Jolanda Moletta’s third album, Oceanine, is something bigger than the beautiful compositions and collection of sound that it uses as building blocks. These 11 collaborative songs are like spells and rituals. Moletta’s voice is the red thread running in the middle of it, but worlds become galaxies orbiting around each of her incantations. Throughout Oceanine, myths become a living, sonic force.
The album draws heavily from the siren archetype, reclaiming it from centuries of distortion. The siren began as something far more complex than the seduction/destruction stories most of us know: bird-women who carried prophetic knowledge, and who understood what humans weren’t ready to hear. Moletta builds the album entirely from layered human voice, hers wrapping around brief melodic fragments contributed by 11 different female vocalists, each whisper and lament a distinct emotional landscape. The results are spectacular.
And at the center of Oceanine is a question Moletta keeps asking: what if the sirens’ songs were cast as something dangerous precisely because they told the truth?
Oceanine is out on May 1 via Beacon Sound. Pre-order it HERE. Jolanda Moletta’s website can be found HERE.
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What are some of your earliest memories of sound? What were the sounds that first captured your attention as a child?
The very first sound I remember is from when I was a child. Lying in silence in the dark, listening to a quiet, steady rhythm that seemed to come from somewhere in the room. It was my own heartbeat.
An even more vivid memory is the sound of the sea. The first place my parents used to take me was a pebble beach, quite different from the golden sandy beaches we often associate with Italy. I clearly remember the sound of the waves moving over the pebbles, dragging them back and forth in this continuous, textured rhythm. It wasn’t a soft sound: it was detailed, almost granular, like thousands of tiny collisions happening at once.
I was fascinated by it. I also remember throwing pebbles into the water and listening carefully as they disappeared beneath the surface, hearing them being pulled downward, almost swallowed by the waves. That sound, as they dissolved into the water’s movement, stayed with me.
How did you first get into playing music and working with sound? Was there a particular moment or experience that set you on this path?
I started very young, playing with an old Casio keyboard when I was about seven or eight, and recording my voice on tapes I found at home, singing songs or reading fairy tales.
I began studying piano more seriously at eleven, focusing on classical music. I was very dedicated. I took part in recitals and even won a prize at an important international piano competition at the time.
That phase only lasted a few years, though. After that, I stepped away from music for a while before returning to it in a completely different way, more connected to emotion, intuition, and the voice. Still, those early classical studies gave me a strong foundation: discipline, structure, and a way of approaching any instrument that has stayed with me ever since.
Growing up by the Mar Ligure, what did the sea sound like to you as a child? Were there specific moments when it felt like the water was speaking directly to you?
I grew up between Piemonte and Liguria. My grandparents lived in Liguria, and we visited every weekend. I spent almost all my summers there, three to four months at a time.
I loved swimming, and I was very confident in the water. I remember going far from the shore on my own, then just floating in the calm, warm sea with my ears submerged, looking up at the sky. In those moments, everything changed: I could hear deep, low frequencies, the soft movement of water against my body, gently cradling me.
It felt like being in another world. I couldn’t hear the shore, people talking, or children playing, just that deep, enveloping sound and the endless blue above me. Looking back, it feels like a form of meditation. I could spend hours like that, floating, swimming, and floating again.
One memory that stays with me is swimming during a rainstorm. The sound of the rain hitting the surface of the water was incredible. The sound of raindrops hitting the surface of the sea was incredibly hypnotic, thousands of tiny impacts creating a dense, textured sound, almost like white noise but alive, constantly shifting. From the water, it felt immersive, surrounding me completely. It’s one of those moments I can return to so vividly. If I close my eyes, I’m still there.
The siren myths you grew up with carried stories of danger and forbidden knowledge. When did you first start thinking about those legends differently, seeing them as something to reclaim rather than just ancient cautionary tales?
In the stories I grew up with, there was always a sense of danger, but not really of forbidden knowledge. The broader siren archetype isn’t usually linked to knowledge or prophecy. To see them that way, you have to go very, very far back, to their earliest origins, when they were imagined as bird-women, psychopomp creatures, connecting our world to the afterlife. It’s something no one really considers when picturing the later siren with a fish tail: that image belongs to the Middle Ages. Sirens were sculpted in stone or painted in frescoes in cathedrals, often with a double tail, as symbols of female temptation, lure, and sin.
I always had the feeling that ancient stories, fairy tales, and myths held something deeper. The world of Ancient Greek and Roman mythology was one where women and their voices were rarely centered. It was when I discovered authors like Marie-Louise von Franz that things began to shift. Her work on interpreting fairy tales and myths as expressions of the collective unconscious, rich in symbolic language, opened up a different way of reading these stories. She showed how recurring images and motifs speak directly to our inner life, our fears, and our subconscious.
From there, I began to look at ancient myths differently. These tales are full of symbols, and symbols speak to us in a way that goes beyond words, reaching something deeper and more instinctive within us.
I’ve been listening to Oceanine a lot, and finding so much in it. You describe your voice as becoming the ocean itself, embracing and carrying the other vocalists’ contributions. How did you develop that approach, and what does it feel like technically and emotionally to build those vast soundscapes entirely from your own layered voice?
I had a very clear vision from the start: I wanted the guest vocalists’ voices in the spotlight, each one carrying a distinct emotional world.
My voice wasn’t meant to lead, but to become the landscape around them, the element that holds everything together. Something that could lift, support, and illuminate their tone, their emotions, and all the subtle nuances within them.
It’s probably the most compositionally dense project I’ve worked on. I started from the melodies each of them sent me, then built chord progressions that felt grounded but still capable of surprising me, always guided by the personality and emotional quality of each voice.
I deliberately chose not to sample my own voice, even though it would have been far more practical. I wanted to sing every note of every chord, harmony, and melody with full intention and presence. For me, that’s where the meaning lives: not only in the structure, but in the way the sound is formed moment to moment.
The process is deeply spiritual for me. I experience my music as an incantation: something that only comes alive if it carries real intention.
As Hazrat Inayat Khan writes in The Mysticism of Sound and Music: “It is not the word that is spoken which has power, but the tone of the voice…The finer the vibration of the voice, the greater is its power.”
That idea is central to my work: what matters is not just what is sung, but how it resonates, what kind of presence and energy the sound holds.
Each guest vocalist contributed a raw melodic fragment of just a few seconds. What did you ask them to do or think about when creating those stems, and how did you know when one of those brief fragments had what you needed?
I invited each guest vocalist to contribute a short vocal stem, a raw melodic fragment of just a few seconds, with the idea that I would build an entire song around it. I chose singers and musicians I deeply admire, whose voices and styles I felt could collectively embody the full spectrum of the siren and water nymph archetype.
I sent them a few guidelines, sharing a bit about my research into the siren figure. I invited them to move beyond something purely beautiful or ethereal, and to explore the full emotional range: from freedom to rage, from sadness to loneliness. I wanted to open up the entire emotional palette of that archetype.
I trusted them completely. Whatever they sent, I knew it would be right, and it was. The whole collaboration came from a place of openness and mutual trust.
Each track features a different female vocalist, creating a tapestry of voices, styles, and perspectives. This not only expands the sonic palette of the album but also deepens its narrative core.
The processing and layering never disguises the fact that these are voices. Was there ever a temptation to push the sounds further into abstraction, or was it always essential that listeners recognize the human voice underneath everything?
There were a few moments where I definitely pushed the processing quite far, especially in the low-end bass elements in tracks like “Coral and Bones” and “Coda.” In those cases, it would have been much easier to reach for a synth, and I think in some sections the sound stops being recognizably human altogether after all the processing.
The same goes for the ethereal, pad-like texture at the beginning of “Daughter of the Abyss”. I’m actually quite happy with how easily I can forget that it started as a processed voice.
That said, I’m always drawn back to the human origin of the sound. The human voice is still the most powerful instrument to me. So even when it’s heavily transformed, I like that, for most of the record, there’s still a trace of it, something that keeps it grounded in a human presence.
Recording inside that sea cave facing the Mar Ligure must have brought the project full circle. What did it feel like to perform this work in that specific place, and did the cave itself change how the music behaved or what it revealed?
Recording in the sea cave facing the Mar Ligure became a turning point in the project, and what came out of that session is now the bonus track on the album. It also forms the soundtrack of a short film I directed, which is coming out in May.
The film features a live recording I made inside that cave, on the stretch of Mediterranean coastline where I grew up. That place has always felt like a threshold: between land and sea, past and present, something real and something imagined.
We originally went there for an improvised live session, and that performance became the foundation for a fully produced studio piece. Back in the studio, I layered and processed my voice, transforming that raw recording into a much more immersive sonic landscape.
The cave itself had a strong influence on the performance. It’s an enormous, almost spiritual space, and singing there immediately brought me into a very instinctive state: almost like reconnecting with my inner child, playing in the sea, imagining sirens, pretending to live underwater.
In the final track, I also wove in small fragments of each vocalist’s melodic material, almost like shared echoes, so it feels as if we’re all singing together inside that space.
So the cave wasn’t just a recording location: it became part of the composition itself, shaping both the sound and the emotional direction of the work.
You mention that our world is still saturated with ancient symbols and archetypes, often distorted or stripped of their original meaning. Which aspects of the siren archetype felt most urgent to reclaim, and what did you discover about that figure as you worked on this album?
The most urgent aspect for me to reclaim in the siren archetype is the power of the voice itself: the idea of the voice as something prophetic, conscious, and deeply aware.
Across myths and histories, there are so many examples of voices that try to warn, to sense imbalance, to hold a wider vision, and yet these voices are often silenced, distorted, or stripped of their original authority. It is usually women’s voices. Figures like Cassandra from Greek mythology come to mind: voices that speak truth about what is happening, and what is coming, especially when that truth is uncomfortable or ignored. In the case of the sirens, there is also this long process of transformation and reduction: from figures associated with knowledge, vision, and collective truths, to beings simplified into a seductive surface, detached from the depth of their origin. What interests me is precisely that displacement: the way a form of submerged or ancient knowledge gets pushed into the background, or turned into something easier to dismiss.
Working with this archetype felt like a way of going back to that “submerged” layer, where voice is not just seduction or surface, but perception, warning, and expanded awareness. The siren becomes not an object of projection, but a figure that listens and sees more than the individual: it carries an ecological kind of awareness, as if it is listening to a wider world around it.
This also connects to a broader way of thinking about the environment and listening. In recent years, I’ve been influenced by Ecomusicology, and particularly the work of Bernie Krause, whose listening-based approach to soundscapes shows how deeply structured and fragile acoustic ecosystems are. His work makes it very clear that the ecological crisis is also a crisis of listening: environmental change alters soundscapes, leading to the loss of something essential. So in a way, reclaiming the siren is also about reclaiming a form of attention that has been progressively lost: an ability to listen to complexity rather than reduce it. It is about remembering that voice is never isolated or purely decorative; it is always part of a larger sonic ecology, and when that balance is disrupted, something collective is lost.
The album moves between being a reclamation, a spell, and a call from the depths. Those feel like three distinct intentions. How do those different purposes coexist within the music, and does one take precedence over the others?
These three ideas don’t sit separately for me; they’re different ways of describing the same impulse, just from different angles. In the music, they constantly overlap rather than take turns.
The idea of the spell is probably the most foundational one. For me, the human voice is a primal instrument, something that sits between the visible and the invisible. Words are not neutral; they are almost like crystallized thought, with a very real effect on the body and mind of whoever receives them. In that sense, voice becomes a bridge: it evokes, it invokes, it shapes inner states. I think of music as one of the oldest forms of this kind of “structured magic,” where sound creates form, and intention gives that form direction. So singing, for me, is a ritual act: listening is a ritual act. It’s about consciously shaping perception and emotion, not in a manipulative sense, but as a way of opening space, imagination, and sensitivity.
The idea of reclamation comes from that same place of intention, but it is more grounded in history and identity. There’s a need to reclaim the female voice from how it has been silenced, distorted, or mythologized. Even archetypes like the siren have been reduced or simplified, when in fact they carry a much deeper symbolic power: intelligence, intuition, transformation, inner knowledge. Reclaiming those stories is about going back to something older than the distortions and reactivating them as symbols of strength. It’s a way of re-anchoring voice and myth in something self-defined, rather than inherited through a filtered lens.
Then there is the call from the depths, which connects directly to the world of my previous album, Night Caves. That work was about descent into shadow, into the subconscious, and into dream states. Caves became a central symbol for that inner space. This new work continues that journey, but it shifts elements: from earth to water. Water here becomes emotional, primordial, and generative. It connects to origin, to the idea that all life comes from a shared, fluid beginning. In a hydro-feminist sense, there is something important in that imagery: a refusal of rigid separations between body and environment, human and nature, inner and outer worlds. Everything is understood as fluid, interconnected, and in constant transformation.
So these three perspectives, spell, reclamation, and call from the depths, don’t compete. They are different layers of the same language. Sometimes it’s about intention, sometimes about history, sometimes about origin and emotion. But at the core, it’s always about listening more deeply to what voice can do, and what it can return us to.
And, as always, to close… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
One of my favorite sounds is soft rain falling on an umbrella. I love it so much, it feels like being inside a cocoon. There is something almost synesthetic about it: the sound feels soft, like silk against the air, wrapping around me in a way that is deeply comforting. It makes me feel protected, held in a small, intimate space within the world.
I also love the sound of swallows on summer mornings in the city, their sharp, fleeting calls slicing through the warm air and echoing between the buildings. It’s a sound that feels alive, restless, and full of light.
And then there’s the sound of the moka on the stove, when the coffee begins to rise, that gentle bubbling, the moment just before it spills over. It’s such a familiar, almost ritualistic sound, something that belongs to everyday life but carries a quiet sense of anticipation.
These are small sounds, but each of them opens a space, a feeling, like stepping into a memory.
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