Over the past few months, Lolina, who previously made music as Inga Copeland and was one-half of the duo Hype Williams, has been on the road playing shows on the heels of her most recent record, Unrecognisable. The project stems out of an online graphic novel and tells a contemporary urban story using outmoded consumer keyboard technology and vocals—often spoken, often processed—with Lolina switching between characters over the course of both the album and live show. 

In May, the artist performed at Nina’s headquarters, alongside duo New York, who have a record coming out Friday on Lolina's Relaxin imprint. She made good use of the space. In a gesture that would go on to be repeated during at least one more stop on her tour, Lolina moved an office couch to the performance area, deploying it as a prop to anchor an obliquely narrative set, one marked by an inarticulable tension.  

We sent a few questions over to the artist; read the interview, and listen to the album below. If you are in New York, she performs July 19 as part of MoMA PS1’s Warm Up series.

What separates Unrecognisable from previous Lolina releases? Do you see it in conversation with your larger body of work?  

There are some loose references to my previous records. I took the names of the Unrecognisable characters Paris Hell and Geneva Heat from my albums Live in Paris and Live in Geneva, for example. But musically, each record is a new project for me and the process is different each time, so my relationship to older releases ends up also changing with every new one I make.  

What inspired the name of the record?

The album is a third chapter of the Unrecognisable project, which started as an online graphic novel with an interactive soundtrack. The story is about a city in which government and resistance group Unrecognisables fight each other by transforming buildings into weapons. The idea was that members of the resistance would have to hide their identity somehow, so Paris and Geneva are both wearing huge hats to cover their faces. This also allowed me to play both characters because I wouldn’t be recognizable behind the costumes, so I was also thinking about it in relation to being a performer. Then for the album, I thought it would be cool to translate this idea into music as well so my vocals on the songs are pitched in different ways. 

You’ve been putting out music in different configurations for around 15 years. In that time, how have you seen the game change?

I’m not sure how to answer this question in such a general way, because in that time there’s obviously been a lot of changes. Nina is a kind of streaming network, so you could probably tell me more yourself about the effects of streaming and social media. What I can say tho, as a musician you inevitably end up thinking about change a lot. It can be on a level of sound when composing or mixing tracks, or more collectively when what is seen as music changes over time as new ideas are introduced about what’s possible. That’s more or less what I was trying to think about when making Fast Fashion, how change works in music.

Do you think of yourself as being a part of a musical community, or do you think of what you make as being a bit separated? How do you feel like you fit into the collective musical consciousness?

For me being a musician means being in an ongoing conversation about what music is or isn’t, and that's definitely a social process.

You often take a playful approach to sampling. One example that comes to mind is the Fast Fashion album. Or the crowd noises on the Live in Paris record. How important is sampling to your larger practice?

In the period between Live in Paris and Fast Fashion I was interested in CDJs as a kind of advanced sampler. It was about figuring out a way to make the process of recording and playing electronic music more improvised by sampling yourself in real time. In the process I did make some records that are more sample based, like Who is experimental music? The album is made out of 5 or 6 short samples, which I cut up into sections, maybe a second or a few seconds long each. I then played them through an old iPod Shuffle in a random order and whatever came out of that I re-sampled live on CDJs into what you hear on the record. The collaboration with Brandon Juhans, L4b, is also pretty much entirely made out of samples and through sampling, and we’ve tried to recreate that process for our gigs by connecting our equipment so that we could sample each other live and improvise the whole set in that way.

Where do songs start for you? Where do they end?

They start with asking what is music? and end with whatever answer I can come up with at the time.

Is there an overarching vision behind your imprint, Relaxin’?

It’s about whatever electronic music means right now.

What does your media diet look like? How interested are you in contemporary music? 

I’m always interested in music, I go to a lot of gigs and clubs so most of the time I learn about it that way.

(Main image: Lolina as Paris Hell, photo by Lengua)