ARDEN MUSIC
Arden creates sensual, spheric sound structures. With her instrument the harp and her ethereal vocals, she explores a musical world between neoclassical music and ambient soundscapes.
She uses loops, layers, works the harp with mallets, modifies it with paper, chains, and all kinds of mufflers. The result is a sound experience that feels like a gentle embrace with maturity to the overall sound that manages to show dare without having to say too much. Sophisticated but still genuine and uncomplicated somehow.
Hi Arden, please tell us more about your greatest inspirations or influences?
My greatest inspiration is nature and the greatest influence is still the things that shaped me in my early childhood. The older I get, the more I notice that these early influences run through my artistic life like a red thread. They are, so to speak, the fundamental frequency. These are pictures from fairy tales, a view of the world in which everything has a “soul”, a very mystical world. Even if there were a lot of influences during my whole life, they all somehow always build on it. I'm a big fan of hip-hop artists like Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, played a lot of blues, jazz and classical music, especially during my studies at Berklee College of Music, and then wrote and produced a lot of pop music. And yet, when I just listen to myself, there are always these mystical images of nature and ethereal sounds in which my emotional landscape is expressing. That is also how my album “ARDEN” sounds like. It will be released this August.
Tell us a bit about your creative process?
I like to create out of an unstructured, chaotic, kind of sleepwalking state.
Somehow this is the best way for me to get hold of the direct, pure and unadulterated ideas I am looking for. I create an environment in which I always have everything at hand, the microphones are set up, the harp is in tune, a few effects of my choice are ready for use and then I sit down at my instrument and just go for it. Best of all without wanting or looking for anything. That's also how I recorded and produced my album “ARDEN”. In my studio, at home. So I was able to work at my own pace and I was able to reconcile the creative process with being a mother. Working alone was also important to me. I just wanted to follow my own intuition and give these little “idea plants” the freedom to grow without having to explain themselves, simply out of joy in creating, playful and without right or wrong.
What are the themes you touch on with your new work/music?
The world in which my music takes place is shaped by images of nature, by an animated, mystical world. It is not intellectual or rational. It is a world in which things are associatively and emotionally connected, a world in which everything is possible if it just feels "right". I also only create all sounds with my instruments harp and voice, through looping, sampling, layering and modifying electronically. My music somehow always sounds quite aerial, gentle and soothing. I guess it is because the harp itself has such an earthy, warm sound, without much treble. And every piece I write builds on that quality.
How has this year changed your creativity and how do you see the world changing moving forward?
My creativity wasn't really influenced by the past year. As a mother of two small children, I am somehow always in a kind of “infant quarantine” even without a pandemic. And my creativity is fed more from being alone than from being absorbed in the outside world. Only the lack of time, due to the lockdown-related ransacking of the kindergartens, is noticeable in that I had much less time to work on music. Due to the elimination of the possibility of giving concerts, I am also much more thinking about digital formats, social media work, video and photo concepts than before the pandemic.
Do you think the art world needs to change, and if so how can it be improved?
I think it is time to break down the genre drawer thinking even more. It is primarily a German phenomenon. This dividing into serious music and so called “U-Musik” - entertaining music - and all its sub-genres which is still taking place. It not only restricts the creativity of music makers who, in the worst case, even censor themselves in order to fit through genre-specific “marketing doors”.
What does wellbeing mean to you?
Wellbeing for me means being mentally only in one place at a time and also doing even everyday's things consciously. When I am with my kids, just being there for my kids, when I am in the studio, just thinking about the music. I am working on that. It makes me happy and gives me the feeling that I am really “here”.
Photography credit. Maximilian Mouson
