How did you first get into music?

I grew up playing the piano since I was 3, before discovering electronic music in my early teens. Music was a very large part of my life during high school, from classical piano lessons to playing the flute in the school orchestra and joining my then church’s creative team as a musician and vocalist - which is also how I learned to use Ableton. When Covid hit at the start of my university degree, I’d stopped doing all those things that I used to do on a weekly basis, so I took a bit of a break from music to focus on my studies in engineering. However, I was re-inspired after picking up a digital music elective at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 2023. I started the LINA project not long after that!

What interests or hobbies do you have outside of music?

Outside of music, I am super interested in emerging technology and how it can be applied to everyday life and the world around us, particularly in the areas of robotics and AI (which is what my uni degree focused on). I’m also very passionate about all things nature, and spend a lot of my free time outdoors, either hiking, fishing or attempting wildlife photography. My day job outside of music is actually as a full-time machine learning engineer at the Australian Museum, where I work on developing AI models for identifying frog species from audio data, to help with ecology and conservation outcomes. As you can see, it’s a pretty perfect intersection of all my main interests, which is rather lucky!

How do you nurture your own creativity?

I like to be available for experimentation, where I play around on the piano or in Ableton, and make something just for fun. I try to do this everyday if possible, and I find that this helps keep my creativity protected from feeling too much pressure, as well as gives me a bank of ideas that I can later come back to when making a proper track. I also find spending time outdoors really helpful, as it gives me some space to think and reflect on what I want to say in my music at the current moment. As counter intuitive as it might seem for a musician, I prefer going on walks without listening to any music these days, as I like to listen to all the sounds that are happening around me just from being outside.

What is your creative process when making music?

I typically start with a vocal idea that sets the tone for the rest of the track and then follow that up with either a primary chord progression or synth line. I’ll often just play around recording in MIDI until I get something that sounds like the right emotion that I’m going for and then add in drum patterns and other layers to build it up bit by bit. I record my own vocals for most of my tracks, but I usually treat it more like a sample, in terms of chopping it up to fit the groove or distorting it with effects until it doesn’t really sound like me anymore. The main track idea usually comes out relatively quickly, as it is mostly based on whatever I am feeling at the time, and the rest of the process is just tweaking sounds or changing the structure until I am happy with the end result.

What is your main inspiration?

My main inspiration is probably just what I am feeling at the time, since making music is a cathartic activity for me, which makes each track a bit like a journal entry. This aspect of my music is most obvious when I am making a track with my own vocals, but for the other ones they will usually still have some sort of relevance to how I’m feeling, even if it’s just through the energy of the track. I am also very inspired by connection to nature and others, so my lyrics are typically rather general despite being introspective, instead of anything hyper-specific to myself.

What are your plans in the coming months?

I am planning to release several more tracks before the end of the year, including ones that merge the emotive side of my music with the heavier club sensibilities of my DJ edits and remixes. I am also aiming to collaborate more with other producers and vocalists, as well as start looking towards putting together an EP sometime in the near future!