Name: Johanna Klein aka LIV ALMA
Nationality: German
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, producer, saxophonist, improviser
Current release: LIV ALMA's homonymous debut album is out via Papercup.

If you enjoyed this LIV ALMA interview and would like to know more about her music, visit her official website. She is also on Instagram, and Facebook.



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?

I grew up in a musical family. My father plays the guitar and my mother the piano, we always sang a lot and as a child I received classical piano lessons. I have always loved improvising on instruments and writing own songs.

At some point I wanted to play the saxophone, which I learned at school. Through the school big band I came to jazz. At home I startet recording vocals, guitar and other instruments and wrote my first songs intuitively at the age of 11. For a long time I devoted myself to jazz music and studied in Cologne with focus on jazz saxophone.

At some point I realized that I was missing the ease in making music that I used to feel. So I started again recording pop songs at Lockdown 2021, learning guitar and getting into electronic music. That was the founding moment of LIV ALMA.

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?

The beautiful thing about music, I think, is that it always sounds different and new, even if it's the same piece. And that you experience music alone and thus experience yourself differently again and again.

I see relatively little and feel relatively much. I let my thoughts flow when I listen to music.

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

In the beginning, I always just made the music with friends that they just made. You swim along with them, the social aspect was the focus for me.

During my studies I started to understand music more theoretically and to stick to certain rules when making and writing music. I didn't really find my own voice until after my studies.

I realized that I no longer wanted to be pigeonholed as a "jazz saxophonist", so I tried to break away from that and enter a different door. That's how LIV ALMA came into being.

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.

All of that actually grows together. Feeling and identity through the medium of music is in close interaction with where you are going.

You experience new things, which then influences your identity, and your identity in turn influences your music.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

Freedom.

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 don't understand the juxtaposition of originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness as exclusion.

In contrast to tradition, however, I am more interested in innovation and originality and in a future-oriented sound world.

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?

With me, more and more instruments were added over time. Piano, saxophone, voice, guitar, flute up to synthesizers, modern production techniques, dealing with Ableton and samples and it still increases.

Over time, however, you don't start from scratch again. The understanding of sound remains and when you pick up a new instrument, you cannot yet play it technically but know how it should sound.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

One often imagines the life of a musician to be more romantic than it is. The amount of time I really spend making music is unfortunately very small. My everyday life consists mainly of organization, bureaucratic tasks and management. But I look forward most to moments of writing, rehearsing, recording and playing.

A typical day looks like this: Getting up, drinking green tea, checking and answering mails, writing messages, organizing rehearsals or gigs. Late breakfast. In the afternoon a bit of recording and writing.

In the evening I like to go to concerts, even more I like to play them myself of course.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

The year before last I got a funding with my jazz quartet to record new pieces in the studio. I wrote pieces, we rehearsed but one day before I realized that I didn't like the pieces and the way of playing anymore.

On the studio day itself I decided that we would just improvise freely for a day. Usually I play saxophone in the band. That day I also sang a bit. What came out of it I like much better than anything I had written before. The music suddenly no longer sounded like modern jazz, but like experimental pop, and thus much more like the music I like to listen to and can identify with.

That was a formative experience for me and paved the way for new musical doors. Behind one of these doors LIV ALMA was waiting ;)

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

In my opinion, everyone listens to music individually. Even in a concert with many listeners, everyone hears the music differently and individually. You can then talk about it and the fact that everyone hears differently makes the exchange interesting.

Making music, on the other hand, works very well together. Some of the pieces on my albums, for example, came about through collaborative improvisation, and I could not have composed the result like that beforehand.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

My songs are about personal experiences.

I am happy if someone else can do something with it, if he or she experiences something similar or if people are put into a state of aesthetic experience.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

You are talking about states that trigger extreme emotions.

Many people music can help as an outlet to classify and process these emotions for themselves. How that is with myself remains my secret ;)

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?

Sound is produced by vibrations that are transmitted to the ear as sound waves. This is something physical, mathematical. They vary in pitch, volume, tempo and rhythm.

The science of sound reminds us to pause, listen, and feel the vibration.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing 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?

In art I feel absolute freedom. It's as if I'm standing in an empty space that I can shape the way I want.

In an everyday task, it is a matter of sequences of movements, the course of which is fixed from the outset.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

Emotion through music comes from reliving experienced reality. Everything you hear you compare with what you know.

Put simply: When we hear a person crying it does something to us emotionally. And when an instrument plays a sound that sounds similar to the sound of a person crying, it does something very similar to us emotionally. And so we always match the sounds we hear with what we know.

That it does something emotional to us is essential for our survival as a species. When a mother hears her baby crying it is important that she reacts emotionally so that the baby is cared for by her. So deep emotions are also created by music.