Earlier this month, I wrapped up my residency at Lobe Studio, where I spent a total of 80 hours across June and July. I went into the residency knowing a bit about 4DSOUND, the holographic sound technology that Lobe is dedicated to, having attended an info session and a performance there previously. But the experience of working independently in the space for so long was irreplaceable in terms of tuning my perception and thinking about spatial sound.
I spent four hours a day in the studio during the week, which I arrived at via a commute involving two separate buses. This new routine was quite a departure from my usual schedule of working from home according to my natural energy flow. But it was well worth the challenge of imposing a bit of temporary rigor on my habits.
I played my first live show of the year a couple of weeks ago. Fittingly, it happened on Friday the 13th at Verboden Festival, a 5-day goth bacchanal here in “Vancouver,” which so happened to culminate in a Scorpio eclipse. I played to a crowd of merry festivalgoers after 1am, opening up the witching hour festivities that went late into the night.
“Vision and vibe” are obviously foundational, but I struggled to think in those terms sometimes when I was writing music in the past. I found the writing process itself to be so challenging that I often couldn’t really spread my creative wings and consider the overall concept, or feel a sense of competence when it came to fine-tuning certain elements.
How did Reliquary V come to be? Although I can’t recall exactly when I started using it for my instagram handle, I started using this alias for music officially in 2020. Prior to that, I had been making music under the name Kayla Guthrie, which for years had consisted of experimental songs presented as intimate and vulnerable performances.
Last night I had an epiphany that was a surprisingly long time coming. I'd been going through the previously-mentioned process of tracking demos, and the way I was doing it was sending each instrument straight into the computer, to get a totally dry recording of each that I planned to later mix and layer with effects and so forth. And it sounded, if not awful, just wrong.
