Collection: Briana Marela
My Inner Rest is a collection of 12 electroacoustic songs performed live by Briana Marela in the Mills College concert hall. With her emotional vocal performance as the focal point, she carves out a minimal yet lush space for swirling and skittering synths, vocal sampling, and live processing to caress and accompany her journey of reconnecting with her creative spirit. Combating self-doubt while redefining her relationship to her artistic practice, My Inner Rest is a vital document in learning how to love and have compassion for oneself.
Invoking magical realism, Marela uses a visual programming language to build custom tools and effects to process her voice and transform non-musical objects into playable instruments. A handheld mirror, when held to her face, warps and pitch shifts her words into a “voice of uncertainty.” A silver bowl of water spins back echoes of her voice within its watery metallic filter. An orange light bulb captures and plays back samples of Marela’s voice in real time while casting shadows around the room. These compositions draw from elements of experimental music, theater, performance art, and popular song. She envisioned this way of approaching performance as a vocalist seeking an embodied physical experience on stage without the need to be proficient at playing a traditional instrument. She makes use of subtle movements of her body, as well as different gestural mappings using sensors, microprocessors, and training with a neural network to inform her live vocal processing. This allows her the freedom of improvisation within composed parameters to control discrete electronic and sampled sounds. Her voice acts as a storyteller and guides the audience through an embodied exploration of self in relation to creative identity.
Unlike Marela’s previously released albums, My Inner Rest was written and composed to be performed live. She was set to start recording after graduating with an MFA from Mills College in 2020, however due to the pandemic and the death of her father, the album was shelved and she left the Bay Area for two years. After deciding to return to Oakland to be closer to friends and her music community, the album was eventually recorded at Littlefield Concert Hall. Former Mills technical director and friend Brendan Glasson engineered several sessions between 2022-23, capturing what would become My Inner Rest in a cathartic close to both Marela's time at Mills College, and the institution itself. The unexpected gestation period gave Marela deeper insight into the power of her creative endeavor, and crystallized the need to perform the material live. Each piece was ultimately recorded on stage, wearing a wireless headset mic and no headphones, as the singer was immersed with her sounds amplified in the room. Some songs took as many as 30 takes in order to capture her ideal performance. After a year of listening and refining these recordings, Marela has yielded a cohesive and intriguing collection of songs that exist apart from the live performances, in their own time and space.
Briana Marela is a Peruvian American composer, vocalist, and performing artist based out of Oakland, CA. Her gestural and lyrical song performances draw from elements of both experimental electronic music and vocal-driven pop music. Using a visual programming language and machine learning, Marela makes custom tools to create compositions with both fixed elements and opportunities for improvisation. She was most recently a spatial sound artist in residence at Audium in San Francisco for their residency New Voices IV, performing her multi-channel piece live every weekend from February to April 2025. She is currently a Montalvo Lucas Arts Music and Composition fellow. Marela received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College in 2020.
Marela has self-released past albums, as well as releasing records with labels such as Jagjaguwar, Surface World and PIAPTK. Her newest full-length album, My Inner Rest, is due to be released on June 6th via AKP Recordings.