Marilu Donovan’s discordant, cascading harp. Adam Markiewicz’s drone-like violin and androgynous vocals. These are the signature components of LEYA’s music, which can sound at once hazy, unsettling, and serene. Both classically trained musicians, their short compositions sit somewhere between experimental, classical, and pop. An important element of the duo’s craft is just how unpretentious it is: They have played at MoMA but also scored a queer adult film directed by the rapper Brooke Candy. And as their excellent 2022 mixtape EYELINE suggests, LEYA are not interested in gatekeeping their process, instead inviting a diverse range of musicians into the studio. They count claire rousay, Julie Byrne, Actress, James K, Martha Skye Murphy, and deli girls as collaborators. 

LEYA’s latest mini-album, I Forget Everything, was released last fall on NNA Tapes; the record builds upon the duo’s baroque ambient pop sound by adding an electronic glow to songs like “Eden Of Haze” and pushing Markiewicz’s lyrics to the forefront on the slowly-pulsating “Baited.” Recently, I caught up with LEYA for a freewheeling chat about their latest project, collaborations, and the importance of Lil Wayne.

While reading about you guys, Lil Wayne popped up a few times. What does Lil Wayne mean to LEYA?

Marilu: I mean … He means so much! I grew up in Houston and inner city Houston is very similar to New Orleans. I was a fan of Lil Wayne in middle school and high school and I remember asking my mom one time if I could go see Lil Wayne. I was like, Oh my god, he has a concert nearby, it's at this place called The Perfect Grass—as in a strip club. And my mom was like, “You're absolutely not going to that.” So yeah, that's my silly anecdote about Lil Wayne. 

Adam: It’s an easy unifier artist that we both love. You’d be hard to find a DJ set we’ve done where there’s not some Lil Wayne songs poked in there. We tend to do these mash-up sets and throw everything in all at once and not play songs for very long and he just has so much good stuff. It's too easy.

Marilu: He’s just so fucking good. He’s literally a genius poet. 

He’s been in the news recently bickering with Kendrick. Have you guys followed this?

Adam: What’s happening with him and Kendrick? 

Lil Wayne is upset that Kendrick was picked to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show in New Orleans.

Adam: The NFL is weird, haven’t a lot of rappers said no to the halftime show? Like Jay-Z didn’t want to do it.

Apparently Jay-Z picks the halftime show now.

Marilu: Stop it, really?

Adam: People used to care that they were conservative. But now in our Trump era there's been a real collusion and this stuff is kind of abstracted. I mean, mainstream rap loves Trump. It feels like things have gotten a little confusing. 

Your last project, EYELINE was filled with a wide range of collaborations. What makes a good collaborator?

Adam: We like curiosity. We’re trying to find new things and happen upon new ideas. We’re into things we don’t know a ton about. That mixtape is a very random list of people, the only unifier is that they are friends and people that were in our world already. We’re both defunct classical musicians who have ended up in this world via this band and been very lucky to figure out how to plug the band into a lot of areas, so what makes a good collaborator is a willingness to be a bit mutually uncomfortable, the classic compromise paradigm. I think anyone who feels even somewhat limited in their practice or something should just, you know, go try to do something random with a random person and [that] probably is almost certainly gonna unstick it for you.

Marilu: I don’t think we’ve had a bad time collaborating with anyone. Some of them are friends that we can call on the phone and get a drink with and tell all our deep secrets to, and some of them are people that have invited us into the studio just out of mutual admiration. And then we're like, Do you wanna make another song together? So we kind of already have an understanding with this person in a creative way. 

Adam: Genre is certainly dead. The idea that people who like music listen to only certain types of music doesn't make sense. I love experimental music, I revel in the world of experimental music, but I hate the idea of calling it experimental music because I think it causes people to not pay attention to it. I think it puts people off.

Marilu: It's alienating! As if it should be serious.

Adam: It is relegated to something that's not fun, and music is just fun and feels good. For a group like us, the equalizer becomes working with other people. Like, we're just trying to write little songs that are meant to be digestible—we're not trying to get into the weeds of [what they mean], that's always been the idea.

I saw Chanel Beads the other day, who mix genres in a unique way. Do you feel part of the same scene?

Adam: I love that band. 

Marilu: Yeah, they’re fucking amazing. 

Adam: The way that band works live, I don't wanna call it like karaoke because that’s a shitty way to put it, but [Shane] screaming over the songs is great. I used to think of backing tracks and triggers as a thing that kind of could detract, but now I think the idea of trying to play with them and make them something more, in a way that they just could never be unless you hear it live, is really interesting. Zachary plays violin for that band sometimes and is a great improviser too. And they’re a poetry band. His [Shane] writing is really crazy to me and difficult to parse.

Marilu: They're friends and neighbors so there's such a great mutual respect, which is always cool when you're like, Oh, wait, that's my friend whose record I'm listening to on repeat. They’re wonderful. We actually have our EP release show tonight with Colle, which is Maya from Chanel Beads’s solo project. She’s fantastic. 

Marilu, did you tune your harp differently for this project? 

Marilu: I have a consistent tuning system I came up with and I also use throughout this project, so if we're playing a live show, I can play between the records. I've been playing harp since I was really little. I went to school for it, I’m a true music conservatory nerd, like a huge orchestra nerd. And I got tired of playing really beautiful things on the harp so when Adam and I started jamming together, I kind of just fucked around with the tuning. We wrote a song and then I was like, Wait, there are 40 strings on this harp, I can't retune for every song. So I left it like this. It's really just my approach. I became bored with spending decades playing in standard tuning on the harp. In graduate school I studied the harp in a more academic way too, learning about tuning systems, but I 1,000 percent cannot keep up with any sort of academic discussion on that. 

Adam, on previous projects your lyrics have felt obscured, but on “Baited” and “Mia” they are decipherable. How did you approach the lyrics on this project? 

Adam: There's a rich tradition of sound painting, a phonetic way of composing that Joni Mitchell used, even though her pieces ended up being really cogent and extremely meaningful. Or like Cocteau Twins, for example, where the phonetics never actually evolves into real language. That’s the way I've worked for a long time. The reason is I'm not a singer per se. I'm a violinist and my practice became about unifying voice and violin, thinking about vocals as sound and trying to make them one. As I've gotten more into singing I’ve visualized singing through different vowels and colors and felt how they resonate in parts of your body and then tried to unify all that into a fluid singing voice. So much of it exists in a different place than words. 

A lot of this project is us trying to do things that we do “well,” but also trying out stuff that feels new. Writing words scares me a little bit. One of the things that bowls me over about other people’s lyrics is when you hear something and you feel that deep connection to someone else's words—that means so much to me. So I would love to be able to figure out how to do that a little more. There are so many opportunities in music to not have to lean into that and the way it functions in music is strange, the things we end up wanting to repeat and the things that make sense to us on a subconscious level doesn’t always mean something or have to be particularly stunning on its own. Words confuse me and I have a lot of reverence for them, so it's been a tip toe process. With EYELINE we put everyone's words inside the liner notes and that was the first step of being like, Okay, we're gonna do lyrics now, we’re going to move forward and evolve a little bit. 

What does the title I Forget Everything mean?

Marilu: I think you can look at it like you're moving forward, you're forgetting the past. Also Adam and I smoke a lot of weed, so I literally forget everything. I don't know if that's crass, but you can think of it in both ways. I have thought of it in both ways.

Adam: So crass.

The question of “do you consider yourself more of a music person or a lyrics person, and why?” was posed to a bunch of music journalists a while ago. What do you pay more attention to? 

Adam: It’s weird because they do end up being separate. I've always been staggered at the music of Leonard Cohen as a poetry exercise, but I love the music too. When I first heard classic Leonard Cohen records, I was absolutely floored by the ability to put all those words together at once.

Marilu: For me there are very few instances where I'm thinking about lyrics, I'm really thinking about the music. I think it's coming from an orchestral background, I’m primarily an instrumentalist. Of course, that doesn't mean that I don't hear beautiful lyrics or take them to heart. But I'm very much sonics first, if you will.

Adam: I've been on a real kick with Future recently, I've always thought Future’s music is really beautiful.

Marilu: He's so good. 

Adam: Future is just beyond deep in this sad way that I really love. And I've been kind of revisiting Future songs, there’s this 2020 Future song “Accepting My Flaws” where there’s this meta level that is so intense. I think in an MC context there are things that have happened that are so virtuosic they’re not really understood yet. Also, I think words are probably dying. I mean, you live in England where people speak better than they do in the US, I don’t even think it’s weird to say there’s a better command of language over there. 

Marilu: I mean, literally, look at our president. 

Adam: I think this band is about being a little dumb. We wanna make something heady, but we would prefer to perform at a rave, we would rather people be drunk. We'd rather it sound kind of shitty. We're gonna perform this material for the first time tonight and it’ll probably be a bit of a train wreck and that's just better. 

Marilu: And it’s more real…