Angélica Garcia tells Best Fit how she recalibrated her sound by transforming grief into an act of universal healing for this week’s digital cover.
There is a rawness to Angelica Garcia’s third record, Gemelo, due out this June. Its genesis, after all, was an open wound. In the midst of the global pandemic, the Californian-born Garcia ended an engagement and made the decision to leave her home in Virginia to return to her family in LA. There, she began to reflect on the source of these personal fractures that stretched beyond her and behind her, far into the past. Gamelo was born out of this loss. “It begins at the moment that grief strikes, and then it ends with a song that’s about being grateful for being human, for having lived. It’s about how personal grief is, how intrusive, how volatile it can be. It really pulled me apart in a lot of ways, and put me back together.”
Gemelo, by definition, refers to the twin self: an aspect of ourselves that exists beyond the limitations that we experience in our incarnated life. But duality doesn’t always imply harmony. There are parts of Garcia’s life that sit like oil and water. One moment she speaks with a solemnity that feels almost like a kind of clairvoyance, the next, she taps into the slang and vivacity of a girl born on Californian soil, but whose blood runs both Mexican and Salvadoran. She is a woman, but she is queer; she is 29-years-old, yet childless. Pulled by tides of traditions while swimming against them, her life has been defined by being both and yet neither. Gemelo marks a reckoning. Garcia untangles her roots, dismantles the cycles which help and harm, and calls upon the spirits of her ancestors to create a record which is the ultimate reclamation of power.
“I found, during the process of making this album, that I couldn’t always trust my mind,” Garcia shares. “Sitting in silence, having lost all these things, I was really starting to pay attention to my body. I remember reading somewhere that ‘anxiety screams, and intuition whispers’, while trying to process this grief. I realised that the quiet voice within my body was the one actually guiding me in life, and that is the one I wanted to speak through this music.”
To amplify that gentle voice, she had to silence the conditioning that was drowning it out. “I felt like I didn’t fit - and I was trying so hard to. And then I just started to realise that I’m not fucking happy,” she insists. “I was trying to be a good girl, a socially acceptable girl, a good daughter and granddaughter, a good musician. A good everything. I was giving my power into other people’s definition to whatever ‘good’ was. And you know what’s fucked up? Sometimes, they conflicted with each other. Sometimes, it was a whole-ass paradox. It was like, ‘What do you want, dude?’”
How Ganavya found the wisdom to stand still
Growing up in the US and southern India, experimental musician Ganavya Doraiswamy felt conflicted about her rare and unusual name. For years she was convinced that her mother had simply made it up, combining her own name Vidya with that of her husband, Ganesan, and claiming that it meant “one who was born to spread music.” As it turns out, her mother was in the clear. A cousin confirmed it after finding the name Ganavya in an old Sanskrit scripture while studying for a language exam. Her mother was right, too, about Ganavya’s destiny, and went to great lengths to give her daughter every opportunity to become “the child with the heavenly voice” she’d divined from a star chart while Ganavya was still in the womb.
Vidya’s faith in her daughter’s future was so absolute that it would define not just ganavya’s life but the lives of her whole family. Music was the reason that they moved away from New York, first to Florida and then, when Ganavya was seven years old, to Shenkottai, a village of only seven streets close to the ayurvedic waterfalls of Kutralam on the pilgrimage trail of southern India. A year later, the family moved again. Her father returned to the US, while her mother took Ganavya and her older brother to the city of Chennai, where ganavya began her formal training in Carnatic classical music and the ancient Tamil dance form of bharatanatyam.
In some ways, it’s hardly surprising that her mother had such faith in what the stars had to say. There’s a long line of singers and performing artists on the paternal side of the family, but, as Ganavya sees it, it has just as much to do with the ambitions her mother once had for herself. “She thought she couldn’t be a musician because, although she knows how to memorise intonation and play it beautifully the same way every time, she lacked the ingenuity to improvise, which is such a large part of Indian music,” she says. “If only she knew that every single thing she did to make my life possible was exactly down to her ingenuity.”
“I’m not only realising my dreams, I’m realising many dreams,” she adds. “It’s one of the reasons why sometimes, when I get in my head, it’s very easy to walk straight out of it. None of this makes sense.”
Audrey Nuna on staying present in an age of distraction
Since the release of Audrey Nuna’s 2021 debut, a liquid breakfast, the New Jersey-born rapper/pop it-girl’s star has only been rising. From recording early demos in her closet in New York City to a co-sign from Jack Harlow, much about her life has turned upside down in the last few years. Just a few weeks back, for example, she released “Starving” — a song about our never-ending cravings for love and attention connection and, yes, food — with fellow breakout Teezo Touchdown. But her focus isn’t on all the external buzz. Rather, Nuna’s got her mind on her craft. “At the end of the day, I want to be a student, which is ironic because I hate school,” she says. “But I just want to be a student of the craft.”
That childlike, love of learning mindset is in the air at SXSW, where she played last week. “I feel like this is so different from any other festival,” Nuna remarks. “It’s such an artist-first festival. When you see that power in the hands of the people who actually make the shit, you’re just gonna experience a different level of energy.” Preparing for her turn at the renowned Austin outpost, Nuna said her goal was to develop a set that brought people into the present, forcing them to concentrate on the art right in front of them and the magic happening in real time rather than the dopamine hits coming from their screens. “Every aspect of what I do, there’s such a level of care put into it. I want to bring that more into the live. Before, it was about showcasing the music. And now, I want to really create a world and an experience, almost as if you’re going to the theatre and experiencing a story.”
Creating space for presentness has also been, so far, the theme of Nuna’s second album rollout. Expected later this year, Nuna says the project leans towards the gritty, angry, and the raw. But those emotions, she says, wouldn’t have come to the fore if she hadn’t purposefully sat with them. “It’s a lot of daydreaming, a lot of just being bored,” she says on her creative process recently. “It’s kind of similar to sculpting in that you come up with an idea and then just tweak it and tweak it.”
Reeperbahn Festival and their full circle moment
For Alexander Schulz, the founder of Hamburg based Reeperbahn Festival, returning each year to SXSW in Austin Texas is more than just another industry event - it’s a return to where it all started.
Schulz first came to Austin almost 25 years ago as the owner of a small record label and was inspired enough to go back to Hamburg and set up his own event – but his idea took six years to come to fruition. “I was so inspired by the high quality of the music that you could find here compared to my country and the rest of continental Europe - and that the quality was across multiple genres," Schulz says. "Everyone accepted everyone’s music. It was so inspiring.”
Schulz had in mind a certain district in Hamburg where he felt such an undertaking could thrive: “The infrastructure was already there and that’s what’s kept me working on the idea until we started the event in 2006.”
Reeperbahn's reputation has spread far and wide – it remains one of the world's most vibrant and loved gatherings for both fans and industry to discover new music in a space that invites discovery and exchange. Their approach to curation has both a local and international focus and the festival has returned to SXSW over the past years as a stage host. Last week they delivered a line up at the Shangri-La venue in Austin that gave guests a teaser of what’s to come at the September event over in Hamburg. Stella Rose – daughter of Depeche Mode front man Dave Gahan – played music from her new record coming this spring. Irish singer-songwriter (and Lana Del Rey collaborator) Holly Macve was also a standout and has a close connection to the festival as a winner of its very own ANCHOR music prize. The award has been presented to up-and-coming musicians as part of Reeperbahn Festival since 2016 and is aimed at guiding both fans and music industry professionals in their search for the best new music – and a springboard for all competitors to an international career.
Three things to get excited about this week
The EP: Today, acoustic indie phenom Kaleah Lee releases her EP Birdwatcher. After receiving nods from the likes of Taylor Swift and Bon Iver, years of sharing snippets of covers and singles here and there on the Internet, and touring with the likes of Leith Ross, Vancouver native Lee finally steps out into her own with a tender debut project.
The platform: In an interesting music tech development, this week, James Blake announced his participation in the launch of Vault, a platform that allows fans to subscribe directly to the pages of their favourite artists for access to unreleased music. Blake believes the platform could counteract problem of low royalty payments in the steaming era and show that “music has inherent value beyond exposure.”
The tour: Next week, emerging indie artist Ellie Bleach will hit the road on a UK run of headline shows. Fresh off of her first appearance in the US with SXSW, Bleach will embark on a string of six dates back home to support the release of her forthcoming EP, Now Leaving West Feldwood.
Something Old, Something New
Every week, one of Best Fit's writers or editors share their recommendations of two records they love - one from the past, one from the present. This week, Best Fit writer Chris Todd on Malcolm McLaren’s Waltz Darling (1989), and Aili’s Nandakke? (2024).
Traveling back in time from Aili’s contributions to the latest wave of acid house right back to an album released at the height of the first phase of acid, we arrive at Malcom McLaren & The Bootzilla Orchestra’s Waltz Darling. Using that pic-n-mix technique to sampling that was common to the house clubs of the 1980s, Waltz Darling takes a jigsaw approach to piecing together an album, each track shamelessly pulling from a piece of classical music, adding a house beat with breathy vocals, and pretentious-as-hell lyrical posturing thematically based around the ballrooms and voguing competitions of 80s US gay nightlife.
As anyone who follows the original acid house era knows, outside of the classics, much that got released in the genre followed a basic, fluffy formula: take an old track, add a 4/4, add a “woo-yeah” or an “ahh yeah” sample, release. Rather than sticking to the mold and created with a team of experienced artists, this album stands out. Bass icon Bootsy Collins played with not only James Brown, but also Parliament-Funkadelic, and it’s his bass which makes the album such an enticing listen. Rock icon Jeff Beck thrillingly shreds all over ‘House of The Blue Danube,’ a track that borrows from Johan Strauss. Mark Moore (“S-Expresss”) and William Orbit also both hop in the mix via their production duties, giving a housier whomp to the highlight, “Deep In Vogue.” It's a sophisticated listen put together with intrinsic detail. The best way to describe the process on this collaborative eighties album by comparing it to Damon Albarn’s way of working with Gorillaz. Though hindsight is always 20/20, with the benefit of time, Waltz Darling could arguably be linked to other 1989 standouts such as Paul’s Boutique and Three Feet High and Rising. It might not be classed with the same, zeitgeist-busting impact of those albums, but everyone who knows Waltz Darling will swear blind it’s one of the best releases of that year.
After a few years of dropping sporadic singles, Belgian/Japanese duo Aili burst onto the scene in late February with the release of their debut album Nandakke? The record is a heady cocktail of half cutesy/half “fuck you” vocals from singer Aili Maruyama, set against the backdrop of dancefloor-focused electro production from Orson Wouters. Digging in might have the keen-eared among you mistaking the sound for Soulwax – and there are connections between the two groups. Given the Dewaele brothers use Wouters as their go-to guy for synth repairs, it makes sense that both bands are cut from the same sonic cloth.
From Aili, you can hear the cut up, pieced together vocal production techniques employed frequently by Soulwax. It has that warm listenability of Charlotte Adigery and Bolis Pupul’s 2022 collaboration Topical Dancer, also produced by Soulwax. But instead of being a politically-charged reflection of European racism in the twenty-first century, we’ve got acid jams about cutting the fingers off liars (“Yubikiri”), dirty electro boppers with the recipe for Japanese dish Takoyaki (“Takoyaki”), and the struggle of dealing with parental separation as a child (“Ichibansen”). The analogue production sounds, the stomach-churning basslines, fused with post punk-funk and driving electronics are the perfect fodder for Maruyama’s vocals, part J-Pop, part Grace Jones-esque ice-queen, along with the immediate mystic of not understanding the Japanese language makes this a must listen of 2024.
Listen to the week in new music by following our Discovery playlist
Dropping at midnight every Thursday, follow our 20-track playlist for a taste of the best new music from the most exciting breaking artists.
These are the songs our editors and writers have on repeat right now, taken from the hundreds of tracks released in the last seven days. Leading the selection this week are new tracks from Artemas, ASKO, Sam Akpro, King Isis, and coverstar Yoshika Colwell.