Briana Marela: 'Uncertainty and the Unknown'

The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.

Composer and performer Briana Marela describes her music as being somewhere between experimental ambient music and lyrical pop music. The Seattle-born, Oakland-based artist’s album, You Are a Wave, came to be through recordings she made during her MFA in electronic music program at Mills College.

“I was writing the instrumental for ‘Uncertainty and the Unknown’ in April 2020 when I found out suddenly that my dad had passed away,” said Marela. “It was the last piece of music I had been working on, and all of a sudden these lyrics poured out, and the song ended up being about him. I actually didn’t touch it for like a year and a half, because I was grieving and heartbroken, but then I came back to it and it felt really important to finish it.”

When the pandemic hit, Marela’s grad school program went remote, including an instrument-building class she was taking.

“I was laughing, thinking like, ‘Oh my gosh, I feel like I’m in kindergarten,’” she recounted, describing the childlike instruments she created at home, like rubber bands wrapped around egg cartons and percussion instruments made from shells. “It ended up being pretty fun to just play around and make these little sounds, and so the song is all based on recordings of these weird instruments that I made during lockdown.”

The whimsical nature of the at-home instruments infused a childlike feeling into “Uncertainty and the Unknown,” an ode to Marela’s father’s personality.

“I feel like his inner child was very present always in my life, and he was always laughing and smiling. There’s something playful about this song, and kind of bittersweet,” she said. “Music has always been a really important part of healing through really hard times and this song felt special. I’m glad I could write something to try and honor my dad.”

Marela’s music also draws inspiration from the world around her.

“I’m often really drawn to the sounds I hear in the natural world, but then I envision them being altered in some way,” she said. “Through sampling, you can time-stretch things and put effects and create a whole new sound world.”

She also attributes inspiration to the Bay Area music community, which she describes as a “nurturing, womb-like setting of people working on things just to grow and bring them into being.”

Marela has two forthcoming albums, one with a more indie pop rock sound and one with material she made during her MFA program at Mills that utilizes visual programming and gestural sound tech. “Magic tech elements make it really fun to play live,” she said.

Briana Marela will perform at Bottom of the Hill on Nov. 17 at 9 p.m. Listen to her music on Bandcamp or Spotify, and follow her on Instagram at @brianamarela.