Words by Sarah DiMuzio

On a mild, muggy Los Angeles spring afternoon I sat down to chat with Holland Andrews about life, vulnerability, healing, and so much more. The night before Andrews had played an incredible show with Everything Everywhere All At Once composers Son Lux at the Fonda Theater here in LA. Andrews is known for their soaring, soul-touching vocal abilities, and their music ranges from delicate piano compositions to distorted noise tracks, and everything else in between. Andrews is also a performance artist and healer and has taken part in many otherworldly projects including a collaboration with Bill T. Jones and Lee Mingwei. Holland is currently hard at work on a series of EPs for Nils Frahm and Felix Grimm’s record label LEITER, the latest of which, Forgettings, is a bright, synthy, expertly crafted, in-depth array of the artist’s glorious range.

Holland, to start things off - what are your personal pronouns?

They/them

As an accomplished creator who has composed and performed pieces for spaces such as The Met, do you feel a rising wave of acceptance and visibility for non-binary people in the entertainment industry?

I think we’re really lucky in the arts where people who often choose their lives as artists already have a pretty good sense of needing to build community, and in order to build healthy communities, there needs to be a certain level of respect. Also, there’s a profound legacy of tremendously talented queer artists that have been leading the way in really cutting-edge, interesting, beautiful work. In terms of acceptance, I think I see that more and more. It seems like a slow tirade of people willing to understand. The language around gender in America has been an ever-evolving conversation. I talk about it when I feel like it’s a safe space for me to talk about it, and I don’t if I don’t. That’s just me. I’m not saying that as advice for anybody. I get to use discretion, and I’m really grateful that in the spaces of art that I exist in, I don’t really need to use it as much.  

What is your music origin story? When did it all begin?

I grew up in a really musical family on my mom’s side, so me and my sister and my cousins would all sing together. I was raised a lot by my aunts, my mother was very mentally unwell so she wasn’t always able to be present. My aunts and my mom had a singing group in the 70s, they would tour and sing together all the time. They opened for the Jackson 5, and were on Joe Jackson’s record label, so that sort of set me up to be in a family who loves to sing and perform. I was often in ensemble casts so I would be immersed in secondary parts and harmonise with people. And then I did band in high school and elementary school and got more immersed in hearing and listening to different forms of classical music. I was also incubated in punk, noise, gospel, classical, musical theatre, and opera as well.

I started to write music when I got a computer that had really rudimentary recording stuff, and I started layering my voice with my clarinet and my saxophone at the time. I moved to Portland, Oregon when I was 19 and started to hang out with folks who were in math-rock and hardcore bands, and they had all these pedals, and I was like “what kinda pedals you got?” They heard my music on MySpace and they were like “you should just get a loop pedal and a reverb pedal, that way you can layer your voice” because I only play monophonic instruments live. The only way I could create chords was just one note at a time with the loop pedal. So that was the beginning of me writing and performing, and eventually just started getting into more production on the computer and also doing music for dance and theatre, and then experimenting with performance art myself with voice and sound.

Can you describe how these three distinct skillsets intertwine in your creative pursuits? Such as the influence of the music on the performance art, or the crafting of the compositions versus physical movements, etc?

They all sort of feel like one thing. Because I had the opportunity to do theatre stuff when I was a kid, I really loved to be present on stage. It felt like the only place where I had permission to just feel every single thing that I could ever possibly want. And then writing music was just another layer of that kind of permission. Being on stage and looping my voice with the clarinet I’m not really bound by an instrument and I have all this space to be embodied. To me they all inform each other, all of these aspects just seem like a big universe, and I’m just dipping into different parts of it depending on who I’m collaborating with, and what I’m wanting to work on.

What is the creating process and creative cycle like for you?

Depending on what kind of project I’m doing, say for example I’m recording an EP: I would describe how I want to feel while I’m making music versus how I want to feel when I listen to it, or how I want to feel when someone else listens to it. Those parts can come later, but to begin I really want to clear the pathway to feeling excited about what I’m doing while I’m doing it.

If the story isn’t a narrative then I like to think about a feeling that I’m trying to create with the song. I will just keep finding all of the right sounds until the gap begins to close on the music that I’m making and the feeling that I’m wanting to achieve, and I just keep chiselling away until it’s there. Sort of like what Michaelangelo said: “There’s an angel in the marble and I’m going to set it free.” I may be saying that wrong, but it's sort of like the most perfected music that I want to write is already there.

Does this grit (such as the distorted elements) have special meaning to you, or manifest in your mind in any particular way?

Yeah, the Grit is there. It’s to acknowledge the suffering and also to be told “I love you” at the same time. Sort of like screaming “I know it hurts, I love you so much, I know it hurts, I love you so much, it hurts, I know, I love you so much.” You need to know where the wound is in order to heal it. I am offering this wound that I’m also trying to heal in real-time while performing or while I’m writing, knowing the shape of my wound may be different but it’s the same as everybody else’s. I’ve built up a lot of really masterful walls inside to keep myself protected, so when I can effectively break through them in order to allow what needs to come out so I can love more deeply, then I know it was a success. If it worked on me, then it can work on someone else!

How do you feel when making and releasing vulnerable songs such as this?

I had a recent epiphany around the way I can express vulnerability: Even though it is being vulnerable it still has often felt like a “controlled vulnerability,” like I’m going to show you the things I can have a volume knob on, but there’s other stuff that you’re not going to see that I’m not going to show you because I don’t know how to control the volume knob on that one yet. I’m not always wanting my emotional world to be easy for the sake of comfort, and that requires excavating. Now the way I feel about vulnerability is if there’s any vulnerable part of me crying out, if I name it out loud just to the air or to a person, I will always be able to receive what that thing needs. I think to be vulnerable is to really be able to soothe and nurture the part that has been missing a kind of love that it’s been needing for a long time. 

What prompted this change, and how does it feel to release your new works under your own name?

I had a lot of vulnerability that just wanted me to be performing music under a stage name, but I was at a point where I said out loud to the universe that I was willing to let go of any aspect of my life that wasn’t serving me anymore. There was a band in Phoenix, Arizona, a metal band that had started using the name very recently. And I was getting tagged in their events, and people that know my music in Phoenix were like “hey are you playing this metal garage show?” and I was like “no? It sounds cool, but no I’m not.” I reached out to them and I was like “hey, I’ve been using this name since like 2010.” But they decided to continue using the name, and then a month before I was going to trademark the name, they had. They trademarked the name. They probably knew it was unethical in terms of band and music dynamics and stuff, but they did. I could have fought it and won, but it was more labour than I was willing to commit to. It felt like oh this question that I’ve always been asked of when am I going to use my name if I am going to use my name, it was just kind of out upon me, it was a very quick thing to accept. Like A Villain was one of the things that I needed to let go of when I put to the universe “I’m willing to let go of anything that isn’t serving me right now.” So be careful what you say because it will come to you!

Fave piece of gear at the moment?

I really love my Bass Octave pedal. It’s an OC3 by Boss, and it has this distortion that I loooove. It’s just like everything that I want in that punk, dark, goth feeling. It also has this really great, clean, low-end, subby bass sound. Anything that I put my microphone through and going into that, I love it. I will cherish that pedal for as long as I possibly can.