On Friday, September 6th at 9:30am, Vernal Pools hosts Oakland based Peruvian American composer, vocalist, and performing artist, Briana Marela for a live in-studio interview ahead of her upcoming appearance at this year’s SF Electronic Music Festival on September 22nd at The Lab.
Marela’s recent music centers the voice, technology embodied through gesture and enhanced objects. Her gestural and lyrical song performances draw from elements of both experimental electronic music and vocal driven pop music. Using the visual coding language MaxMSP and machine learning, she is able to make custom tools to create compositions with varying fixed elements that transition into moments of improvisation.
Her most recent albums include the independently released You Are A Wave, an experimental electronic music album, marked by the grief of the sudden passing of her father in April 2020, with a focus on voice and Buchla 100. As well as a collaborative album of poetry/spoken word lyrics, noise, and ambient electronic textures with Oakland artist Sally Decker, titled Small Tremble in Slow Motion, released by Surface World in June 2022. This collaboration with Decker was the result of a remote residency with the organization Qubit in NYC. This audio visual collaboration was an exploration of the expansive possibilities of being present with oneself within experiences of deep emotional contraction such as grief and loss.
