Alicia — ill-esha — is from Vancouver, BC. She started performing professionally at 14. She has been making music full-time since 2007. Music is not a side project or a passion that competes with real life. It is the 9 to 5. That clarity runs through everything she says.
Her sound sits at the intersection of live musicianship and electronic production — organic electronic is how she names it. Twelve years as a vinyl DJ before she moved into production. Logic and an Avalon preamp as the core setup. Vacuum tube gear throughout because she is chasing warmth, not precision. Her stage mic is a condenser — rare in live performance because condensers are usually too fragile — but she found one bulletproof enough to survive her, which matters because she drops things.
“I’ve been a live musician my whole life. I integrate instrumentation, vocals, and organic elements with electronic music and heavy bass. It all has to come from the same place.”
On being a woman in the industry: she is direct without being tired about it. People buy her albums and then show up to the show surprised she is a woman. Interviews next to male artists go differently — the guys get asked about their craft, she gets asked about her gender. Her answer: it felt the same as yesterday. The pressure to make something more commercially aggressive, more like whatever is trending, is real. She can’t respond to it. The music has to come from inside or it doesn’t come at all.
Collaborations have been consistently generative — Antiserum taught her the most about engineering and mixdowns, Opio and Russ Liquid brought out the live musician in her. She has never finished a collaboration that didn’t work. The new project at time of filming was Telepaths, a live looping duo with Unlimited Gravity where both sang, rapped, and beatboxed over beats. The name came from the fact that before they had formally written a track together, they had each independently started songs in the same key, at the same tempo, with the same beat pattern. Telepathy.
Superpower: flight. She used to have flying dreams once or twice a week as a kid. Now she travels constantly but wants to do it without the plane. The work she would use it for: the Critical Beats Amazon Voices project — bringing recording technology to indigenous tribes in the Amazon so they can document their own songs, stories, and the destruction of the rainforest in their own voice. Her real superpower, she says, is trying to help the world. That is not a throwaway answer.