Name: Foundling
Members: Erin Lang (voice, bass, harp), Samuel Hall (percussion), David Georgos (synths, keys, programming), Peter Hanson (sax, flute), Dino Karlis (drums)
Nationality: American (Peter), Australian (Samuel), Canadian (Erin), German (David), New Zealand (Dino)
Interviewee: Erin Lang
Current event: Foundling's new album Equilibria is out via Lakeview Enterprises. They will officially launch the album on May 26th 2024 at ACUD Club, Berlin.

If you enjoyed this Erin Lang interview and would like to know more about her music, visit her official website. Foundling are also on Instagram, and Facebook.

For a deeper dive, also read our Samuel Hall interview, and our Foundling interview.



Are you acting out parts of your personality in your music which you couldn't or wouldn't in your daily life? If so, which are these? What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music?

Yes, I think the music is very much a portal for me to first go inwards and find the spaces that need excavation. The things that have happened that affected me the most deeply and then kind of live them again and move through them and transform them into this musical landscape that is kind of the fantasy of where the reality and the feelings of the experience live again in the outside world, back through the portal.

It’s a kind of mystical version of myself I suppose, where I can be express a kind of depth of emotion that I wouldn’t in day to day life. I feel extremely lucky for that space and I think it underpins my approach to music which is centred around belonging.

I never really thought about making music. It just happened. When I needed to embody the songs that meant so much to me and made me feel connected to the world and they amalgamated and transformed and came back out in the things I made. It felt like a responsibility to continue that reaching out for connection, the giving after all the artists before me had given and made me feel like I wasn’t alone in the things I felt, a sense of belonging to a wider group of connection through shared emotional experience.

It’s such a hard thing to find for so many people, emotionally and physically in the current state of the world and through history so many people displaced and in incredibly difficult circumstances. If ever this music gives the smallest sense of being held and understood and belonging, then I’m so grateful to be a part of that thread.

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

I’ve always thought I was so lucky to know where I felt connected to the world for so long through music, I never even really had to think about it. To feel passionate and excited and challenged, and that I had a place to sift through and process the hard parts of experiences and emotional life.

I didn’t set out to be a musician. As a kid I thought I would be a vet or an actor. But in the end it felt inevitable, I suppose. I was making certain decisions about learning instruments and playing with other people but it felt more like needs than decisions. So, I would say music doesn’t necessarily reflect the way I live my life but more like it directs it.

Maybe it’s not necessarily understanding music, but allowing yourself to feel it and be a part of it, giving in to it, to find it over and over again as a place where all the complex thoughts and emotions could live and come out, so that I can be the person that I am, with this incredible support for processing the inevitable emotional forces in our lives.

I suppose in that way it has been an incredible teacher and I’ve learned to be proufoundly grateful for all the people and connections it has brought to me and the roots that hold firm through the challenges.