Live music and touring have been on lockdown and fans as well as artists are going through withdrawals. We wanted to come up with something fun to help bridge that distance between fans and artists right now. What we came up with is something called The Lockdown Lowdown and it’s a Q&A session with fun questions for artists to answer. They’re not your typical interview questions, so it gives you a peek inside of the artists themselves. We’re big music nerds here at I’m Music Magazine and we love learning things like this about the artists that we love. We’re pretty sure that you’ll get a kick out of these, so we hope you’ll take the time to read them. In this installment, we sat down for a fun Q&A session with Alia Synesthesia of .Subterranea.
SUBTERRANEA is composed, performed, produced, mixed and mastered by Alia Synesthesia, a Siberian-Canadian trained operatic singer & multi-intstrumentalist.
1. How have you been doing during the pandemic and how are you spending your time?
Mostly creating new music and working on passions/work projects (video game soundtracks, music for media, etc). Also I finally have an opportunity to pick up a few new music skills, for which I am very excited about! Other than that, a stable exercise regiment is pretty much a must for me ever since gyms are closed.
2. Have you been working on new music?
A ton of it. I have finished a 6-songs EP that is coming up possibly by the end of August, ‘Music for New Churches’ – I am very excited to share that work. It’s 6 neo-medieval tracks, mostly instrumental, that combine western instruments like drums and cello with world instruments like nay flute, harp, didgeridoo, guzheng, taiko drums, tabla drums and more! I was going for a bit of a hybrid composition approach and really enjoyed the process.
Outside of that, there was a new Subterranea track release in June (“Ecochamber”) – we have joined forces with a phenomenal guitarist Constantin Necrasov (Half Past Four, Volkodrom) and a couple very exciting collaborations on the go.
3. 5 albums that changed your life
1. Storm Corrosion – Storm Corrosion
2. Chelsea Wolfe – Abyss
3. Ulver – Association of Julius Caesar
4. Alcest – Kodama
5. Nightwish – Oceanborn
There is a bit of a trick to this collection. They have definitely changed my life in a sense that they all lead to very major music decisions for me and re-defined my approaches to composition, but of course there is more music that affected me on a large scale. A lot of my peers and colleagues would be mentioning classics – Sabbath, Megadeth, maybe even Metallica – I didn’t grow up with all this music, because as a kid (and perhaps as a girl) born in recently collapsed soviet union and then immigrated to Canada at fourteen, I was not accepted or invited into any “music enthusiasts” circles where this music would be shared and re-shared, and played. At best, I was discovering music in complete isolation and there isn’t much traction in a vacuum. It all started with me discovering a translation of an interview with Tarja Turunen (Nightwish) in a poppy Russian music magazine but I had no peers to talk about that with.
4. 5 artists that influenced you as a musician.
Tarja Turunen, Bjork, Diamanda Gallas, Mikael Åkerfeldt, Dan Swano.
All influenced me differently. Tarja Turunen is what essentially gave my music passion wings – I had no idea it was possible to combine classical singing with symphonic metal before (hell, I never heard metal before!), and she was the first metal singer I ever discovered. Bjork taught me to be fearless and independent in my musical expression, Diamanda Gallas taught me that it’s okay to be strange and terrifying. Mikael Akerfeldt taught me that it’s okay to throw music away if you don’t like it, and it’s okay to change musical directions. And Dan Swano taught me that you can definitely be a multi-instrumentalist, singer and a producer at the same time.
5. Your 5 favorite live albums
Yup, here’s a thing – most music I was exposed to before 2010 didn’t come in live albums. This, in all honesty, would probably be a good question for my partner who is a walking prog encyclopedia. I will just give you simply 5 albums that I like. They definitely did have a hand shaping my musical expression, but not in the same way. For instance, I had a huge Megadeth phase that came with me listening and researching the members’ autobiographies, yet I just don’t make this kind of music, so there’s been no particular influence outside of fascination.
And here it goes:
1. Skinny Puppy – Too Dark Park
2. Witherscape – Wake of Infinity and/or Moontower by Dan Swano
3. Megadeth – Peace Sells (I had my Megadeth phase in late twenties)
4. Depeche Mode – Black Celebration
5. OSI – Free
6. Life on the road; 5 of the craziest/funniest/scariest tour stories
I don’t have any, as life blessed me with pretty predictable and not-so-crazy bandmates. Touring is a breeze when customs aren’t trying to squeeze the living hell out of you.
7. 5 favorite movies
I like horror films, and my favorites change all the time. I consume horror as a way of exploring cultural insecurities, too, so in a sense, me consistently watching a couple of horror films a week is an endless journey into the human psyche and not really entertainment alone.
8. Best and worst advice you ever heard.
Any kind of artistic advice I have been given is almost always bad. I believe that creating art is a very personal process, you can’t just give one simple advice/direction that fits all – creators have different circumstances, different mental blocks, different ways of solving those mental blocks, different strategies of addressing those mental blocks. The best artistic advice one can ever possibly give is just inspiration, really. That, or tools for searching that inspiration. When it comes to best advices – I am still looking for those. There are plenty of helpful ones (with regards to arts and marketing, etc) but not sure if I ever had that one best advice that really turned life around for me.
9. Strangest thing you ever autographed
No strange things have been ever autographed by me.
10. If music was over today and you had to go into professional wrestling, what would your wrestling name be?
Doctor Strange. Because I am strange, and I am a doctor. Well, I will be one officially in September.
