Interview by Matteo Pini
Portrait by Rachel Le

MP Your earlier work cloaked your voice in reverb and texture, whereas this album is considerably starker and less adorned. Did you see reverb as a kind of protection, and if so, what permitted you to let it go?

AR I definitely saw it as protection.  I didn’t feel strong enough as a lyricist or writer to have my voice front and centre, even though I feel like I am first and foremost a vocalist. I was new to everything, and that felt like a safe place, appropriate for the ambient realm. But I got bored with what I would normally do. For the first time, I wanted to foreground the vocals, to have people understand what I was saying. It was scary to think about how people would perceive the lyrics, which convey really difficult feelings and experiences.  I wanted to expand myself as an artist, and the only way to do that is to do something very scary and new.

MP How much does the form of your music inspire its content? If the music is meditative and relaxing, is the process of making it also relaxing?

AR This album did not feel very meditative! It felt cathartic in some ways, but  it was also torturous and challenging.  I was so afraid of putting out this type of music, both because of the vulnerability of the lyrics and how exposed it was sonically. My last album was also vulnerable  in its subject matter and identity, but I was using effects to hide what I was saying. You wouldn’t necessarily catch what I was saying in the music itself, but for this album, I wanted my words to be at the forefront. 

MP Your previous albums have such a sense of endlessness and eternity. What was your experience like writing Poem 1, given that its subject matter has such a defined ending?

AR I was implementing some sonic tools that were similar to drones, like repetitive patterns and notes, or even percussion that repeats in a drone-like way. I was very inspired by the idea of the stark, intense emotion of a specific event, and that felt like an interesting place to write from. I wanted to lean a bit more into pop and folk songwriting, because those genres are very influential to me. When you’re dealing with more of a pop structure, you can’t be as floaty. You have to be straight to the point, but the songs are so slow that the floatiness still feels present.

MP Were you drawing upon the tradition of heartbreak albums, or any poetic influences?

AR I was listening to a lot of Shirley Horn, the jazz singer and pianist. I was listening to her album Softly (1988) a lot. She had this subdued, almost sensual approach, and her story is interesting: she avoided becoming too mainstream, turned down record deals and did things her own way. She’s very singular in her art form. I was also listening to the Polish composer Henryk Górecki, particularly his Symphony No. 3 (1977). I tried to embody the really difficult experiences and emotions that Horn explored in her music and the striking feelings of loss that Górecki evoked in his. As for poetic influences, some of the text is from older arias and lieders [classical vocal music genres], and I was also reading Louise Glück, which I found very inspiring, too.

MP Did that front and centre quality evolve out of Natural Wonder Beauty Concept (2023), your collaborative project with DJ Python? What is the link between those projects?

AR That project was really necessary for me; it felt like a stepping stone into where I am now. After my last record, Because of a Flower (2020), I was at a loss with what I wanted to do, and felt very drained coming out of writing and performing music with such a heavy subject matter. Natural Wonder Beauty Concept felt like a nice vehicle to try whatever we felt like and be a bit more lighthearted, to have music feel fun again. Brian is a great writer and musician, and we encouraged each other to try a lot of new things. It was when I started toying with the idea of making a “real song”.  I tried to do this with a few pieces on that record, and that gave me the courage to keep going in that direction.

MP You’ve engaged in so many different musical practices – as a chorister, in jazz bands, singing karaoke. How do you see these different fields coming together in your practice?

AR They are definitely all interrelated. I learnt a lot about how to sing properly in school. When you’re singing in an ensemble, you have to know how to relate to others and use your voice intentionally within a larger framework. In jazz choirs, you’re singing really tight harmonies, and you have to be really precise with what you’re doing to pull it off, so it takes a lot of listening and awareness of what is going on around you. There’s just so much subtlety in singing and songwriting, and it’s nice to take little details from all these schools of thought and put them together.

MP Could you explain how the record came to be titled Poem 1? Poem 1 implies that there might be a Poem 2. 

AR When I was thinking about how I wanted to structure the album, at one point I thought it would be cool to make an album where every song is a poetic stanza, and the whole album is just one long poem. As I kept thinking about it, I realised that would be actually really difficult, but in that time I came up with the name. Even when I abandoned the concept, I kept the name because I thought it sounded nice. I don’t know if there’ll be a Poem 2, but coming out of this album and facing all of my fears and seeing how it’s resonating with people, has inspired me to keep moving forward. I want to keep running with this newfound courage and accomplishment. It proved that that I could do something that really terrified me. .