I had a moment when I was preparing my playlist for my first in-person DJ gig in almost 3 years last weekend. Putting together noise techno with icy dark disco tracks, I realized that the past was echoing through the present. Not in a nostalgic way, but in the sense that a seed planted long ago was finally blooming.
Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how my approach to performance has evolved. I’m a self-taught musician. Although I was in the school orchestra for a few years and have taken classes here and there as an adult to brush up on specific skills, I didn’t have a formal or professional training in music.
“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.
