17 - Elan DARE

Giannis Kampiotis
October 18, 2022

Hello music people 👋

Today in the spotlight, Elan DARE

An artist at heart, she does not put her music in a category. Influences, styles, elements, and emotions all blur when she is creating. “Anything can be anything”, she says.

But that expressive attitude does not get in the way of her creative ways. She uses the limitations of hardware to unlock creativity 🎶

Read Time: 4 minutes 📰

The Setup

Gear List

Who are you and what is your relationship with music?

I'm an artist and I have different relationships with music.

Art is intrinsically cultural and political. I believe art for the sake of art is also important, and art as a reflection of ourselves and our perceptions is extremely powerful too.

Depending on what I'm going through and how I'm perceiving the world, my relationship with music shifts.

In any case, music has accompanied many big changes in my life and has always been one of the strongest reasons I have to find purpose, not just for myself but also to share with others.

What's the one thing in your studio you can't live without?

An acoustic piano.

What's your process?

Being an active listener, and learning new music on the piano is one of my favorite ways to get the gears turning.

I also love to unpatch everything on my Moogs, pick a single one and find an idea to jam around, then add more instruments as I see fit.

I tend to record every jam. From there, dedicating time to develop and finish the ideas is key, this could take a day or weeks.

It's always different.

How would you explain your style?

I'm still developing my sound.

I like to blur the lines of the music that I know and enjoy. I don't put my pieces in set styles.

Anything can be anything.

You can borrow elements of any style and bring it into yours. The barriers are set by our minds, the music is there to be played with!

Has this journey of building a hardware setup changed the way you think about music or life in general?

Yes, hardware instruments have limitations which I find very liberating to create music.

The fact that synthesizer music is a machine-human interaction allows you to think less about elements that you'd generally focus 100% on when you perform a "traditional" instrument.

For instance, with synthesizers you have the luxury of focusing solely on expression without worrying about note execution