Name: Elena Herrmann aka Eddna
Occupation: Composer, sound artist, producer, songwriter, vocalist
Nationality: German
Current release: Eddna's Cut in Half is out via NIA.

Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

Most of the times the impulse to create comes in moments when I am the least conscious of my self and the most porous to the outside. Creation then comes flowing in like a beautifully destructive wave breaking the petty dams of my self and touching me fully. Engulfing me.

Whether I am standing on a cliff on a Greek island with the roaring ocean in front of me, …



... confronted with an angry storm on my balcony in Berlin or just in my dreams, …



... which have been full of oceans and cliffs in the last years. It’s the "ecstasy of being enfolded” that makes me create, to use the words of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima.



Movement makes me create as well. Going for a walk, running like a horse, traveling on a train, dancing alone, on the dance floor or again in my dreams, on a piazza in Venice in an unknown past.

And yes, love makes me create – always.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

Strangely, the answer to this question depends on whether I am talking about visual, musical or lyrical work. Visual ideas come to me as “visions" most of the times – appearing in front of my inner eye. It feels as if they have evolved in my subconsciousness for a long time and only show themselves the moment they have matured enough.

Musical ideas are more like fleeting sensations, as if carrying water in my hands. They often come to me when I am out for a walk – overflowing me from behind, making me rush home in fear of losing them through my fingers before I have a recording device, an instrument or paper at hand.

It is similar with lyrical ideas. Text is like someone suddenly standing behind me, grabbing my shoulders and whispering words into my ears with confidence. I feel that I have to listen attentively or else they will leave and might never return.

Whereas visual ideas are already the finished works in their “ideal forms” which I am then trying to turn into their “physical form”, music and text are at the mercy of the creative flow leading me to a finished work without knowing before what it will be.

Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

As much as I have realised that one is rarely prepared for creativity flooding in, I had to painfully learn that the continuation of this turbulent wave comes with its taming. I found that only if it is turned into a flowing stream can it end in a clear, deep and reflecting lake – meaning a good work.

To speak less metaphorically: I often find myself in the middle of a chaotic room with my tools not ready when I start the process of making a work. In those moments I am so excited about the new beginning that I feel that there is no time to loose tidying, cleaning, setting up, thus preparing.

However this mostly ends in either getting distracted and lost in a delta of unrelated ideas, sinking in a swamp of endless possibilities or in trying to force the direction of the river by digging words or melodies into frozen soil, thinking “why o why do they sound so artificial if the first lines and notes came so naturally?”

By now I know that these are the moments to drop the shovel and let the “early version” be. It is the time to clear up the land, find inspiration in other realms, doing “research", and after some time watch the river return to its chosen natural path again, thus continuing the work.

Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

I wish my creating phases were always this wholesome.

I would say that I have something like two creative phases. A calm and “healthy" dreaming phase with slow mornings, coffee, meditation, scent sticks, candles, yoga and walks. It’s the time of getting ignited by the surrounding sparks of inspiration. And then there is something like a “mad” production phase in which I am burning, setting worlds on fire, often on the verge of burning out. 



At the moment I am trying to find a state in between those two phases because I feel that the latter phase has taken too much energy from me in the last years. After having released my debut album Cut in Half I feel that another dreaming phase has begun – seven months in Japan.

What do you start with? How difficult is that first line of text, the first note?

They first lines and notes have always and will always come. For me the following ones are often the difficult ones.

In insecure times I fear that my ideas are products of luck. I realised for myself that it is important to have patience and trust in their coming or the strength and perseverance to go and look out for them.

They surely will come. It is a cycle.

To quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

What slightly bothers me in this question is the importance that is given to me being active towards a rather passive idea as opposed to ideas having a life of their own or even us having a shared existence in this enlivened world and me being lucky enough to be open enough to encounter them sometimes.

We are blessed with our senses – despite their limitations – to observe and experience this world. I hope to be like a fertile breeding ground for the creative seeds that are floating around us, to get impregnated by them.

To answer Bruce Duffie: Not a creation out of the self, not a heroic discovery, but an encounter with what’s ever surrounding us.

Or as Mishima, again, beautifully put it: “If only human beings could reverse their spirits and their bodies, could gracefully turn them inside out like rose petals and expose them to the spring breeze and the sun.”

Once you've started, how does the work gradually emerge?

With visual ideas I try my best to “incarnate” the image that has shown itself in front of my inner eye, asking myself which materials to work with, which movements a body is capable of, which light and camera to use to make it the best physical realisation of the vision possible.

With musical ideas it is more mysterious because I do not know what the finished work should sound like. I like to think of the process as a meandering river flowing through different strata (timbre), around sticks and stones (rhythm), creating different curves, surfaces and bubbles (melody).

Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

I would love to be able to let go of control more often. As beautifully overwhelmed as I can be by ideas, I tend to fall into the traps of analysis, evaluation, “logic” and judgement.

Although I do not want to say that they should never come into being, I think it should neither happen in the phase of calm dreaming, nor in the phase of mad producing but afterwards – maybe this is a third creative phase that I have not fully established yet: the phase of reflection.

Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

This is what I have talked about earlier. A river can split into many rivers, a delta in which one can get lost.

I am not saying that one should not get lost, I have just decided for myself that in order to continue with a work I should decide for one path, the one that feels most urgent in that moment and not mourn the other potential ones. They are not lost. They can be marked on the map for later journeys.

I write down those ideas, or I record little sound sketches. It is always such a pleasure to go through this archive of ideas at a later point in time.

There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

Spirituality and love is all it is, I think.

Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you're satisfied with a piece? What does this process look like in practise?

It takes ages for me to finish a work because I am not easily satisfied with what I do. In the past I think I have allowed myself too much time for “improvement” which often led to deadening the piece to my ears, eyes and soul. In practice this looks like a perfectionist with a strained jaw, listening to the same track a hundred times, sensing a flaw and digging for it in frozen soil.

It took other people to release this tension and block. I am grateful to my friends for listening to my music telling me “It’s done” and to my co-producer Philipp Koller telling me “It’s almost done”, suggesting simple but ground-breaking edits like “Let’s let this voice come from the left”, “Let’s put the drums through a space echo”, “Let’s add a real piano”, “Let’s make this faster” or “Let’s make you sound like a lady in the 80ies declaring the murder of a man standing in the spotlight of a smoky room wearing a shoulder-padded jacket.”



When it comes to my album, I have definitely overthought and overworked it. I do not regret it because it is my debut album and I am content with the result. For now though, I will let it lie and turn towards new ideas that have been neglected for too long. I am beyond excited to start afresh.

What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? How involved do you get in this?

Production for me is the core of my creation and I want to be fully involved with it at all times. I can barely separate my ideas from their immediate formation. In fact I would love them to be much closer even, because this for me is the creative flow.

Nevertheless I have realised that opening the production up for people like Philipp Koller is sometimes necessary to get distance from a piece again, see the broader picture and the next steps. Having wonderful instrumentalists play my compositions on the violin, double bass and organ also helped me rethink my production.

It was eye-opening to watch Philipp mix the tracks on Cut in Half as it made me realise that it can be such a deciding factor for the kind of music that I am doing. What we called additional production was often already techniques of mixing. It gave me more of a structural, dynamic and spatial awareness and made me realise that from now on I want mixing to be inherent in my production. So within the next months I will try to gain more skills in mixing to make use of them creatively in the production phase of my second album.

Mastering to me is a bit more mysterious. I know that it can give such different colours to a finished track in the last instance but the differences can be so hard to grasp that I mostly like to give the decision into someone else’s trusted hands – like those of Ingrid Loftsgarden in the case of Cut in Half.

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

Yes, I call it the post-natal depression and it always hits me hard. In those moments it is important to let go. To let go of the piece and to let go of the feeling that one has to keep on producing, thinking that else one will lose momentum.

I am very bad at taking breaks but with the release of this album I realised that I need to rest, that without this rest – distance, space, time, emptiness – there cannot be new creation. So now I will wait like a dried out shellfish on a rock at low tide, waiting for a new wave to come.

Is it not beautiful and hopeful to know about the ever-occurring tides?



Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

It is true that creativity and beauty potentially lies within everything. In the future I am hoping to incorporate this knowledge more into the rather mundane endeavours of the day as they tend to get neglected for their seeming triviality.

I am hoping to learn this during my time in Japan, where objects are carefully moved, receipts at grocery stores handed out like precious gifts, the pretty side of a tea cup turned towards the receiver and fallen leaves swept rhythmically.

Music though, in its engulfing intangibility, music – in my humble opinion – is capable of reaching the highest realms of beauty.