MOONILENA

Standing at the intersection of music and art, where melody and memory blur into hazy half-formed shapes, stands Moonilena. We spoke to the Stockholmbased creative about her technical approach to her aural constructs, and the genesis of her captivating new album, Minnet

The vision of a future archive, staffed by soulless machines, tasked with curating and categorising the myriad fragmented memories of human emotions – and becoming baffled by the task – is an artistic conceit that resonates deeply in 2024. With the onrush of AI-fuelled plugins, DAWs and all-out generative music engines, a machineled future, scrutinising human art and emotional expression in a way such as this, seems almost inevitable.

For Stockholm-based artist Moonilena, this concept proved a fruitful starting point for her own creativity. On her new ambient album, Minnet, Moonilena – real name Marlena Salonen – harnessed a selection of tools across both hardware and software, to build a dark yet tantalising listening experience that wallowed in the space between signal processing theory, and human emotion.“I wanted to make a concept out of memory,” Marlena tells us. “I was studying signal theory and I was really fascinated by quantisation errors that occur when you go from analogue to digital. A signal might come through interpreted by a machine, similar to the original one, but with its intent obfuscated. With large amounts of data and over longer periods of time, this in a way also leads to distortion of memory. Kind of akin to memory loss. So, basically, the concept for the album is an artistic interpretation of these phenomena of degenerated memory and memory corruption.”