Deep Voices 116: Lara Sarkissian
An interview with the dynamic producer about her must-hear debut album
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This edition of Deep Voices is an interview with Lara Sarkissian. Her new album, Remnants, is out now. The above playlist is made by Sarkissian, consisting of songs that influenced that album. If you enjoy this interview, please consider a paid subscription to Deep Voices to keep this project going. Thank you!
There are many ways to listen to Lara Sarkissian’s music. You can attune your ear to her dynamic use of percussion. Or pay particular attention to her aching synth melodies. On some tracks, you might hear a particularly sharp and unusual woodwind and wonder, “What’s that?” Many musicians claim a vast array of influences, but few are able to blend them as seamlessly as Sarkissian. Her music, largely electronic but not quite techno, is woozy and heavy—except for when it’s crisp and light. Throughout many of her tracks, and especially on her debut album Remnants, Sarkissian, a Bay Area native who is a first generation Armenian-American, has woven in the Armenian music she was steeped in growing up, to create a new, dynamic sound.
In 2020, Sarkissian, in fact, intended to move to Armenia. But after a long simmering conflict, Azerbaijan launched a military offensive in Artsakh, an ethnically Armenian territory. There was intense fighting and thousands of people died. Most Armenians fled the area and it is now largely under Azerbaijani rule. The conflict kept her in the US and Sarkissian spent much of the period of time during the war a going, she says, “insane.” She found herself unable to make music. When, after the war, she did finally return to producing her album, she infused her productions with a purposeful blend of Armenian instruments—qanun, duduk, tombak—are all present on Remnants.
Also present: hardcore drum workouts, post-rock, fierce techno, and dark ambient soundscapes. This collage style of composition comes naturally to Sarkissian, who along with the musician 8ulentina, created Club Chai, a series of parties and a record label that promoted a diverse array of sounds in dance music. On Remnants the desire for a seamless blend of cultures is present in each drum hit.
Still, Remnants is a piece of music, not a history lesson. Sarkissian struggles with how much to explicate about the music and her culture and how much to let it speak for itself. To accompany our interview, Sarkissian put together a playlist of her musical influences. It includes Armenian liturgical music, British dubstep, and American jazz. We talked about the playlist and her album on a rooftop terrace on a windy New York City afternoon earlier this month.
How were you introduced to Armenian music?
I went to Armenian school, where music and performance are such a rich part of the culture. Growing up, I was part of the choir in school. But my mom was probably the biggest influence on me being a musician and artist. She is an icon, honestly, in the San Francisco Armenian community. She programmed a lot of performances, brought musicians—literal pop stars—from Armenia. So I was thrown into that. But when you're growing up, you don't understand. You're like, “Oh, I gotta go to this thing again.” She collected a lot of records, a lot of cassettes. There's actually a track on the playlist, “Haji,” by an Iranian artist that I would hear in the car all the time. I remember as a child I would hear the drums and be like, “That is crazy.” It was such a tactile and haptic feeling hearing those drums, and it's something that really stuck with me.
When you make music, how much are you naturally reaching for those rhythms?
I listen to a lot of post-rock, a lot of art rock and [when I started making music] I thought it would be really cool to use Armenian string instruments. With this record, I was thinking of it as creating my own band. Back in 2016, when we started Club Chai, there were all these different collectives, NON Worldwide, and collectives from South America where artists were using music from their regions, adding a lot of flutes and woodwinds and these different percussive elements to electronic music. I didn't know any other Armenian artists that were doing that. So I wanted to make this thing that I really wanted to hear.
How did you get reintroduced to Armenian music as an adult?
In 2016 I lost my grandma. She raised me and my brother with my mom, so it was pretty difficult. At that point I was out of college and I wasn't really around the Armenian language as much anymore. When you lose your elders, you lose the cooking, the food, the conversing. And so I started going to church, and I would sometimes sing in the choir. My priest would have me read pieces from the Bible in Armenian. It was my way of practicing the language again. I would go just to hear the music. The liturgical hymns are absolutely serene and so gorgeous. It opened another world because, at the time, I was throwing these warehouse shows with Club Chai, which was a spiritual space to me, a place of release, a place of convening, and of having a musical dialog with all these insanely beautiful-minded artists in San Francisco. But I'd have to leave early. I’d say, “Gotta go to church in the morning!” People were like, “Lara, oh my god!” I almost felt guilty. I was like, “Oh, I feel really gross, I was at this party the night before.” Then, as I started going to church more, [I realized] it's the same thing. It's literally the same thing.
How was your relationship to the church music different than it was when you were a child?
[As a child] you're thrown into these spaces and they're like, “This is you, this is your identity.” And you're just sitting there and it's in the background, but you don't understand it. You're not really present. It's just there, right? But then as I got more into electronic music and different subgenres, when I listened to it again, I was like, “Oh, wow, these hymns cross genres and borders.”
What parts of the sound were you most drawn to?
Just the depth of it. The church is a very immersive setting. The first track on the playlist, “Aravot Louso” by Lucine Zakaryan, is a liturgical hymn that I've heard in church. I took influences from his melodies and the harmonies. I know I wanted to have the string instrument qanun on my album and I sat there and over and over and tried programming it in a way that didn’t feel gimmicky. knew I wanted this big grand opening to the album based off of this song.
You have two Ara Gevorgyn tracks on your playlist. Who is he?
He's one of the most famous Armenian composers. Hearing him was mind opening for me. He's one of the few composers that uses a synthesizer. He'll be on stage with an entire orchestra, an ensemble of Armenian like folk performers, and then he plays a really ’80s synthy sound. That blew my mind as a kid. I've always joked that eventually I want to be the woman version of Ara Gevorgyn. “Artsakh” is actually a track that I grew up dancing to. A lot of gymnasts and figure skaters have used this as their song; it's pretty iconic. Dance was a huge part of growing up, a huge part of how I received music. My mom would drag us to these dance parties, barahantes. This song has the same line dance as “Kochari,” which is a very classic Armenian Highlands folk song that is tied to a dance. “Kochari” literally means “brings the knee,” or “knee come.”
That sounds like electronic music, music that’s composed specifically for dancing.
It’s the same thing. “Our Dead Can't Rest” is very much influenced by that style of music, the heavy, percussive dhol drums and the tombak and that woodwind instrument cutting in and out. You hear a lot of zurna in that kind of folk dance music, that kind of sharp, piercing woodwind. That's a mountainous instrument that is literally made to be able to pierce through. And the duduk instrument is something that's tied to the meadows. It’s peaceful, serene, open.
On this playlist, you have a lot of Armenian music, then Silver Mount Zion, who are really atmospheric, but you also have DJ Pacifier, which is almost comically aggressive techno. A lot of people have varied influences, but don’t bring them all to their music. I think you can hear it all on your album. Is that conscious?
I work in a very visual way. I have a filmmaking background, so I was making experimental shorts and creating their soundtracks before filming. I would go out and film, either in the Bay or in Armenia, and I would piece together the footage and use the field recordings from those environments. I would try to kind of do sound collage. I didn't think of it as writing music. Because of my video editing background, where you literally cut up things visually, that's how I look at my Ableton timeline. I think of each track as a different zone orbiting around you. There have been times where I'll literally have the drums and then I'll bring in a woodwind and I'll layer them without listening. I'll just start chopping them up, visually weaving the WAV form. And then I'm like, “Let's see how this sounds.” I'll hit play and be like, “That's sick.” Then I'll just pitch things up and down… I’m giving away my secrets!
In what way do you hope your music is consumed?
I do like that my music is not packaged and the clean way of like, “This is for the club, this is for this.” But it makes it very difficult to market it and be known as one thing. It's something I'm fighting constantly. But finally this year, I was like, “You know what? What I make kind of transcends that.” I like the fact that it has that range to encompass all these different spaces.
You have so much to say about music but your music is pretty much all instrumental. How do you decide on your song titles? They are one of the ways you can lend some meaning to the music.
This record was made during a time where the Artsakh War was happening, and I've lived in Artsakh. I've taught there. In 2016 I was teaching at the Tumo Center for Creative Technologies, which is a really rad afterschool program for kids. I would travel around Artsakh a lot. I would go to this church, Ghazanchetsots Cathedral and record video. I was in Artsakh for about a month and a half, and then I went to Yerevan, and I taught the same course there. I lost a student of mine, a friend of mine, from Yerevan, who had to go serve [in the war]. These were kids who wanted to be filmmakers, they wanted to be musicians, literally 16 years old, who had to go defend the frontlines.
For my former student passes away, and two days later, this church gets blown up, the fucking cathedral that I would go to every week. When I would visit that cathedral I felt like I had been there in a past life. That’s just the way Artsakh was. The way that it felt like you were just off the map, off the grid, and cut off from everything you know, and you're just in heaven. That place was just so fucking magical. I don't know how to describe it, it just felt like it doesn't exist on this earth. Now Artsakh is occupied. It's gone. I kind of went insane for a year. I was just not myself from 2020 to 2021. I was literally in Telegram chats trying to get bulletproof vest for press people and filmmakers that were in Artsakh. That is the shit I was involved in. I couldn't write music. I knew [eventually] that what I wanted to write with this record was gonna be coming off of all of this. But I didn’t want it to say that. I found a lot of text around Armenian legends and poetry. I wanted the song titles to be this story that follows two or three years of paranoia, of waking up every day looking at the list of names to see if there's a name you recognize as someone who passed away. Every day, every day, every day, every fucking morning. And just the bits of light and glimmer and hope that I would receive, not seeing someone's name. The darkest things were good news, like they only took this much land, okay, good. They haven't gotten close to this village yet. It was just so fucking consuming. I wanted the record to reflect all these different feelings within darkness, all of these glimmers of hope and light and distrust.
I was following you on Instagram at that time and that was the primary way I was educated about what was happening. It was not widely discussed. But like you’re saying, this is an album, not a history lesson. So what do you hope people will learn with the record?
It's a really hard question because it's something that I keep trying to dance around. You get frustrated to get pigeonholed as a certain kind of artist, like, “Oh your music is only tied to this community.” What I've liked about my music, what I've liked hearing from others, is that they felt like because of the unfamiliarity of it they were able to tie it to other things. I had people in the UK saying that when I used a lot of woodwind sounds, for example, it reminded them of old jungle music.
But I do want it to be a record that’s marked in this time, that reflects these events. I do hope that people research into it more, just have it open up their worlds. What I do not like is how SWANA sounds get generalized. Armenians have been dispersed around the world. They've had to live within other diasporas, and that can sometimes dilute the culture. So I want our Armenian music to be referenced very specifically. I want people to understand where it originates from. I don't want it to be jumbled up like, “Oh, this is Arabic music.” No, it's not. This is specifically from these sites, these places, these people that have been lost and forgotten. I want people to name these sounds specifically to this culture. That's very important for me.