What was the moment you realised TEKOSA wasn’t just a collection of sketches but a body of work that needed to exist as an album?
From the beginning. I started out with a full length in mind, and used a few loose parameters to try to keep the whole thing together.
Ambient can often feel weightless. You’ve described wanting to bring “fire” into the genre — what does heat mean to you in a sonic sense?
Ambient that is maybe a little more in front of you, commanding your attention, rather than drifting off.
There’s a tension running through the record that never quite resolves in obvious ways. Were you consciously holding something back?
Intensity is one of the things I was aiming for. To resolve the tension would have undermined the aim.
Do you write from emotion first, or from texture and sound design, and let the meaning reveal itself later?
I always start with sound design, trying to arrive at a compelling sounds that I can work with, which then naturally leads into phrases and meaning.
Silence feels just as important as sound on this album. How do you decide when to leave space rather than fill it?
For both the sound and any silence, I just listen to the track, to see if it is what I was going for and to see if it works.
Was there a particular track on TEKOSA that unlocked the tone for the rest of the record?
Laleno kind of anchored the album. A few of the tracks I even went back and reworked long after I initially completed them, salvaging them as best as I could, because they sounded too separate from the others.
Ambient music often becomes background listening. Do you think about how your music is consumed, or do you let go of that once it’s released?
That’s out of my control. I just try to get it out there to people who might be interested.
Did the album come together quickly, or was it built slowly over time?
It came together very quickly, in the span of three months or so. I initially set a deadline, to help facilitate production, and kept getting sidetracked with various things. That compression of time ended up helping me finish, because I would have been really ticked off if I missed that deadline.
What does the name TEKOSA represent to you — is it conceptual, personal, abstract?
It’s a little personal. Like all my other titles up to this point, it’s just a made up word, a mixture of different Greek words. I think some of the titles I’ve used actually have meanings in other languages. I double checked them by doing a search, to make sure they didn’t reference something egregious. I think the word for one of my singles not on this album, Tiskata, means a type of stew in Norwegian.
Now that the debut is out in the world, do you feel exposed, relieved, or already thinking about what comes next?
Thinking about what comes next! Very excited to have a platform to release my work, and hopefully reach people who will enjoy it.
