying to do,” KÁRYYN says. “I heard he was a rock producer, we met, sat and spoke, his wife is a Buddhist, we got on, he’s a wonderful human being.”
The ten tracks are ambitious, almost cinematic in scope with a forensic attention to layering textures. Synths, the Oberheim Matrix, ARP 2600, modular set ups all fed into the sound sources before being manipulated and pulled in different directions.
“How do you take something, then regenerate it and regenerate it? The rhythm, the kick, the drum and the snare, these are the bones but where are the guts? Where are the synapses? It’s in the music’s membrane, that is what I get excited about.”
“But the form of every song on this album can be played on a piano too,” KÁRYYN continues. “That’s important for me - even though you’re creating this huge, all encompassing sound, even if you take that away, you can produce the song completely differently and it will hold up.”
Covid
The record started with James Ford, strings collaborator Raven Bush, & Maya Youssef Qanun Master-then with the album three-quarters finished, the pandemic landed leaving KÁRYYN stuck in LA. It was at this point that Ross Birchard (aka Hudson Mohawke) came in to help her finesse what already existed and shine a light on the music’s details.
“I had to finish the album, there was some congealing factor I was looking for,” she says. “Ross was around, we went through everything. On some songs, he would just refine the kick and the snare, on others we were much bolder. He’s such a sensitive guy who is titillated by ridiculous and major sounds, sees and hears the beauty of the bigness.”
“We both wanted to make big poppy songs that say something true and real but put as many crazy wild sounds forward as we could.”
There is a depth to the album and scope that is breathtaking. KÁRYYN cites ‘Mind Over Heart’ as a highlight although the songs are all her “children”.
“It goes from being an acoustic on the piano to this moment when it becomes technicolour,” KÁRYYN says. “Sounds become like these characters and we pitched the voice in different spaces and it glistens like the sound of a coin being sourced in a Mario game. There is this big sub bass drop too, it’s an album meant to be heard on awesome speakers.”
‘The 6th’ is also a core moment from the record too, an anchor for the songs that have been gestating for more than 15 years. Themes surrounding physics and computers gaining consciousness are all part of the album’s tapestry too with ‘Collapse Phase’ delving into the the life-span of a star when it’s dying. Now with the album out, she’s excited for the wider world to tune in.
“Everything is coming next,” KÁRYYN says. “The album is out, then festivals and shows. But the most important thing for me now is not to jump into next. Finally I’m going to be here in the now. Past and present get to be here too and we have finally aligned.”
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