Carla Malrowe
...is a musical chameleon from South Africa who has found her home in The Netherlands. She wears many hats as a songwriter, producer, pianist and singer, and she has a deep passion for drum machine plugins, screeching electric violins and lyrics that are darkly poetic and defiant.
Her music defies easy categorization, as she explores the tension and harmony between the artificial and the natural, the digital and the analogue, and the modern and the classical. She blends elements of electro-pop, indie alternative, freak-folk and dark wave to create sonic contrasts that highlight the paradoxical co-existence of opposites.
How did your passion for music begin, and what are the main influences behind your musical style and identity?
Growing up with a die-hard audiophile and musician, like my dad, sculpted my passion. When I was 5 years old, he came home one day with Rumours by Fleetwood Mac on CD. He likes to play his music super loud, just like me, and I remember lying down on the carpet in front of the HiFi with him, eyes closed, just listening. By the age of 7, I was performing Roxette's Joyride on coffee tables to my family. By age 9, I was writing my own songs with my dad's guitar lying flat on my lap.
I'm in love with the songwriting of Bjork, Fad Gadget and Cocteau Twins, the beats of Skinny Puppy, Kraftwerk and Grimes, and the lyrics of Leonard Cohen and Arcade Fire. My sound comes from juxtapositions of everything that I love and everything that shouldn’t be juxtaposed. I can't tell you exactly how it happens, but for every song I start with, I have an intention for it to be dark and gritty, but it always ends up being melodic pop haha!... I just roll with it now.
What was the inspiration behind your latest release, “The Spin Astride”, and what’s the story behind it?
The message of The Spin Asride was inspired by a quote by Samuel Beckett: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.” When thinking of my subject matter, I started imagining this spinning top…. Spinning astride an open grave, the possibility of it toppling over at any moment. The song explores grief on a dark level and in stages that struggle to resolve. It’s a highly “complicated grief”, I would say, since I started grieving my subject long before his death.
The instrumentation and structure of my song were inspired by Hyperballad from Bjork, in my opinion, a romantic yet philosophical and rather dark ballad that progresses into an uplifting dancy electro piece. This was not the intention from the get-go… This is what it become halfway through my writing period when I happened to find Post in a record store one Sunday. My goals with my songs are always fluid. I’ve learnt to pick what I am precious over (one or 2 track elements) and be open-minded and experimental about the rest.
The atmosphere of the track is amazing. How do you find the right sounds for a song?
Wow, thank you. I spend hours and hours sifting through sounds to seek out what I find interesting. Once decided upon, I feed them through various effects to manipulate them and make them my own. I am constantly putting piano through distortion pedals and drums through reverb pedals, for example. I have built up a library of what I love now, especially a collection of snare sounds. A snare’s sound in a song is probably the most important sound to me.
How do you decide that a song is ready for a release?
No song of mine is ever ready for release haha! Someone once asked me what is the most difficult part of being a songwriter, and my answer was, “releasing the song!” I’m an insecure artist, I often doubt what I do because I’m always taking big sonic risks. I rely on the amazing musicians in my inner circle to offer critiques and advice on my songs. For now, at least, this is the method that works, while I build confidence as I build up experience.
How do you balance the time-consuming aspect of being an indie artist with the other aspects of your life?
I work hard by day to make a living and create at night to stay sane. I'm exhausted when I get home, but I know that if I don't go to sit down to work in the studio, I'll start resenting life and the black dog will win. So everything from producing to marketing to rehearsing happens when the sun goes down. I guess that's when my day really begins.
Who is your dream conversation partner for music, regardless of their living status?
I’d like to sit and talk to Florian Schneider during the time of The Man Machine, or Fad Gadget while he wrote Incontinent, or Bjork while she was creating Post… And my question to all of them would be the same… “So, what the hell were you thinking??”
However, my two soul mates in music are musician Bronwyn Leigh Bing, and music producer Matthew Fink - the three of us can just sit and talk music until the early hours of the morning, contemplating the significance of chord progressions and tempo changes and samples made from power drills and metal trash cans.
What are your goals for the future?
My goal is to carry on doing what I love… And that is creating art for lovely people like you. My EP, ‘The Petals and Sand’, is set for release on 31 October. Other than that, my next album is already well on its way. I might even have some tour dates to announce soon!
