LEYA is the New York-based avant-pop duo of harpist Marilu Donovan and vocalist/violinist Adam Markiewicz, who started making music together in 2018. From the beginning, their work has not only challenged their instruments’ associations to notions of divinity and purity – one of their earliest projects was the soundtrack to a Pornhub exclusive directed by Brooke Candy – but also the boundaries inherent in the experimental scene in which they operate. Interweaving detuned harp, beguiling strings, and droning, operatic vocals, their music seeks to embody difficult feelings, often somewhere on the spectrum between ecstasy and uneasiness, without registering as difficult in itself. Following their debut record, 2018’s The Fool, the duo honed in their sound on 2020’s eerily intimate Flood Dream before linking up with Julie Byrne, Eartheater, Okay Kaya, Actress, claire rousay, and more for the 2022 mixtape Eyeline. Their new mini-album I Forget Everything, arriving on the heels of extensive touring and collaborations with fashion houses, filmmakers, and choreographers, finds them recentering their approach of simplicity and experimentation. What pours out is a raw humanity that remains palpable yet elusive, a profound loss that cannot be named yet permeates their drifting tapestry of sound, warped as memory. Even if everything’s starting to fade, LEYA suggest, you might find bits of it in the music.
We caught up with LEYA for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about theiir collaborative language, breaking the barriers of electronic music, their headspace going into I Forget Everything, and more.
Although it provided an avenue for experimentation, I Forget Everything is also framed as a return to the foundations of your music. What do you remember about beginning to build that collaborative framework for LEYA?
Adam Markiewicz: Like many projects, it sort of started by accident. Marilu asked me if I wanted to jam and play a show; we prepared one 10-minute piece, and there was kind of a little song embedded in it. It was pretty cool. We were like, “Oh, let’s do this again.” You were experimenting with the tuning system, and I, at the time, was working in another project that was kind of notes-as-sound, detuned metal stuff. But all this detuned, weird music I was trying to synthesize into very straightforward heavy music and these short format songs. Marilu and I had a similar approach to trying to work outside of standard tuning, but framing that within songs that are very digestible. It’s really not meant to be looked at as experimental music or meant to be difficult to parse. It’s just supposed to be connected and very emotive. Over time, that’s built to this kind of character in the music, where it’s generally uneasy, tense, anxious; there is a certain color to the whole thing. But originally, we were really just concerned with taking some of this language that we associate with new music, with experimental music, and bringing it into a world that is really for everyone.
I actually do loathe the term “experimental” as it gets applied to art a lot. That’s not to say that I don’t luxuriate and live in the world of experimental music – I certainly do – but I think it acts as a barrier very often. It makes us think we need to sit down and study something, be quiet, be tense, that we can’t disturb the environment. We really wanted to start a band. What gave this project some motion was we made a song, put out a video, and were preparing to put this tape out when we got contacted by Pornhub and Brooke Candy to do this adult film project. That was very early on in the group, and it gave us this realization that we could spend more time doing this. As this stretches out over the years, whereas the idea originally was to take this language and make it feel more universal, it became, “We should work with people who are in these disparate areas.” The unifying notion is not about making something difficult; it’s just about making cool stuff and trying to capture people. As far as live shows are concerned, we play club shows, we play raves. We want to be part of the party.
You said you first collaborated on a 10-minute piece that had a little song embedded in it. Is your method for locating the three-minute pop song, if you will, still subtractive in that way, now that you’re more aware of your musical language? Where does the song come in?
Marilu Donovan: That’s a hard question. I don’t even know how to begin to answer that.
AM: We have a bit of a process. The harp usually comes first, and it is absolutely the center and kind of the basis for everything. I don’t think it’s so subtractive anymore. I think we work from really small bits and kind of build it out. Maybe more so than other folks, we really do sit in the room together for a lot of the process. We work on each other’s parts together and chisel away and make things that don’t work very well until they start to work better, you know. Marilu is very patient with me, I will say.
Are there times where you conceptualize the interplay between the harp and the violin, or is it still mostly guided by instinct?
AM: I think the writing process is kind of inverted a little bit. Initially, we were playing around with the idea of writing things really quickly. We wanted to get out of our own way with composition a little bit, but that has kind of faded over the years. In the beginning, we were building these larger drone pieces and working amidst improvisation to compose these pieces out of it. But now it’s pretty intentional. We sit and try to envision the thing from the start. We’re trying to get better at songwriting, speaking efficiently through the work. We like a limited palette, and we’ve stuck with this very specific setup: we use harp, we use violin, and we use voice. We’ve dabbled in other things with other people, but as far as this record is concerned, everything is generated from that.
MD: Even the samples and the more production-oriented elements are all solely from harp, violin, and voice. That’s why when we discuss this record in particular, it’s kind of going back to the basics. We’re expanding on it, but we’re only using these three elements.
To me, when those electronic sounds come in, they feel like a response to the imagery you invoke in the opening track: “filling the Eden with haze.” What prompted you to create them using these elements, as opposed to maybe experimenting with other production techniques or instruments?
MD: We’ve both been playing these instruments since we were little kids – I personally don’t really know how to do anything else. I’ve spent my entire life honing this craft, going to school, studying. I’ve thought about, in LEYA, doing perhaps something on piano or maybe guitar, but I don’t think there’s ever been a question of not using harp and violin.
AM: Yeah, I would echo that. We don’t know how to do anything else. It’s kind of the only way we know how to go about this stuff. You said something really interesting about “filling the Eden with haze.” I’m not entirely sure what this record is about. It’s definitely a document of a bit of confusion, but this idea of a space being colored by something that’s maybe less organic or new, or maybe even synthetic, is certainly a palpable element that you really hit on in a pretty direct way. We spent a number of years, up until recently, very engaged with making work with other folks and trying to expand the language through that, and this was an attempt to kind of go back to our roots a little bit, so to speak. We also sought to fuck it up a little bit and to push this in a direction where we’re thinking about production as a component of the thing that we haven’t really in the past. We’re stepping into something that we know a little less about.
What surprised you the most about working without collaborators at this point in time?
MD: I think we pushed ourselves more than we thought we could.
AM: We thought about even making this record with a producer or a primary person, and then we just did it ourselves instead. We made a lot of mistakes with it; some of the recording process was very rough-around-the-edges process. And then it turns out it’s okay. claire rousay talks about this frequently – this idea that, and it seems like a “duh” type of thing, but it’s really not, because many of us get in our own way with this type of stuff: whatever you have at your hands in front of you is enough. If you’re using a cheap interface to record yourself at home, you don’t need a nice one to unlock your potential. You don’t need an expensive microphone. You don’t need to play an instrument you don’t know how to play. You just need to do the thing.
I think there’s a lot of pressure because we’re living in a time where people are becoming so proficient in production. You can do anything you want in the box. You can strive for this kind of perfection. There’s a lot of athleticism and competition – this is a very palpable thing in music, I think, in various contexts. Certainly as a classical musician, from a very young age, you kind of know where you rank amongst your peers. I remember orchestra seats in high school – I grew up in New England – being like, “This is where I rank amongst all the violinists in New England.” And that means X and Y for my future – that means I have these opportunities, and I don’t have these. I could get into the fact that that’s a very dark way to educate the youth about getting hyped on making music, because it makes them feel as if they’re not enough from a very young age. And I think the same thing applies a little bit to recorded music. I’m not saying this is a triumph of a record – in fact, I’m really pleased with the fact that we’ve learned a lot.
MD: It’s a messy moment in our lives, and we’ve put it out there for everyone, or no one, to listen to.
AM: It was not like a fancy studio record.
In ‘Eden of Haze’, you can literally hear my upstairs neighbor walking in.
AM: We haven’t put anything out in a couple of years, and I think we could have put a lot of pressure on this release to be this very high-fidelity, big leap into the next frontier of fanciful recording stuff. Instead, we’ve embraced where we’re at.
MD: Which is literally my living room. [laughs]
I’m not sure if this is necessarily related to the title, but I was wondering whether there was an effort to approach I Forget Everything as a kind of clean slate, removing it from the context of everything that came before. Or if that maybe happened unconsciously, where the title suddenly reflected the process itself, or what you wanted out of it.
MD: Isn’t that a dream – to forget everything? Is it even possible? It can mean so many things. I mean, I’m very forgetful.
AM: We both are, yeah. [laughs]
MD: We’re both gutting stone and writing stupid songs, and then it’s like, “Wait, I literally don’t know what I just did.” One could take it that way. But I would hope that even in life, it’s like, can you start fresh and forget what happened before? Or are you forever changed by what happened, what led you to the current moment?
AM: I think music, how we experience it as people, is so inherently tied to not only memory but our idea of memory – the phenomenology of being conscious of time, of what’s happening in music. Any time you’re overwhelmed by the beauty of something, it’s due to it being unexpected, right? If we stand in a present moment and regard the past and the future, as we get farther into the past, the horizon diminishes, and as we get farther into the future, the horizon also diminishes. So, in any given moment, as we move to experience what’s next, this happens amidst an expectation, and sometimes expectation is somewhat defied. But what’s also true is that what we think we know of the past gets distorted the farther we get out. It’s the very essence of functional harmony: when we hear one chord, we expect to hear another chord after, or a certain number of options. It’s based on cultural context and history and everything we’ve heard in our lives. What I think is basically true is that it’s all very deceptive, and what we think we know is not always true.
But it’s also, as you said, Marilu, really hard to shake the past. Our last mixtape, Eyeline, came out in 2022. We toured that heavily for about a year and a half, and part of this was post-pandemic touring bonanza. We were on the road as much as possible. We weren’t playing shows with guests or anything, but we were living in the space of promoting work based on collaborations. We were like, “We need to come back to our own voice here and really speak on our own about the story we’re trying to tell.” I think this EP is us stepping back into that. We had an expectation of how it was going to go, and it all went a little differently. At the end, we needed to name it, and we were like, “Well, I kind of forget everything that happened.” We were both very worn out in the middle of 2023 when we got back from touring. Even in our small little world, there’s pressure to get the next work out so you can keep the whole wheel turning–
MD: Amidst the world collapsing around us. Can’t forget about that.
AM: I feel like in Western society right now, we’re consenting to things as a society that we can’t really go back from. Everyone I know understands that what’s happening in the Middle East is unthinkably evil, and yet the powers that be have looked us all square in the face and said, “Okay, we kind of know it too, but are you going to do anything about it?” The truth of the matter is it’s happening. These moments in humanity – you can’t go back from them. I don’t know if we’re talking about an era beyond this where things get worse and worse and this is just the beginning benchmark…
MD: The beginning of the end.
AM: “Filling the Eden of haze.” We were also thinking about the idea of paradise as something private, something you create with the people directly around you, and you sort of block out the world. Maybe these utopian ideas need to be shattered sometimes because the reality is there’s so much suffering going on beyond the immediate realm. It just feels like a good time to question absolutely everything as far as one’s own instincts are concerned.
MD: I mean, what is reality? We’re all experiencing wildly different versions of it.
AM: We had a bit of a brain break amidst this process, trying to think about all this at once.
MD: How do artists fit into the world that we’re heading into, that we’re already experiencing? What do we do? For us, in a simple way of thinking about it, this is a release of us experiencing grief – even if it’s in a mundane way or a very extreme existential way, literally just acknowledging the world is pretty fucked up right now.
AM: We don’t really make work that is extremely content-forward. The lyrics to LEYA used to be multilingual and based in vowel painting, kind of like how Joni Mitchell composes or what Cocteau Twins songs are or what Melvins songs are. We’ve attempted to make a bit more of a vessel for poetry with this one because there feels like an impetus to have more direct contextual meaning in the work. But it’s still really just about a feeling and trying to understand that feeling. It’s like when you’re trying to process or deal with feelings; rather than naming them, it’s better to ask, “Where is this in my body? What color is it? What does it sound like?”
There’s also this feeling of inertia, and the word that comes up a lot on this record is “waiting” – it’s all happening, but you’re also waiting for something to happen. It could be anticipation or apprehension – what kind of feeling is that waiting for you?
AM: I love that. I hadn’t thought about that, but I do think that’s a very unifying state among these things – waiting.
MD: It’s interesting you picked up on that; there was another song about being in a waiting room that didn’t make it on the record.
AM: Yeah, we had this choral piece that was kind of pontificating about being in a waiting room. A bit of a nod to the Fugazi song. I have very bad ADHD, and waiting is this weird, arrested state for people with that specific type of neurodivergence. If there’s something happening in like 10 minutes, you’re not going to be able to get your brain to focus on anything other than waiting for the scheduled event.
Could you share one thing that inspires you about each other?
AM: I think his sense of curiosity – wanting to try something new. When you’re working with someone, you always have to make compromises. Sometimes we’ll be playing through something, and he’ll be like, “Why don’t we try this?” And my immediate thought is, “No, I don’t want to,” but he’s like, “No, let’s do it.” And it ends up being the best option. There’s something almost childlike about his curiosity and excitement that can be really fun to be around, but also inspiring musically. You know, the inspiration we have to have between the two of us isn’t just us writing songs; we’re literally in a van together for months on end, just the two of us playing shows, having to entertain each other. And I’m inspired by that sense of excitement and wonderment.
AM: One thing I really appreciate about you is that you look at music in a way that is incredibly direct. Whether it’s explaining equal temperament to me or something, you would talk about it in a way that I could never. When we first started playing together, we’d be sitting in the room and you’d be just noodling on the harp, and I would just kind of melt into the wall. It would just feel so good to be there. I think that you’re such a natural musician; you just do it. As you said, you’ve been doing this your whole life. When it comes time to write – Marilu can play all this crazy classical music that I can’t – you have all this facility to do these things, and yet you take your music and put it into this simple humanity. It’s not about barriers; it’s about kindness. When we’re writing and I get too deep into the weeds, you’ll be like, “No, this is just this.” You’re grounded in the reality of what it is to play music in a way that’s unlike anyone I’ve ever met.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
LEYA’s I Forget Everything is out now via NNA Tapes.