In this interview spotlight, I chat with Amina about the latest release (Anacord) as well challenges, motivations and more.

Full Q&A along with links and music below.

So you’ve just released Anacord after 4 years. What was the process of making it and why did it take so long?

It took a long time because I wanted to do something worthwhile. I’m not interested in trends. I think a lot of music comes out and is exciting for a while, but most of it gets forgotten or tired out pretty quickly. I wanted to do something that was coming from more of a timeless place, something that I felt existed in some timeless void or vacuum. I got sucked pretty far into it and it took me a while to find the way back out, and what I wanted to make ended up just being a lot of work for one person to do. But I had to be uncompromising artistically, so it just ended up taking a long time.

The album is pretty spooky sounding. What led you to this strange ghostly world that is Anacord?

I wrote most of the album while I was living in Seattle, and there I got obsessed with this idea of “bad spirits,” like there were these weird creatures lurking around every corner waiting to trick you or put a spell on you. It’s a gloomy place, and when you live in a place for so long you start to pick up on these weird energies that seem to hang over everything. There’s this little white ghost in the artwork and on the cover who sort of became the main character on the album, and I think that was a bit of a response to the bad things I was seeing and feeling everywhere. It was at that point in life when you get out of school and you get really disillusioned when you’re seeing the world as it really is for the first time, without knowing how to protect yourself from all the bad things you experience. I just sort of felt like I had physically disappeared because I couldn’t accept or deal with my surroundings. But the album was my way of getting through that, of learning how to not be the ghost walking down the street.

So in a sense the album is kind of about facing and accepting the world as it is?

In a sense, though it’s not quite as cinematic as that sounds. There’s a definite theme of growth, like a weak creature trying to become strong. I kind of saw it almost like a video game, with each song being a different boss battle that you’re fighting. You’re leveling up, getting stronger, fighting the bad guys, getting new powers. There’s not really a conclusion to the album. Or maybe the conclusion is that there is no conclusion, because its not like that will ever end. You have to keep on living and growing and fighting until you die. But there’s definitely a turning point somewhere on the album. It’s that point when you start to get the upper hand.

You made the album cover, as well as a series of artworks and an animated video that goes with the album. How did that come about?

At the time I was making the album I worked at an art museum, so I got into the habit of standing around a gallery and spacing out into the paintings for hours and hours. I got really into the idea that paintings are these entire self-contained imaginary worlds that you can go in and out of, and I wanted to translate that into music. So I started looking for these worlds and developed my own technique in Photoshop to create them visually. And as I started creating these worlds I started picking up on the types of sounds that lived there. All the songs on the album started off from those sounds. The melody, lyrics, and structure were all born out of them. It was like writing songs backwards, stitching a lot of little pieces together into one solid whole. So in that sense the music really came from these weird abstract landscapes I was imagining. The music and art are like two different presentations of the same world.

What are the challenges you face as an indie musician in this oversaturated, digital music age?

Its nearly impossible to get anyone’s attention if you’re not making pop shit or you don’t have ten thousand Instagram followers. There’s definitely a lot of people out there who still need real things. But it’s like, how do you reach them? How do you get through the shitstorm flying in everyone’s face constantly?

Anacord is kind of an experiment in that way. It’s there, it’s sitting on the internet. Will anybody find it? The industry is total bullshit, so when you try to make something that’s real it just doesn’t fit into the system. So what do you do?

My theory when making this album was that I had to give it a life of its own, to make a whole world that existed completely outside of myself. And by doing that, by putting this life and energy into the music, you give it the power to exist in the world, to live and grow on it’s own. So I think it will find its way, probably slowly, person by person. But it’s a thing, its alive, something will happen. That’s my theory. Right now it feels like a painting hanging on the wall of an empty museum, but I think people will catch on. We’ll see.

Where is the best place to connect with you online and discover more music?

You can find all my music, artwork, and everything else on my website: www.amina-music.com.