Interview | Ingrid Lukas

Estonian singer-songwriter Ingrid Lukas and her eclectic band of the same name have begun doing heavy lifting on the promo for their newest record We Are. We had an opportunity to chat with Lukas and get some insight on the polyphonic universe they inhabit.

CRAVE: Given the strange state of the music industry, we have a lot of cookie cutter artists out there at the moment. And then suddenly we have this bright and dark track called We Are by Ms. Ingrid Lukas. Talk about a shift in gears…Who is Ingrid Lukas and where did she come from?

Ingrid Lukas: I’m a singer and songwriter born in the Estonian forest in 1984 and now living in Switzerland. I have three homes: Tallinn, Zürich, and Music. I’m creating music and doing concerts with my band called INGRID LUKAS since 2007. I’m also giving workshops and singing lessons in various schools and working as a music teacher with deprived teenagers with challenging backgrounds.

Estonian singer-songwriter Ingrid Lukas in concert.

The single is chock full of elements and ingredients, ranging from electronic to rock to simply organic orchestration. How do you imagine your songwriting process? Where do you find all of these sounds and find a way to make them fit so boldly into a song?

Well, usually the process is joyful and fluent. I believe we live in a sea of sounds and it depends on who tunes in because everyone is hearing something else. Here are some lines of one of my songs.

JOYS OF SEA:

Children, children. Dance all over me.

Let your feet weave a tapestry.

Of earthish pleasures. Joys of sea. Free of self.

Unselfish free

I often write a song by myself, then I bring it to my band and we work together on an arrangement. My drummer and friend for many years, Patrik Zosso has an important part in the songwriting process. I bring a nordic song with spherical atmospheres and landscapes and he combines these sounds with deep and urban electronic beats and sounds.

We Are has a very forthcoming sort of refrain “Awake when I recognize myself, before I recognize you.” When you listen back to your work, do you warp back to the moment of inspiration that you drew from? Is it therapeutic? painful? Autobiographical?

“Born when I forgive myself. Before I forgive you.

Awake when I recognize myself. Before I recognize you.”

The songs I have written through the years are for sure autobiographical. Each of them has been very urgent for my own development. Music is my first language. To understand what is going on in the outside world and in my inside world, I need to speak music. But I am glad, these themes are universal and other souls can recognize their own stories in these songs.

Ingrid Lukas combines indie pop and electronic music. Photo courtesy of Ingrid Lukas.

Should artists suffer for their art? What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned about your voice and expression as an artist while recording your new album WE ARE?

I think we do not necessarily need to suffer. But sometimes we choose to suffer. I wrote a song about that on this record:

THE GAME

It`s always the same

The rules don’t change

We are our own slaves

Enjoy the game

I must admit that there is a side inside of me too, that likes to dig into something painful and let it come out to the surface, face it and then maybe bring it into a song. That is helping me to see and hear it in a new light. Here some other lines from the song NURSE YOUR RIBS:

And send my soul

To dance with pain

And never take

Me back again

Ingrid Lukas combines dense orchestration and simple melody for the new album We Are.

During recording my new album WE ARE I learned to listen to the deeper and darker corners of myself and bring them up to light. Another big development was that I felt the need to start to move and shake and to look for an expression through body movement. So for this new record, I stood up from the grand piano and started to dance and play synths while singing. This brought new waves also into my vocals.

Imagine that this album is a canvas. What are the colors we find when going from the beginning to the end? Are they gentle brushstrokes or violent ones? Somewhere in between?

I once had a collaboration with a young and talented painter Samuel Schuhmacher. During our concert, he was improvising and painting in the very moment, what he heard and his movements were beamed to a screen behind us on stage. He did not know anything about our music before. The colors he did choose were all black and white, sometimes a little blue and at one point intense red. I remember one of his stories…sea, waves and a little boat sailing in the ocean, looking for land…

It was fascinating to play music and in the same instant to see these sounds becoming forms and stories on the screen. While a drum solo I took a chair and went in front of the screen and started to dance together with Samuels brushstrokes. Magical.

You come home from a long day. How do you unwind? What do you listen to in order to decompress? Or do you prefer silence?

I love to turn off my brain and just be aimless. It does not matter what I am doing then. Whether I am shaking my ass off, or collecting mushrooms in the Estonian forest, or diving in the swimming pool in Zürich, or laughing out loud and silly with my friends.

Are you planning any live dates? If so when and where? What can fans and newbies expect from your live show?

There are some festivals in Estonia, like the Intsikurmu Festival on the 6th of Aug 2016. We are also going to play in London at the End of Oct 2016 at the Festival Match and Fuse.

Additional shows are in planning.

In our concerts, we invite people to our musical universe. It is somewhere deep down in the sea of sounds and with different creatures like night angels, unicorns, and manticores. I wrote a song about that: UNICORN

And we dance one step further

And we dance one – two steps beyond

And we dance a little bit deeper

Down, down into the demimonde.

Imagine you get a time machine that takes you back in time to your 16-year-old self. You’ve got a vinyl, a book, and a piece of paper with one phrase of advice written on it. You give these three things to your younger self. What are they?