Introducing our favorite Ikigai Cosmonaut who recently graced us with her debut Album: 'Singularities'. Greetings, dear friend! We hope this interview finds you in high spirits. Before we delve into the musical wonders of Ikigai Cosmonaut, can you share the story behind the inception of this project in 2019 and the driving force that led you to start this solo instrumental music project?

From a very early age, music was present in my life, not just as a listener but as a musician myself. I've started to play guitar as a kid, and even as a child, it wasn't enough for me to try to play the music I heard, I always pursued composing original themes, explore sonic textures, building my own instruments and storytelling.

I knew I wanted to make instrumental music even when, as a listener, I barely had access to this particular style. My first influences were bands, so I had the idea that the next thing to pursue as an artist, was to meet other musicians and join one to extend other visions to grow myself, but the time has passed and that never happened.

Later on I add keyboard playing to my experience, which felt more natural as an expression for me, but it was when I had the chance to try the Machine from Native Instruments for the first time that producing clicked to me. I got myself the Micro I and started exploring music alone with it.

I kept music as a hobby on second plan. It is when I felt in love for electronic music that I started to get interested on music production and realized that trough digital I could do it by myself. 

Ikigai Cosmonaut, started unintentionally in the first place. As a joke with a friend, I decided to make a cover of a track that I hated with the purpose of proving that we could make a personal approach to every type of music and flip it to something completely new and personal, and the first track “100 Explosão” of my first EP "Odisseia no Espaço Tempo", ( "Odyssey on Space-time”) was born. I totally felt in love with the process of producing one track and kept on going, until I realized that I had given life to an EP.

My grandfather was a “Fado singer”, and the thing he left us when he passed away was his music record on a few tapes, so I always saw art as a way of becoming immortal. I took that reflection and inspiration and decided to release the music I had created. At this point I took myself more seriously and i felt that I started this project too late in life, so I kept on working on music.

I needed a name which reflected the impact that music has on my life, and then I created my instagram account so I could have a specific place to share my work, and that had a big impact for my personal growth as an artist. The place I thought that would be meant to share my work with friends, really fast turned into a place where I did meet other creative people that supported me and inspired me every day. This alone helped my confidence and desire to do it even more. The Ikigai Cosmonaut project begun as an "inevitable accident", as as extension not for what I do but what i really am .  

I realized that in the passed, I was too afraid of making music and taking myself serious about it, because I was on a spiral fear of what could go wrong and maybe loose the biggest passion in my life, mostly because I didn’t knew anything technically about it, but now I know that nothing can go wrong as long as I keep loving the process.

Making music for me was and it will be a learning journey, and a way of expressing myself and putting the best I have to offer at the present time, with no rush or expectations.

How has your journey as a self-taught musician since childhood influenced the evolution of Ikigai Cosmonaut's sound and style?

There is a well-known expression that says "necessity makes the artist", and I believe that this somehow fits me well. I never had any musical training, so as a consequence I always felt free from rules, and that somehow translates into my style.

Since I was a child, I have always trained my ear to follow rhythms, tones or combine melodies, so now as a producer I'm not afraid of combining notes that don't theoretically make sense, or creating rhythms that don't correspond to standard patterns, or even creating songs structurally outside of the usual expected formulas.

In a way, I feel a little privileged in the sense that ignorance ends up depriving me of some fear. I believe that musical training is important as any major source of knowledge in general, however I feel privileged not to feel trapped by concepts predefined by someone other than myself.

What I feel and what I ear are the only truths that I follow, and as long as what I create sounds good to me, I am not afraid of making theoretical mistakes, because I don't know how to identify them either.

I think that this freedom in technical terms combined with what I like as a listener has a direct impact on the way I create. The desire to learn more about music or gear, is one thing that as a self-taught artist impacts my music the most, and that has been my drive to make music.

So I use this search for knowledge as an unlimited source of inspiration to me.

Your sonic landscape is described as rooted in instrumental experimentation, oscillating between fragility and aggression. How do you approach this delicate balance in your music?

Honestly, this balance, when it occurs, happens naturally and almost as if by accident.

Usually, when people talk to me about my music, they assume that I make a conscious decision regarding my music fluctuating between musical styles, intensity or aesthetic choices, but the truth is that this happens naturally, and I almost never chose to do it rationally.

I only produce one song at a time, and I never move on to another without finishing it, so this balance results of the combination of what I feel emotionally over time and that change. My music ends up summarizing a space-time for my feelings, so aesthetically speaking, it's not really a pre decision option, it ends up being more a consequence itself.

I believe that fragile and aggressive are more complementary than opposites. If we think about, aggressiveness, when pushed to the limit, reaches a fragile point until it breaks and those fragments become something that can be aggressive again.

I think this cycle attracts me in a certain way, and as a listener I have always been pleased by that aesthetic combination as well.

For me, it's important that music reaches different sensations, music and felling are connected, and it is almost impossible for me to express myself without the two, so I let both live in my universe as an extension of who I am.

Could you share some insights into your creative process when translating intangible emotions into tangible auditory experiences?

To be honest, this translation is something more personal than intended to be transposed to an audience itself. Generally, I choose concepts to portray and put my interpretation on them.

I think about what they mean and how they would sound and I try to recreate a soundtrack for something visual that occurs in my head. For me, making music is like scoring an idea, initially having my interpretation of it and explore it trough sounds.

The experience of listening is always something very personal and subjective, I don't do it with a purpose to cause something to the listener at the first place. For me, it’s important that the sound itself corresponds to my idea and felling about it, in the hope that this will later reach someone, whether does it or not.

Perhaps it have a selfish idea about making music, but I do it for myself. I only do what for me feels right to tell the story I want to, and I let the outcome reaction in second plan.

I think that's the beauty of instrumental music, a sense of free interpretation.

Your artist biography mentions that your music is the "unfiltered personal truth, untethered by constraints." How do you maintain this sense of artistic authenticity in your compositions?

My first premise is to not make any pre-programmed decisions when approaching my creations. My music comes directly from exploration, both in terms of emotions and my relationship with the gear I choose to use.

I don't restrict myself to something I want to do, but above all, I completely embrace freedom and accept whatever, at the moment of creation, comes my way. I know what I like, and at this moment I have some type of sounds that I usually explore in my music, however I never close my door to happy accidents or combinations that I initially didn't decide to use.

Technically speaking, I never start a track the same way, I don't use a formula like composing a drum beat or a lead first, for example.

Usually I create a small loop and keep adding instruments and sounds until I'm happy with that combination, and I assume it as my first sketch of a track. Then I work around that idea, and sometimes the track changes drastically. Which sometimes leads me to start a song from scratch based on that newborn, and others I try to glue opposite ideas together and that alone become one track by the process itself.

I think this personal truth comes from creating in the present moment and accepting what I feel and the decisions I make, regardless the deviating off the initial starting point of my previous ideas.
I have this vision of creating like a “jazz improvisation jam”, where I assume several roles as an instrumentalist that keeps adding something new along the process, and trough trial and error I keep whatever works for me.  

I usually say that throughout my process I talk to the music, and it tells me back what it wants to be and where it wants to go, and I just allow myself to pursue that.

Were there specific challenges or creative decisions you made to ensure a balanced and impactful emotional journey throughout your latest album “Singularities”?

Perhaps the choice of the concept of the album ended up being the most impactful for its journey. I consider myself an innate observer and thinker, and in a world that currently almost demands a type of standardisation, I found it important to portray and highlight the opposite as being the authentic and organic truth that makes things significant and special, the singularities.

Being curious, I have always felt attracted and fascinated by everything that is unusual and irregular, so, even before moving forward with the creation of the album, there were already some themes in my head that I wanted to address previously, so it made sense to attribute a “singularity” as a motif  to each track, either in its truth, or in the interpretation that I decided to attribute to it. 

In the concepts behind each track, the emotional charge fluctuates between something denser and lighter also, so sonically my aesthetic choices embraced the weight that each theme lived by.

In a way each of them brought the emotional impact that belong to them alone, creating a journey while listening them together. So one of my decisions that I end up putting a lot of thought when I finished the tracks was the order I choose them to be listened to. That decision alone made me leave two tracks outside the album, “Mycelium” and “Kraken”.

I was happy with the outcome of them and the way I approached their concepts, but they impacted the fluidity I intended for the whole, so I cut them off. My main focus, in the end, was to try to recreate a sensorial crescendo, and most important a unity combined by several emotion density.

Also, along the album composition I took a lot of big breaks between some tracks, I've learned that silence and distance is very important to creativity and to a critical opinion about the work itself. So I took the decision to be among nature for a few days for several times, in the search of reconnect with myself, my creative process and also comeback to the home studio with a clear vision about what I wanted to do.

I thought a lot about this being my first album and the importance of it, and my approach to balance it along the tracks came as a result of the question "if I deleted all my previous work, what would I do now to represent my learning and choices about my journey so far?", and "Singularities" born.

Do you have specific tracks in "Singularity" that hold a special place for you, either due to the themes explored or the creative process behind them?

This question is complicated, since I have a special and intense relationship with each of them individually, so maybe I will share a bit about the story behind the track "Situs Oppositus", the Singularity which the concept has been with me for the longest time.

A few years ago, I met a musician whose artistic name was "Inversus", and I did asked him about his choice, so he explained to me that he was born with a rare genetic disease called "Situs Inversus”, also called “Situs Oppositus”. 

This is a congenital condition in which the major visceral organs are reversed or mirrored from the normal position. In his case, since his organs are completely mirrored, the condition do not affect his normal life in any way, in fact he only discovered he had it late in life.

I never saw him again after this share, but I never forgot about this condition that left me hooked to know more about it, so when I choose the general concept for the album I knew  that somewhere I wanted to include this concept as a track.

Creatively, the track already had a certain jazzy vibe, when I named it, and I did a small bridge between this rare condition and my relationship in terms of musical genre throughout my path.

Before I start producing music, the style I imagined myself creating would be a combination between two of my favourite musical genres, jazz and electronic, but my work lead me to somewhere else. 

I hugely respect  jazz genre, so in a way I am a bit afraid of perusing it myself alone, even if some” jazz is hidden" on a few things over my work.  

So I thought that this concept crossed the combination of what my music supposed to be in my previous imagination, but also the idea that one genre can be flipped with another and “still work” at the same time. Somehow I built this electronic jazzy vibe, so i had found my "Situs Oppositus" inside my work and on the album.

This track almost didn't survive to the final cut selection, but I'm glad it did. It turned out being a special track on the album, and one of the more singular ones.

What’s you favorite piece of gear in your studio at the moment? 

The device that I've felt in love recently is the Drum Computer and Synthesizer "Syntakt" from Elektron. Although I haven't used it on my released music yet, this is my favorite device I've ever owned, in the way that it fulfills my needs and likes all in one.

I love the sounds that I can reach with it, the sequencer and the workflow, it's very user-friendly, also portable and totally capable of making music using it as a stand alone. I love to explore one device at a time and I see gear as a kind of micro universe where I can be lost in, so the thing I value the most about gear is versatility and utility.

It is a fun box but also a very usable and a capable one, so its the perfect match on music creation in my eyes. The other thing I love about it, is how fast I get results in terms of sounds that match not just what I like to produce, but also what I like to listen.

In general, all Elektron devices that I owned, had and have an important role of what I'm becoming as a musician today. My workflow changed a lot and I gain a new vision about creativity, sound design, simplicity, working with limitations, and I also end up transposing that knowledge not only to other gear as the DAW I use as well, so I'm glad I had the chance to give Elektron a try one day.

Also, about the Syntakt, I feel that we are both at the beginning of our potential to come. As Elektron tend to do, I believe the unit will be improved and filled with new features over time by firmware updates and that excites me a lot. At this point, I think the workflow and the creative options are superb, so I can't wait for our future journey together.

What can listeners expect from Ikigai Cosmonaut in the future? Are there upcoming projects, collaborations, or new directions you're excited to explore?

The future is uncertain and without fixed plans at the moment. My first album has just come out, so now I want to explore all the new gear I've acquired throughout this producing time.

I bought some new synths and pedal effects that are waiting for some time and love, so at the moment I just want to continue exploring and rediscovering myself and keep on learning more about music production. I feel like I haven't even started yet, and I have everything to learn still, so I will embrace that for now, and for a while.

This past year I had the idea of ​​starting to explore and record bigger jams and maybe sets, with the aim of focusing, learning and putting together a full dawless setup where it would be possible for me to perform with, but the idea ended up fading and It didn't happen.

This is one thing that I would like to approach with time, because I never explored playing dawless for long periods of time, and I would love to see how it would impact my creativity and technical skills. But this is a personal curiosity not a future goal, so I will wait to see if that felling kicks in again in a near or distant future.

So my only plan for now is just to keep on making music, improving myself and mostly have fun while doing it.