Part 1

Name: Isabella Bassi aka Isabassi
Nationality: Brazilian
Occupation: Producer
Current release: Isabassi's Speaking Things is out via Super Hexagon.
Recommendations: Book: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera; Album: Blue Alibi by Mica Levi

If you enjoyed this Isabassi interview and would like to know more about her music, visit her on Instagram, and Soundcloud.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?
    
This question always feels tricky for me as I feel like I didn't have well defined and clear influences. Growing up in Brazil in the 90s, with parents that listened from Bee Gees to Fatboy Slim, it all kept shifting for me. Music has always been around, in one shape or another.

As an only-child spending lots of alone "quality" time, I always had my disc-man with me to listen to music and feed my imagination, but I didn't have many friends to whom I could speak about and share musical interests with. I had a few guitar lessons and as an early internet kid, researching music on MySpace (or whatever platforms were at that time) occupied a lot of my afternoons with diverse genres - from Brazilian reggae-rock, american punk-rock, electronica to piano & nature soundscapes. It was a very introspective activity for me and I loved it.

But it wasn't until I was 20 that I started DJing and then moving to Berlin in 2016 when I started producing music. Since then it has been a long long journey full of discoveries and exchanges that shaped me into who I am now musically. I was lucky to meet some people in this city who introduced me to a lot of amazing stuff and all of that influenced me somehow - shout out to my partner who, for me, is a music-pedia.

As an idea to what's shifting through me now, I've been obsessed with trip-hop for quite some time already and I'm about to read Tricky's autobiography. But, besides being that imaginative and expressive world to get immersed in, I feel like making-music is the best experience I can get my hands on to get to know myself.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?
    
Now that I'm thinking about it, I guess I see - or better, feel - a movement. Like impulses, internal spasms, stillness or being slowed down. When I'm really enjoying listening to something I usually like to embody it and listen to it with the body. It's like when we are being creative, you feel locked in time, synced to something else.

And when I'm making music, if I were to only follow my thoughts I wouldn't be able to make a decision, as all different choices are potential choices (I'm quite an indecisive person). But there are only a few (if not one) that resonate in you more than others - and I believe we can feel it in our bodies.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

I guess when I had just started making music my goal was to craft and perfect one specific type of sound / style, but that actually felt like a barrier for me, besides getting bored of the process very easily.

I was trying to replicate what I was listening to and that wasn't working. It got me thinking "why is this process being so frustrating and when do I actually get to enjoy myself making music?" I guess you could call it a breakthrough, when you notice that, when you allow yourself to create whatever, express whatever and follow that sort of creative pull to wherever it takes you, it resonates so much more and then even obstacles in production / techniques aspect become good life lessons and rich learning curves.

Slowly I also realised what kind of workflow I'd like to have, for example recording machines and then resampling and processing them, arranging like a sound collage. I can't orient myself towards "what sort of sound do I want to get after a studio session?", but it is more like "what sort of experience do I want to have and what do I want to explore?".

Sometimes I wish I could define an umbrella theme for an album, a sound concept, and stick to it, but it never worked. I guess the downside of that is, because I want to feel very free creative wise, I try not to put so much emphasis on my art, vocational speaking, as in to not feel pressured. But somehow life has its ways to, every now and again, bring it to the forefront, and that's ok.

I've always been interested in psychology and the symbolic language that music is, like a window to our inner selves with perfect metaphors and analogies to our reality. So summing that with the teaching experiences I had in the last two years, I am now pursuing a Music Therapy masters degree.

And all of that feels like a constant and never ending development - of course it brought me new challenges, especially in trying to bring the electronic side of music to a discipline that is somewhat still very musically traditional, but I'm excited with the journey.    

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

For me, identity is something that we keep rewriting and redirecting the narrative for.

Last year I came across a great Music Therapy book by Even Rudd which tapped into the concept of identity, and how we can see it as a rhizoma that keeps forever growing and making connections, instead of being this static inner core. I like the idea of letting go of identity too, and that's something I explore while making music.

For sure I have my preferences in music which seem to have been around for the last few years - anything that sounds like stoner music, I'm in, from stoner rock to dub, trip-hop, to doom ... I just really enjoy slow tempo music, and I enjoy its contrast with light and heavy moods, as a listener and as an artist.

I guess that's somehow teaching me in this period of time how to slow down in real life and be present and held in the moment.
    
What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

I think music and art can't be understood in absolute terms, alienated from the experience. When you listen to music or see a piece of art, that encounter will shift things in you, conscious or unconsciously. So I think I definitely put more emphasis on the experience side of things.

I think when we analyse artists too much and put emphasis on their story and their importance, sure it's necessary for contextualization, understanding cultural influences and for educational purposes. Or even as a tribute, it's great.

But one can tell you a million things about a great artist and you still won't know what you will feel about it until you listen to it / see it.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

I think originality is timeless. It's not much about one versus the other. My opinion is that perfection is in the eyes of the beholder, just because it resonates deeply with her / him. Perfection simply happens when it happens, and perfectionism, as a goal, should be taken lightly and not in a self-destructive way, like a painful weight we can carry.

I'm a big fan of Carl Jung and the individuation term, and what I interpret from it is, being whole and embracing all of our aspects so that each one of us is indeed an original piece. And art and music are great tools to explore that.

I'd say I'm not interested in either "music of the future" or "continuing a tradition", rather experiencing music as one of the ways we can explore the multitude of "things" we have inside us, and how we move them around. We actually need to let our unconscious come forward if we want to access our creativity, and each one of us has their ways, some healthier than others …

I believe we as listeners can sense that, when a piece of music has "honest content" inside of it. I think as an artist one can craft a workflow where they access and let flow honest content coming from them and organise it in unique ways.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

My first album was created mostly with the Analog Rytm drum machine. The first time I used it, I fell in love with its sequencer. It's a great and fun machine that can give you loads of flexibility and never ending jams. I love percussion-oriented music and that definitely got me into exploring more and more broken rhythms patterns.

I don't use it that much anymore because I have been working on drums on the DAW, and every now and again I record one or two drum loops with it, but I have always taken it with me for live performances and will keep doing it.

I have a GR-1 Granular Synthesiser which is very close to my heart. I love working with random samples and processing them with whatever I can get my hands on, and the GR-1 is fantastic for that and for its playability. I'm working on a new live setup as I want to present my current album on 'Super Hexagon' in a deconstructed soundscape vibe, and I hope to process some main samples used in the album through the GR-1.

And pedals, lots of pedals! For the last two albums I have been recording guitar and bass parts, helping me to exercise my melodic senses, and while I still try to find a way of giving a right place for that in my music, it has been super fun, especially using an e-bow.