Name: Odd Beholder aka Daniela Weinmann
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, producer
Nationality: Swiss
Current release: The new Odd Beholder album Feel Better is out now via Sinnbus.
Recommendations: In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin; The movie Jeanne Dielmann by Chantal Ackermann

If you enjoyed this interview with Odd Beholder, visit her official website for more information. She is also on Instagram, Soundcloud, and Facebook.    



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?

I am my own device, my instrument. I create a mystery that I want to solve. In the process, I oscillate between two states: I am a dreamer and a critic. When I am The Dreamer, I know rather than I think, and I do rather than know. But this state can last only for a short while, we’re talking hours or minutes. Then, my stance shifts, and I become The Critic. I look at what I’ve done, and I try to make sense of it; I start to interpret what I have done.

While The Dreamer is a rather non-verbal, highly sensitive and sensual creature, The Critic is verbal, not very sentimental, and conceptual. As The Critic, I analyze what I have done.

When I dream, I am not aware of my inspirations because I am in my senses and in my body (mainly in my ears and hands). But as The Critic I discover themes and references. This is not a limiting process but gives me new ideas and helps to create more intentionally, and to focus on context and communication; it puts me on a map and helps me find a direction. This is why a lot of my albums feel conceptual: I let the sketches develop a dialogue with one another and with the stuff I listen to.

I began by stating that I like to solve the mysteries I create, but sometimes, I also accept them in an unresolved state – depending on who has the last word: The Dreamer or The Critic.

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

If I’d be good at planning, I’d be doing something else and I would definitely write shorter answers. (Yeah. What the hell am I trying to prove with this interview?) But I try to make peace with my chaotic mind, chaos is necessary, it is fertile. Chaos is compost, compost is life.

Let’s stay with the trouble and read Donna Haraway. “Finished Work” is the delusion that taught me stamina and discipline, and I thank it for that. On a pragmatic level, it is invaluable. But maybe even on a spiritual level, it can be an important exercise that leads to a greater understanding of the world to draw lines in the sand, to create milestones on a round planet and mark a calendar in the infinite and incomprehensible time continuum of the universe.

But finishing for the sake of finishing something is not an end in itself. Nothing is an end in itself but death. We Western people have succumbed to a cult of result that ended in much destruction, exploitation. Our “productivity” is turning phenomena into products. Turning land into nations. People into workers. And then the workers into AI. And listeners into customers, and customers into users.

It’s a Freudian death drive to finish work. We need to check our death drive and connect with our will to live and to let live.

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'?

I need a visually calm, but not a sterile space to compose. I create a collection of sounds (often, synths and percussion samples or field recordings) and musical sketches (mostly, a rough demo sang over an acoustic guitar and recorded with my iphone).

For the lyrics, I sometimes work with mood boards and image collections consisting mostly of film stills or photographs, but sometimes also of paintings and drawings.

And for the communications with producers and technicians, I work with playlists of songs that I use for reference (I collect them to talk about the desired mix or the arrangement – is it very lush and layered? Or minimal and intimate? HiRes? LoFi? Nostalgic? Futuristic?).

When do the lyrics enter the picture? Where do they come from? Do lyrics need to grow together with the music or can they emerge from a place of their own?

I am not only writing lyrics but poems, prose, diaries, journalistic and scientific articles – in what context a good sentence ends up in is sometimes not clear at the beginning. So yes, my lyrics can emerge on their own.

On the other hand, it is true that melodies convey words and vice versa. As I am typing my answers, I hear them in my head and I have an opinion on their flow. Western people are often surprised about the four Chinese tones as if their own sentences wouldn’t use music to convey music, too. Imagine you would pronounce this sentence as a question. It would be the wrong song.

And if I listen back to a melody that I have written, I just know if it is convinced, hesitant, affirmative, annoyed, scared, or curious. I try to respect that.

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?

Yes, that happens to me, too.

But I am stubborn. I do get lost sometimes, but most of the times I stick around.

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?

Well, we pray when we are made aware of how little control we have over a situation.
We pray when we want to reconnect with our guts and get out of our heads.
We pray to connect with our best self.
And we pray to feel our feelings.

So yes.

When you're in the studio to record a piece, how important is the actual performance and the moment of performing the song still in an age where so much can be “done and fixed in post?“

I should value it more. I fear performing. But it’s true that it matters a lot. I guess we can perceive more than we are aware of:

I guess on some primal level humans know when the room and the timeline is artificial, is digitally assembled. Nobody looks at a painted window and says: Nice weather outside.

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?

In theory: Endless improvement and refinement, but thank God there are deadlines made by people outside of my head. Also: I am not of the type that redoes a song over and over until you can barely recognize it (when I made All Reality Is Virtual I went through such a phase, it somehow never felt finished).



Now I try to be more assertive about the production. This is how the snare should sound. This is the key melody element. This is the bassline. I try to stick to what felt good at one point, and I try to formulate that idea as precise as possible.

And yes, I can satisfy myself musically, but it’s not any different than with other songs that I listen to: I can get tired of my songs and I can rediscover them later again.

Even recording a solo song is usually a collaborative process. Tell me about the importance of trust between the participants, personal relationships between musicians and engineers and the freedom to perform and try things – rather than gear, technique or “chops” - for creating a great song.

This question moves me a bit. It is such a common thing for me to collaborate with people that I sometimes forget how beautiful it is to be able to do so. Yes! Trust is essential.

When I was young, I just made my friends play an instrument. This was great for a while. Then I was a bit disappointed in how shitty everything sounded – I felt like I couldn’t express myself because of our collective limitations and so I started looking for “good musicians”.

I then had a few difficult experiences. At times I felt lonely in my creation process. I felt supported musically, but I wasn’t seen. This is a rather common experience for minorities in the music industry. You go through stuff that your fellow musicians and engineers don’t notice. Your songs may interest them musically, but they cannot relate to the topics you talk about. Context matters.

On the other hand, if music isn’t a tool to cross chasms, then what is? Many of my male friends may not understand the type of sexism women in my generation experienced but they understand discrimination – have you ever talked to a guy who is short? Who sucks at sport? Who has a speech impairment? Who grew up poor? Who is neurodivergent (and yes, many engineers are)?

Music opens you up. After the second beer in the studio, they will eventually share some bits of their story. I love that about the process. Everyone I met in this field is here for the big emotions, even if they hide that fact well behind oscillators, spectrometers, and complicated genre denominations and what not.

Nobody will ever ask in a plane if there is a musician amongst us. We don’t trust musicians like we trust a surgeon. Yet every now and then, we give them our hearts.

What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? In terms of what they contribute to a song, what is the balance between the composition and the arrangement (performance)?  

Are you asking for a recipe?

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?

Naturally, I can relate to the feeling of exhaustion. After the release of an album there often is a recovery phase, but I think I can frame it or experience it in a positive way. I make time for this recovery and don’t expect too much of me. I am allowed to binge a series if my album is out.

I am allowed to be tired of my songs already, I am allowed to think it’s probably all shit. I am allowed to fearfully count the likes under my posts. But I am also allowed to shrug my shoulders, grab my boots, and hike up to the snow line.

Because yes, even as an artist, I love myself some vacation. My album is off my plate! Whee! Clean slate! Now I have time to stroll around, take pictures, paint, read, cook, sleep, kiss. Releasing an album is a job. Writing an album is a privilege.

I suspect that when artists feel very empty after a release, they may have hurt themselves and others in the process of creating it. They have withheld too many things they really needed – and like good Christians, they have projected their happiness into the far future, into the moment when they will harvest praise for their album – and when it is finally out, it cannot make up for the pain that they have felt. That’s not fair on the album, I think. No amount of praise makes up for the way you treat yourself.

Or as somebody wrote: You can’t hate yourself into a better person – and you cannot hate your art into being better. I think artists should normalize maintaining their friendships even when they go through intense work phases. Luckily, as a woman, I have always been expected to be able to do both: Care about people and about art at the same time. I can highly recommend it.

Music is a language, but like any language, it can lead to misunderstandings. In which way has your own work – or perhaps the work of artists you like or admire - been misunderstood? How do you deal with this?

I don’t automatically suspect that my lyrics have been misunderstood when people don’t like them. What I write doesn’t resonate with everyone.

Often, I feel stupid to write about my worries and fears. I grew up in Switzerland, the richest country in the world. If I was born into a working-class family in Lebanon, I wouldn’t care about Odd Beholder. In fact, I would most likely have zero patience for it.

It can also be a problem that we think that what we care about is universally important or understandable. We need to come to terms that our horizon is a matter of our positionality in society. If we understand that, we might be able to listen more deeply to one another and assume way less.

But yeah, I’d love to listen more to what my listeners make of my music – if you happen to come across an Odd Beholder song, send me your interpretation, your reading of it. Most people don’t bother to do that, so I frankly just don’t know how people perceive it. In the age of doom-scrolling and smart curation, who has still time to understand anything?