cloud collecting #31: Briana Marela
on becoming a better listener, loving who you are + music as a spiritual relationship
I've been a fan of Briana Marela for many years, so it's extra special to feature her on cc today. Her new album, My Inner Rest is a collection of 12 electroacoustic songs performed live in the Mills College concert hall, showcasing her singular and pure voice. It was just released on June 6th via Los Angeles-based experimental label AKP Recordings.
Briana Marela is a Peruvian American composer, vocalist, and performing artist based out of Oakland, CA. Using her voice as a focal point, she makes use of visually engaging elements of tech augmented gestures and objects to compose and perform her music live. Her gestural and lyrical song performances draw from elements of both experimental electronic music and vocal driven pop music. Using a visual programming language and machine learning, she is able to make custom tools to create compositions with varying fixed elements that transition into moments of improvisation. She was most recently a spatial sound artist in residence at Audium in San Francisco for their residency New Voices IV, performing her multi-channel piece live every weekend from February to April 2025. She is currently a Montalvo Lucas Arts Music and Composition fellow. She received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College in 2020.
Her newest full length release My Inner Rest, was released on June 6th 2025 via AKP Recordings. Marela has self-released past albums, as well as releasing records with Jagjaguwar, Surface World and PIAPTK.
1. I first became familiar with your work through your album All Around Us co-produced with Alex Somers (and Amiina on strings!) in Reykjavík. Over the years, your music has evolved both sonically and thematically. How has your relationship with music changed over the last decade and how have your creative priorities shifted?
A lot has changed over the last decade, and yet the core essence of who I am is still present on all of my recordings. My voice especially is still a central fixture to the music I make, yet there has been some evolution in the way it features on my newer albums. I am still very drawn to melody and lyrical content, yet I think my newer lyrics are a little more mature. I used to write a lot of love songs, and now on My Inner Rest there is only one real overt love song for my partner, and the rest of the lyrics are more about self doubt, self-love and compassion. There are not as many percussive elements present in my newer music, it is slower and more ambient and sparse. My creative priorities shifted to value the way the song is composed to be performed live, vs how it should live as a recording. Much of my past music was written and composed in a fixed DAW such as Digital Performer or Ableton Live, and composed as many overdubs. That was the primary way I wrote songs, I had to layer them in the computer to be able to write anything. Now I am primarily composing in MaxMsp, where everything is mostly existing off of a grid, and ends up having a feeling of newness even when I perform the same pieces. I also used to want to be more proficient at playing other instruments, I kept trying to be better at playing piano/keys, yet my recordings were always bits of overdubs pieced together. I feel freed from that expectation I had for myself, and it lets me figure out a new way to play my music live, and that translates to the way I embody the music. 10 years ago I was a nervous and anxious performer, and now I think I have really found my calling as a performer who can engage audiences in a confident and visually intriguing way.
I also used to be more into looping and having more repetition in my music, I think while there is still some repetition and I haven't completely abandoned song structures yet, but I think in general I worry less about trying to adhere to time based structure. Over the last decade I have also cultivated a better producer and engineer mindset through working on my own and other people's albums, I think having spent a lot of time trying to become a better listener both technically and creatively has really helped me. Listening is one of the most important skills that takes a long time to develop, I've really seen that mature in myself in the last decade. It's incredible how much all the time I have put into music over the years has given so much back to me spiritually, it's a beautiful relationship.
2. You’ve described My Inner Rest as a vital document in combating self-doubt and redefining your relationship with your artistic practice—ultimately learning how to love and have compassion for yourself. How did this album process serve as a form of self-healing, and how did it allow you to shift your approach to creativity in a more compassionate, authentic way?
In the period of time where I felt disconnected to my creative process and decided to pursue an MFA at Mills College, I was realizing how much I did not love myself. I think I actively did not like myself. I was intensely self critical and negative to a degree that I would never treat anyone else. I had spent so much of my life giving love to other people, that I had not saved any love for myself and in confronting my inner self I found conflict. I did a lot of writing during this time, trying to process different aspects of who I was, who I wanted to be, and why I ultimately wanted to still create and perform music. Performing used to be a huge source of anxiety, and not a place I always enjoyed being in. Although I have always loved singing, that was when I felt most free, I realized it was my adherence to trying to be proficient at another instrument on stage that made me nervous, and trying to replicate my recorded songs as perfectly as they were on their recordings. The freedom I found in creating my new music was in letting my voice be my guide on stage, and creating my own instruments to play the songs, and adding a looseness and improvisational nature to them that didn't require anything I couldn't naturally give to them through my own gestures or interaction with props. I figured out a way to find the things I was good at and focus on those and develop those things and not focus on the things that I wasn't good at. The songs themselves too have so many important lyrics and words that capture different conversations I was trying to have with my inner self, giving myself different sorts of mantras to believe in. "I am the brightest star" is one phrase which is akin to a positive affirmation, another is "There is value in you." I question where and who I seek validation from, "Will this applause assure me enough?", and "I only have myself. What can I bring you when I have nothing else?" It is a combination of the songs and their lyrical content, as well as my newer approach to composing that shaped this whole record and the last ~five years of my life. The hardest thing was I had conquered a lot of this self doubt and insecurity in grad school when I started this process, but then when the pandemic happened and my dad passed away, the grief and trauma from that time period really pushed me back into an awful headspace and deep depression. It was really only in returning to working on this album in 2022, that it helped heal and save me a second time as well.
3. How do you cloud collect (connect to childlike wonder) in your creativity?
I think I've been able to connect to my sense of childlike wonder more than ever before in the last five years. My creative practice feels less rigid than ever before, it flows more naturally. Because I'm not especially proficient at any instrument (except for voice), now that I create my own instruments and interact with them in a playful and magical way on stage, I reveal aspects of my inner child as well as being able to find a confidence playing my music that I never used to have before when I was so anxious about playing the wrong notes. There is still room for risk taking and improvisation, and to play my songs requires a different sort of skill, that I would describe as finding and holding presence. When I feel free and untethered, singing melodies and feeling my own body as an instrument, and when I can embody an object or gesture fully, that is when I feel I am cloud collecting the most.
The best places to find Briana are her Instagram and her website.