Name: Layla Rehana
Occupation: Vocalist, composer, spiritual guide
Current release: Layla Rehana teams up with Sebastian Mullaert for Solar Paint, out via Bigamo, available November 14th 2025.

If you enjoyed this Layla Rehana interview and would like to know more about her work and music, visit her on Instagram.

For a deeper dive, read our Sebastian Mullaert interview.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

I feel music in my emotional center— somewhere around the solar plexus. It’s like energy translating itself into emotional feeling which sometimes elicits color and texture. Sometimes it feels metallic, sharp or cool. Other times it feels warm, smooth or sparkling.

It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it’s as if I’m seeing sound. I first recognized this while in Sebastian Mullaert’s studio. He was playing pieces for me to sing with, and I realized each one had its own distinct shape or atmosphere, almost like entering a different room. I usually experience it with my eyes closed.

It’s rare, but when it comes, it feels like a quiet conversation between me and the music itself.

How do listening with headphones and listening through a stereo system change your experience of sound and music?

Listening with headphones feels like sound entering straight into my being. It moves through the body before the mind even has time to interpret it. It’s deeply intimate, like the music is whispering from the inside out.

Through a stereo, the experience expands. The sound starts to live in the room, interacting with air, walls and distance. It becomes more of a dialogue with the space itself.

One pulls me inwards and the other invites me to listen outward.

Tell me about some of the albums or artists that you love specifically for their sound, please.

My listening changes with the landscape I’m in.

When I was in New York recently, visiting my parents, I found myself rediscovering how it feels to walk in a city that’s alive with movement. It’s a mix of freedom and anonymity.

Olivia Dean’s music became the soundtrack to that moment. There’s something in her voice— That smooth, jazzy warmth — that felt like sunlight on concrete.



I tend to move between worlds when I listen: sometimes it’s ambient and spacious, other times it’s soulful and raw.

It’s less about a genre for me and more about how the sound shapes the atmosphere of my emotional world.

Are there everyday places, spaces, or devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?

I’ve always loved the sound of a jar or bottle cap being opened for the first time. It’s such a funny small thing but so satisfying! There’s a freshness in it, like something new is beginning.

I also love the soundscapes of the jungle in Playa Del Carmen. The birds at dawn, the insects, the rustling plants. It feels like they’re all in conversation, signalling to each other that a new day has come.

There’s something sacred about that rhythm— it reminds me that sound is how life communicates aliveness.

How important is sound for our overall well-being and in how far do you feel the "acoustic health" of a society or environment is reflective of its overall health?

Sound is the breath of a place— a living language that reveals how awake or disconnected a society truly is. When we listen, we can feel the difference between a jungle alive with wind and birdsong versus a city oscillating with strain.

The frequencies we live among either nourish or deplete us. They weave through our cells and shape our sense of safety and belonging. I often feel that the “acoustic health” of a society reflects its collective consciousness— whether it’s attuned to harmony, presence or lost in noise and distraction.

To nurture sound to a space is to be attuned to the unique spacial need. And sometimes, more often than not, what a space needs, what we need is silence.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds?

The sounds that move me most are the quiet, living ones. The rustle of wind through the trees in the early morning, when everything feels like it’s just beginning to breathe.

In the jungle, I often hear the soft, yearning vibration of a spider monkey calling out for food— it’s such a raw, emotional sound. Those moments remind me that nature is constantly singing, even in it’s hunger and stillness.

The melodies I create often come from listening too those subtleties— like in “Songs from The Floating Island” from my new EP solar paint.



That track carries the same humming, lullaby-like phrases I hear in the jungle— the way the wind, creatures and space all seem to hum in one continuous conversation.

Many animals communicate through sound. Based either on experience or intuition, do you feel as though interspecies communication is possible and important? Is there a creative element to it, would you say?

I do believe interspecies communication is possible.

There is something extraordinary for example about the ways dolphins are known to interact with human pregnancies using sonar waves to sense and even support the birthing process in the ocean. It’s as if they’re attuned to life at a vibrational level that we’ve forgotten.

That same kind of intelligence shows up in the documentary The Secret Life of Plants, where we see that plants respond emotionally to sound, to touch, to our attention—and with tools like PlantWave we can even hear their subtle songs.

To me, that’s proof that sound is a universal language of consciousness. When I tune in my creative process and sing, I feel I am joining that dialogue.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?

I love my music. I love my playlists. Any chance I get to listen, I feel that same delight Glenn Gould described. I might even attribute that to my Human Design chart, as in my chart it says sound is how I digest life best.

But silence, for me, is just as essential. It’s the space that allows everything to integrate. We often think of silence as the absence of sound, yet I feel it’s actually a frequency we can’t perceive. It’s a subtler vibration that holds everything together. That’s why silence feels so peaceful; it’s not empty, it’s full of presence.

Many people equate silence with being quiet, but what I experience is silence is actually fully alive and attuned to everything around me, including me! I once wrote a short poem that said:

“Silence is an unstruck sound found all around; it knows no bounds. God is found in silence when our Ego self is mute.”

Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses, including vision. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?

If we listened more than we looked, I think we’d live in a more connected world— Softer, slower, and more attuned. Vision tends to define and separate, but sound dissolves boundaries. We can close our eyes, but we can’t close our ears in quite the same way.

Listening asks us to receive, to feel rather than judge. It draws us inward and outward at the same time. When I’m channelling sound, I’m constantly reminded that true listening isn’t passive, it’s a creative act.

When I truly listen, I become part of the music that’s already happening all around us.