I haven’t heard an album quite like Lola de la Mata’s Oceans on Azimuth before. The violinist and composer was told to give up music in 2019 after a tinnitus diagnosis, but she took this setback as an opportunity to explore sound in new ways and intentions. She met A.J. Hudspeth who runs the sensory cell lab in New York where they study the cochlea. From there she began collaborations with biophysicists who helped facilitate ways to record her tinnitus. She developed new instrument prototypes and conceived the concepts behind Oceans on Azimuth. Sonically, it is a dense and riveting listen, challenging our perceptions while finding unexpected ways to emotionally connect. It’s an incredible ride.
Oceans on Azimuth is OUT NOW.
As always, I like to start at the beginning. What are some of your earliest memories of music and sound growing up? Was there a lot of music around when you were younger?
I grew up just off Ladbroke Grove where the Notting Hill Carnival takes place. I guess my parents chose to live there as it had a life to it…dub, reggae, and punk music scenes clashing. So I had these beats swirling around me all the time. The main sounds I remember though are the screams and nervous giggles reflecting off the block-wide concrete schoolyard belonging to the Spanish school coming in through the open window of our living room.
I asked my dad if he remembered what records he would play the most when I was first born. Supposedly, to get me to sleep he would (quietly) play NIN!
When did you first get involved in playing music? Was there a certain impetus that pushed you to learn an instrument?
Neither of my parents play an instrument but both loved music. My mother was a contemporary dancer (Martha Graham & José Limon styles) and my father was a live music photographer first before starting up his own label and record shop on Portobello Road. They encouraged me to pick up an instrument when I was young-ish. To their dismay I chose the violin (piano or cello was more on their mind), there is something about the proximity of its placement to the throat – you wear it almost as an extra limb, and it projects sound loudly around the face making it feel one with the expulsion of breath. In a sense, it’s a secondary throat, a secondary voice…and I found a good sound quite quickly but rejected just as fast the learning of music theory and scales which to this day I have stubbornly neglected to learn.
And what about composing and creating original works – how did you first start writing your own music and creating your own sounds?
My brain might not have learned theory but my ear has. It’s inescapable in a sense. Kids toys, theme tunes…all classical music is essentially a series of scales. Even when improvising my hand can’t help but find certain shapes that my ear is recalling or finds pleasing because it has been told in the past – this and this go together. That’s why I play my violin more percussively and enjoy detuning it and preparing it with blueback and tin foil woven through the strings. I can’t rely on trained movements, I have to listen and respond. Be part of the mechanism, become the feedback…an energy source acting on another energy source, responding to an energy source to infinity.
Let’s move straight into “Oceans on Azimuth” and how you ended up making this record. First, I’m curious what it was like back in 2019 when you were dealing with serious tinnitus and vertigo to be told you should give up your music?
I was just coming into my own as an improvisor. I was part of an ensemble, a trio, and a duo, and starting to get regular gigs. Initially, the sensations were quite difficult to convey to medical professionals looking at me from the outside. Hearing something that no one else does and no one else can see or capture (although it turns out in my case I have very noisy ears that can be recorded). To answer honestly? Fear.
Music was my second ‘vocation’ if you like. I first trained as a textile designer and took that work into a dance realm. But this practice ceased when I barely survived from being spiked when I was around 20 which made long hours/physical labour taxing. Music originally crept in in my mid-20s when I was working at an arthouse cinema and it was a bit of a lifeline for me. I found something in sound that didn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with my body, my age, my gender. It was a voice but a different kind of expression, one that I could keep to myself or use to intercept and communicate with others in improv sessions for example.
So being told that music – the very thing that gave me a force and presence that felt truly my own and couldn’t be gazed upon – could now, suddenly, be muted or felled, was terrifying.
Could you elaborate on your collaboration with A.J. Hudspeth and the sensory cell lab in New York? How did this collaboration contribute to the creation of this new record?
I marveled at everything I encountered there…seeing stop-motions of hair cells growing, learning about distortion products and their influence on the cochlea and its capacity to produce its own sounds. In fact, we recorded these, known as spontaneous otoacoustic emissions – from my left and right ear, which can be heard on the record (titled the same). In “Calibration God” you hear Francesco describing the relationship that exists between the bridge of the violin and the role the three bones in the middle ear play in impedance matching. “PINK noise” was developed with the lab’s resident musicologist and group coordinator Lana Norris who wrote the playful lyrics from terminology overheard at conference meetings focused on statistics and auditory psychophysics.
The most significant takeaway from being around the biophysicists was witnessing their comfort and vibrancy around not knowing things for definite. Failure or setbacks just propelled them forward. So this energy that was shared around the lab became intrinsic to the ethos of the project coming together. It was research in a way, part journal, part medical curiosity unraveling in the dark. But equally a frame within which music could emerge without judgment, without fear of failure. It all belonged.
You developed new instrument prototypes that were inspired by the middle and inner ear, and they add such a distinct timbre to this music. Can you talk about developing and incorporating these instruments into your compositions?
Tinnitus feels to me like something in between my wetware, my brain, and the outside world. It’s a constant filter for me, so I wanted to reach into the ear to grab phantoms and look at them from different angles. Working with casting and 3D printing allowed me to get closer to my ear canal and explore the negative form of the physical hollow. Suddenly I had before me something that I could touch, or slice into different planes…so I did exactly that and developed ear canal slices as triangles and gongs. I also allowed the concept of the fluid locked in the cochlea to transport my imagination into thinking of our bodies as holding two oceans on each side of our skulls. This took me down the road of bone, silica, glass, and marine biologist Ernst Haeckel’s radiolaria illustrations. The natural environments of the ear and those imagined became the foundation for track concepts. Just like tinnitus is unique to each individual and each ear – the sounds the instruments made were their own and a total discovery.
The less-common materials you used are really interesting to me – particularly glass, ceramic, and ice – again, all of these elements turn “Oceans of Azimuth” into such a distinct sonic world. What drew you to using these sorts of materials? And what surprised you about the results?
I mentioned above where the choice of glass came from, but unexpectedly, I found that the radiolaria-inspired lace-like fused glass pieced to be the most unique. If hit with any ordinary soft or hard mallet, they would crack, but when tapped with fleshy fingers they produced a metallic timbre. The larger the structure the lower the general tone of the instrument. I have been so taken by them that I have already dreamed up a possible sound installation.
With clay, I was thinking more about the wax that softens and hardens along the ear canal, and as for ice – we are back in the fluid world of the locked oceans. I believe that the cochlea is the only part of the body that houses liquid where there is no osmosis occurring. So this stasis, this coffin-like existence lent itself to ice experiments of trapping and releasing air.
What challenges did you encounter during the creation of “Oceans on Azimuth,” particularly in translating abstract concepts of hearing and listening into tangible musical experiences?
Personally, I don’t find the active experience of listening to be so abstract. It is local, physical, something that is developed and tuned into. Hearing on the other hand is a wild card. We don’t consent to hearing or not hearing things. The ear mechanism functions in the way of its choosing. So perhaps the challenge was in sharing a narrative that exists between and connects these two concepts. But practically I found immense inspiration in imagining myself traveling into the ear canal on a sound wave in air, then vibrating on a fleshy membrane, transfusing into bone only to flow along a tongue-like structure and waggle the hair cell bundles…each of these textures and architectures gave me potential for composition, instrument choice, tempo. And that’s even before getting to the nerves firing or the brain… or yet again, doing the travel in reverse.
How do you envision listeners engaging with your music, especially those who may have their own experiences with tinnitus or hearing diversity?
This is a fair question to ask. The academic John Drever whose research centers on aural diversity asked me the same question the other week, as simply mentioning tinnitus can trigger someone’s tinnitus. Just answering your question here I hear my ears buzzing at such high voltage all of a sudden. So I am unsure how to answer your question, at least not yet. All I know is that I have my own experience with my ears, and as they are intrinsic to my making process and also I should add, my living experience – they have become my muse. At least for now.
To close, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world? And how have those changed or evolved since 2019?
Ha! These will be rather cliché…here we go!
Thunder
Mechanical doors opening
Dry leaves still on their branches, shaken by the wind
air escaping as ice melts
Cat purrs (I know…)
Bell sounds from afar
An audience suddenly falling silent
I’m not sure they have evolved. Definitely, for a period I struggled to enjoy any sound, purely because I couldn’t hear anything over my tinnitus filter.
I would say however that I am far more sensitive to volume or a mass of sound than before. For instance, I would avoid meeting in a cafe, auditorium, or a gig venue. I find my ability to focus on sound has blurred. Perhaps this led to my approach of choosing to emphasize dry-defined sounds in my compositions, almost as if looking at the material structure of the instruments under a macro lens.
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