Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.
Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!
For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.
To date, there have been 85 New Music Monday features published through this collaboration.
This week, Amnesiak is the New Music Monday highlight!
Amnesiak is the solo recording project of 16-year-old Jody Senn. For this project, she produces mostly modern metalcore with influences of pop and progressive, but has a wide range of sound in her already prolific discography.
Senn released her first album as Amnesiak when she was just 11 years old and has since released 29 singles, EPs and full-length albums.
Her latest album, A GIRL AND HER MAGGOTS, was released in late July.
Senn says that after releasing her first recordings, she had so much fun with the project that she just kept creating from her home studio setup.
“I was having fun making what is objectively bad music until I decided I wanted to start doing it more seriously and semi-professionally,” Senn told Victoria Buzz.
“Before that, I had done a lot of music but I only found a passion for it when I started recording and producing, and that really unlocked the joy of music for me.”
Senn says that what came out of honing her chops with Amnesiak is a project that is unequivocally her.
“I’m not trying to be a collective or a group or anything outside of the purest expression of me,” she explained.
“I think with the most recent album, A GIRL AND HER MAGGOTS, I really sort of honed in on that and created an album that unabashedly myself and very much written all about my own experiences—made to sound exactly like the music I want to hear.”
“It pulls no punches in the weird structure or the style of songwriting,” she added.
For this album, Senn says she really tried to synthesize the environment in which she exists. She said one example of this is the song “MOSS” from her latest record.
“That song is about laying in a bed of moss on a mountain somewhere midday, and I really tried to synthesize that in the production and make it sound exactly like that.
Senn also noted that a major overarching theme to A GIRL AND HER MAGGOTS was exploring her own experience being trans.
“One topic that will keep coming back is the transgender experience,” she explained. “I really kept coming back to that while I was writing this album.”
“There’s the anger at the world around you on ‘WORLD EATER,’ there’s the sort of feeling of being an imposter on ‘GIRL’ and ‘HER SISTER,’ there’s the freeing nature of being in nature as a trans person and so on.”
Highlight track – “HER SISTER”
Senn says that typically, she writes a song’s music and the melodies before writing the lyrics, but with “HER SISTER” the concept and lyrics came to her first.
“I came up with the concept of writing a song from the perspective of one of my younger sisters’ friends,” she said.
“It’s completely imagined, this person that I’m writing from the perspective of does not exist but I wanted to use that lens to look at my own internalized transphobia and my own self perception—writing about that from an outside lens rather than an internal [one] to make for a more interesting experience.”
She added that there were a few standout lines that came to her before writing this that sparked her curiosity in exploring the topic, one of which being “Your sister down the hall, you know I love you but she’s dangerous.”
When she went to get the music and melodies together for “HER SISTER,” Senn says that she was inspired by a prediction she read for what the newest album from Victoria juggernauts Spiritbox was going to sound like.
“[They predicted] a dark stormy night, but the colour scene was red, and that stuck in my mind—I really hoped that’s what the record would sound like—and it didn’t.”
“So I figured I just had to make that myself.”
This imagery inspired Senn to use sound to capture the feeling of being in a more angry storm that was out to get her.
To create this sound, she created instruments from scratch through plugins and audio software that would resemble “a stab and a horn.”
“There’s also a bunch of pulsing drone sounds throughout the song in the pre-chorus and such, and there [are] a few reprises of a storm with a sort of washy, wave-like lead chord synth,” she explained.
Senn recorded the entirety of “HER SISTER” and A GIRL AND HER MAGGOTS from her basement studio. She played guitar, bass and sang it all herself, using midi software for the synths and drums to have it all sounding as precise as she could.
All-in-all, Senn says this album took her two years to complete and represents the project she has spent the most time and energy on of all her releases.
Check out “HER SISTER” by Amnesiak below:
Listen to “HER SISTER,” A GIRL AND HER MAGGOTS and the rest of Amnesiak’s catalogue on Bandcamp, Tidal, Spotify and Apple Music.
Because this is a recording project as opposed to a performance-focused one, Senn says she does not have any plans to play live any time soon.
“Due to the nature of the music, even if I were to get a four-piece band, there would be a ton of parts integral to the songs that just would not be able to be played,” she said.
That said, Senn’s other main musical project, Belladonna, a local indie outfit, has some tentative show dates she shared.
Senn will be playing with Belladonna on CFUV’s live Basement Closet Sessions on Friday, October 23rd.
Following that radio performance, they will be playing at the Victoria Friendship Hall on Saturday October 24th and the Philippine Bayanihan Community Centre on November 14th.
Keep an eye on Amnesiak’s Instagram to stay up to date on future releases.
Related:
- New Music Monday: Miss the Heart channels feminine-rage on new single
- New Music Monday: Hawk & Steel release first album after 9-year hiatus
- New Music Monday: Hillsboro confronts addiction struggles on sophomore album release
CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal.
“I think CFUV is an incredible, not quite training ground, but place where young budding artists, sound people and people that are just passionate about music can easily develop their skills with so much support from the staff,” Senn said.
“It’s a great place to spread your wings.”
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Amnesiak in the comments below!
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