A while back, the music of Ailise Blake crossed my path. Her music is transfixing and enchanting – like a song carried across foggy moors on the winds. Ailise agreed to an email interview – I hope you enjoy getting to know her as much as I did!

ARDENTLY Magazine: Your album, to me, sounds like a voice carried on the wind through a forest. Coincidentally, you’ve described the album’s title, Soave, as sounding like the wind to you. What about the wind or its qualities were inspiring for this album?

Ailise Blake: The wind, as any of the 5 elements, have been an inspiration in the writing of this album, as they are inevitably and secretly inspiring in the lives of each and everyone of us. But if i should choose an element that characterizes my music, it would be water. I’ve always been attracted to masses of water, The deeper they are, the scarier they are and the more they are inspiring to me. I’m always trying to convey this sense of heavy oneiric sleepiness, the one you can find only underwater. I suppose I tried to take away some of the heaviness of water giving Soave space to breathe.

AM: You’ve said that Soave is a “hermit’s journey” and is an ode to Ceremonial Magick – what were some of the esoteric themes you were excited to explore in this album?

AB: Soave is my own “hermit journey”, I choose to write it in an isolated place, surrounded only by trees. It is an ode to everything magick, the ceremonial kind and it is a part of a bigger Work that I’m doing on myself .  The Ceremonial Magick it’s just a tool that I use in my everyday life to try to achieve understanding  following a gnostic path of studies. It is like my own grimoire.

AM: What about your recording location – isolated in your remote village studio – helped the most in your creative process?

AB: To me, the silence and the cold are a cozy space, where my mind can concentrate. The fact of being alone, surrounded only by animals and plants, was a way to focus. I didn’t listen to any music but my own for months, I didn’t want my mind being “polluted” by someone’s other voice. I still live in the same place. I am a solitary person who enjoys being alone . 

AM: What did you enjoy the most about creating Soave – the writing process, the mixing, or something else?

AB: Definitely the writing process, especially the bass, how it completely changes the song. I am more into writing than recording. I find the recording tedious because I tend to be very precise and it is less fun, but I have to say that the final version of a song, recorded and mixed, isn’t comparable to anything else. It is a satisfaction to see something grow and reach its end.

AM: What was it about the Thelemic Mysteries and Ceremonial Magick that made you want to explore these philosophies in your music?

AB: It wasn’t a choice to integrate this philosophy in my music,  but rather a product of who I am. I am, after all, a thelemite, and by consequence everything I do or I create is of a thelemic nature.  It is a willful action dictated by my deep unconscious mind.

AM: In your writing and creative process, are there any rituals or habits you have to get yourself in the right headspace or flow?

AB: I never write music on command. Everything has to come by itself. I am not able to tell myself to create something, because it doesn’t work for me. It took me three years to write Soave. The recording took 7 months. So, there’s not a particular ritual made especially for compositions. There are, however, the salutations to the Sun that I do daily that help me to ground myself, and I always record during the night. 

AM: I found instrumentals on Soave to be full of warm resonance, especially on the second track, “Lustration”. The polarity of the electric guitar and the acoustic guitar was especially enchanting. What goes into finding that particular balance of the shoegaze elements, like the effects-heavy electric guitar, and the more dreamy elements, like the synthesizer?

AB: Thank you. I don’t think much about how things are gonna go in balance one with the other, in the sense that I don’t ask myself any question, I just do it . I’ve always incorporated electric dirty guitars in my music since the times on  Macabre, my first solo project. I started to play  acoustic picking again after a long time and I wrote Soave with this technique. Before, I used to write all my songs starting  with bass. I suppose it is like a circle, that joins past and present and that embraces it all. I love shoegaze , folk, and sad music… I guess That’s the result .

AM: If you could describe your music in three words, what words would you pick?

AB: Probably oneiric, humid and decomposed as adjectives. Angels, Oceans, Death as nouns. 

AM: What is the most important thing that you want people to take away from Soave?

AB: I just wish that people that listen to it, could find  the time to breathe and rest. I wish that people would use it to create their art themself, I wish it could give them dreams and give them time to think about Death and the end of things, which is not an end after all.

AM: Anything else you’d like to share or promote?

AB: “O Lion and O Serpent that destroy the destroyer, be mighty among us”- Liber XV.

You can find Ailise Blake on her website, Facebook, Bandcamp, Instagram, Spotify, and on her label’s YouTube channel.