LILIEN ROSARIAN - Interview

ETHEREAL.PRESS

Tell us about Lilien Rosarian.

LILIEN ROSARIAN

hi!

i am a girl from new york.

i like repetition and finding patterns on this dark planet. i have made a bit of collage kinda music under this name. i’m still pretty new to existing.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

The project, 'every flower in my garden,' is one of the more unique projects we listened to this last year.

Can you tell us a bit about the concept of the album?

LILIEN ROSARIAN

it's a little journey through a garden i made. the bunches of flowers are the loops, the wind is the tape noise, and all parts are loosely collecting themselves together into different forms.

it's packed densely as if you're moving between small compacted rooms and the outside world is gone. i tried to specifically recreate the feeling of looking at a complicated environment filled with so much stimuli that you need to choose specific bits to focus on at a time.

that's how i like to think of it at least.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

In the description for the project on Bandcamp, you talk about how the project was 'made with lots of collected sounds and cassette loops, sampling over & over, filling spaces, educated trial & error, luck.'

How does this process differentiate itself from other forms of music production?

LILIEN ROSARIAN

the majority of the sound sources are things gathered beforehand, not really knowing where they'll end up. even most of the stuff i played are repurposed recordings.  

i guess that's why i say 'luck'.  it's a lot of surprises for me figuring out what sounds work together and what doesn't, like solving a puzzle.

i like sampling on cassette loops for its ease in making carefree & complex rhythms, whereas the more intricate stuff is usually from various max patches i made. 'sampling over & over' refers mostly to me trying to more aggressively melt things together by re-processing things in groups, it helps everything exist in the same place, and also kinda just helped me keep discovering "new" sounds by repeatedly recycling stuff instead of getting stuck on a single element and trying to make that work by 'filling spaces', i mean trying to create a densely packed environment, having something new in every corner, constant movement, a culmination of tiny details.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

Why did you feel pixel art would be the album's best representation?

LILIEN ROSARIAN

it wasn't really my intention for it to be considered 'pixel art'; the artwork is almost entirely based from downsampled images. the decision is, well, maybe half because my p5js code ran pretty slowly for large images, half because i grew to really like the low resolution, being so cloudy and vague while also having a crisp and defined form.

a lot of my image algorithms did a lot of drastic changes per pixel, like moving them around, sudden color changes, things like that..so they also just looked better at low resolutions, because the manipulations could look a lot more seamless, whereas the high res would feel pretty unnatural and sort of jarring in comparison.

i also liked the contrast of having an unafraid digitally sharp representation of natural sources, as i try to do in my songs as well.

ETHEREAL.PRESS

Why do you choose to express your art more experimentally?

LILIEN ROSARIAN

it makes me happy and it feels sincere... it's just natural so it doesn't feel like choosing anything. i kinda like the idea of creativity through abstraction imperfection etc. as a fruitful means to provoke branching creative thought. that just sounds comfy to me...

ETHEREAL.PRESS

What's next for Lilien Rosarian?

LILIEN ROSARIAN

mostly i want to keep pushing things further and see where else i can go. i think i'd like to try something with a bit less nature this time... more concrete, maybe.

things often kinda vaguely float in my head still, so it's hard to promise anything.

i'm mostly working on tools/coding/max patches right now.. and, for me at least, that ends up being pretty separate from the 'actually making music' part, - though almost equally important, i think.

so... we'll see!

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LILIEN ROSARIAN: BANDCAMP - TWITTER - YOUTUBE