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When we are trawling the internets, sometimes it feels like finding anything worth listening to feels harder than finding god, but once in a while, that stuck between whirls vortex opens and a sonic hadn’t is held out pulling you into ethereal bliss. That song a few weeks back was Avalon’s ‘Harder To Reach Than God.,’ a melodic day trip that melds dark pop and downtempo beats to climatic effect, toeing a tension of mystery and sexiness than pulls like deep exhale when short of breadth. Ever so curious about the celestial origins of this song and its creator, we meet Avalon fish from her travels in Japan to dig into well everything: 

OnesToWatch: You just let us know you were in Japan the past two months, what have you been up to?

Avalon: I’ve always had a lot of love for Japan, and I spent some time there when I was a teenager. I was just there working on my record. And also practicing Japanese, I am taking Japanese at school. But overall, I just am inspired by what’s going on there, culturally and musically, so I was living more of a “local” life while I was there. Just day-to-day, working on my record. 

How good is your Japanese now? 

I wouldn’t say it’s conversational. I speak Spanish, too, and it's funny because the Japanese pronunciation is really similar to Spanish, like the vowels and stuff. So it’s kind of easy to get a hold of the pronunciation, but the alphabets are so complex, there's three different alphabets. It’s a complete change from English or Spanish, but it's okay, my Japanese is okay. 

Well, that was a bit of a side quest question, but I’m always curious. So to start us out, I think it’s one of the most difficult jobs on Earth right now to be an artist, so why are you an artist? 

You think it's a difficult job? 

Oh yeah. I say that from the perspective of reaching an audience. I think it's as hard as it's ever been to find an audience and nurture and grow it, but I guess from the generational creativity side, it's probably not the hardest time to be an artist. 

To answer your question, because I think it's sort of multiple parts, I don't feel like I chose to be an artist, and I think expression – in the forms of the kinds of media that I express myself through – does lend itself to these questions of audience. Like, who's my audience, or, am I making music for this particular TikTok niche? But, I really don't like to think about those things. I don't mean this in an “othering” way, or to say that people who do make their music with the idea of how it's gonna reach people or what they're kind of saying as an artist, that those people are invalid, I just don't feel that way personally. I’m just really grateful for the support that I've gotten as an artist and I think music is just this one aspect of all of the different mediums that I use to express myself. And it also feels a symptom of the rest of my life. Of course my life revolves around my art, but I think most of my life is so rich outside of my art that it informs the work. There's like a circle forming around my music and art and myself. 

So to answer the question, I think there is an art to persona and to how you can present yourself as an artist these days. But I look at it more as an extension of the expression and not necessarily as a thing that I want other people to see, you know what I mean? 

Even when I was talking to my friend about putting music out and how people felt about the release of my newest single, he was like, well, you know, how are the streams doing? Do you have a goal for streams? And I was just like, I really don't like to attach myself to any metrics or to things like that. I think the things that resonate with people resonate with the right people and yeah, exposure is important, but genuine things always catch on. You can stop me at anytime.        

No, why would I stop you? This is not your common denominator answer, so I'm interested.

I just, outside of music, I have a lot of interest and a lot of things that I have done with my life, so music has become a focus it naturally became a focus in my life. Like, even DJing, for example, I didn't set off to be a DJ or open for The Dare or play at the MoMA. It just came naturally. Like, I had a collection of vinyl, so when I started getting asked to play my records at dive bars in LA, I was down for the love of the music and sharing it. there was no money and I didn’t even know how to use CDJs back then. It was a way to express myself and I feel like people can feel when things are genuine, you know? 

And sometimes the most genuine things don't even blow up, like I have no expectation. Like I have no idea what's gonna happen in my music career. The thing that makes me nervous and the thing I care about most, is just being vulnerable. It's very vulnerable. 

I could see that. What else competes for your creative expression, as you mentioned?

Music is multi-medium to me in a sense. I started my journey with art through visual art, and that's how I most expressed myself when I was growing up, and I wrote a lot. 

But I mainly painted and drew, and I thought that that's what I wanted to do with my life. Like when I was in high school, I always just painted and what I loved about painting so much was just the fact that I could listen to music while I did it. And that's the thing that I think that's hard for me with music and making music is that I have to turn my music off, you know? 

Oh, that's gotta be a subheader. I hate making music because I gotta turn off music while I make music. That's perfect.

I mean, it's funny because with painting, what attracted me so much to it and why it stuck as a practice – and it's weird because it's not really a practice that I have anymore. I think that's because music has kind of taken over as my main focus.

But as a practice, what I always loved about it was that I could control every aspect of it in some regard. I think that's what led me into production and wanting to be able to produce my music as well as write it. So, producing for me became the main thing that took all of my attention. I got really into hardware synthesizers and like really messing with the fine tuning of the sound and the textures of everything. It’s almost like synesthesia – things look a certain way when I hear them. Painting is just how I see all art now. It's really weird. I don't know how to explain that. But, I guess nothing really competes with music. I just think that music is so multifaceted. I guess writing competes with music. I write short stories, I write for school, a lot of essays, poems, I write songs, like the songwriting is a completely different craft than writing a poem, you know?

I love that. That's a good segue. First of all, I wanna just address the song, which I absolutely fell in love with: “Harder to Reach Than God.” So I guess that begs the question, have you reached God? 

How long did it take? What was the process in reaching God? 

Well, I think God is a very loaded word and I kind of think that's why I liked using it for the song because it is provocative, and because it means a different thing to everybody, you know? 

My feeling towards what God is, is more like a representation of omnipresence, which is an energy that I like, and it's the energy that the universe is made out of, all things are connected by omnipresence. the idea of “om” as a sonic representation, and language representation of omnipresence, like that's what I mean as God. So I think it's always available because we exist within it and it exists within us and it is us, it's everything, you know? So in a sense, of course, I've reached God, but that's what the song's about. “Harder to reach than god” is something I said to someone. because they were so hard to reach. It was someone I was seeing. And I was like, wow, why is it so hard to get a hold of this person, and I put them on this pedestal, but it's like, I'm the one that makes them special and in a sense, you make everybody special that you love – they become special to you because you see them through your own um perception. So the song “Harder to Reach Than God” is kind of a diss track, but it's also not. It’s like, oh, you're so hard to reach, but I can talk to God at any point. Like, at any point, I can go back to the most important source of everything. And I can realize that source at any point. So like, the thing that I'm looking for in another person is really just like a reflection of myself. Which is also like a reflection of all around. It's all one. 

I sense the cheekiness in it. It's beautiful, but I could sense the cheekiness in it. Diving into sort of the production and the full 360 of the musical output. Do you create a lot of music and then narrow down which to release? Or is it one of those things where it's like hard to sort of craft a song? 

What's your songwriting process? 

I think, well, for example, with “Harder to Reach Than God,” I made that song when I was living with my ex at the time, and I had this little corner of the room that I dedicated to my studio. It was literally the most ramshackle setup ever. There was a sliding, really old, wooden table that I had my computer on and my interface. I had barely enough room for that, and then I had a little synth rack and my guitar. 

You know, the thing that I really liked about that song and the thing that made that one interesting to me as far as the way that I would approach writing something now versus that one, is that it just kind of came from experimentation and all sort of landed well, immediately. I hung onto that song for a really long time and I never wanted to change it, and I'd always go through all these different versions of it, and I didn't like the different versions of it because I really thought that the the song itself is very innocent and I wanted it to continue to be innocent and to not be overproduced. I wanted it to be sparse, you know what I mean? There's some beats that I make where I'm like, fuck, this is an incredible beat and I love it so much, but I can't write something over it. Because that's the expression, it's just the music, you know? 

But then there’s also all these little tidbits I write down in my notes app or my journals, and lyrics end up sticking to different songs. Lou Reed said this thing in an interview that really stuck with me when I was a teenager. He was talking about how he would approach writing a poem versus writing a song. He said that when you hear music, it comes at you, so you have to be aggressive in the way that you say something, like there's not a lot of room for nuance. But, every song is different. I would say that more often than not, when it comes to the stuff that you would probably hear associated with my project as ‘Avalon,’ I’m writing it to convey a message or to get across some sort of perspective and not so much an aesthetic or palette. I also make lots of different types of music. I make ambient and I make synthy, minimal wave shit, and that's all stuff that I don't think would ever fit for this particular project.

Do you put out that other music under other monikers or is it a secret? 

I'm going to put out this ambient project at some point, but I don't know. I go back and forth between thinking if I should put it out anonymously or just put it out associated with my name. There’s a vanity to presenting as an individual artist. Like not a vanity, but it's like an unfortunate necessity that you have to present and be perceived as a figure and as a persona. So I actually have fun with it in that way, but as far as ambient, I think that there should be no ego in it. So I wouldn't really want my name to be associated with it, you know? 

I get that. Well, I’ve been asking for different perspectives on this, and I’d love your take – there are some amazing women producing their own music, making their own beats, but it’s a smaller amount than men. Do you have a take on that, given you don't seem to be afraid of doing that at all? Is it just that there's a gender wall, and men are mostly doing it and therefore it's harder to do it or why do you think that's the case? 

Well, I think production is a really interesting aspect of music because a great song can be written, and most of the song's greatness is owed to the person that wrote it, but then also producers interpret that song. Classic producers would interpret a song, for example, Carol King, you know, “So Far Away,” she wrote that song by herself. 

But then a producer interpreted it and was able to get a recording of it that did justice to the song, a very clean recording in the style of rock music at the time. I think nowadays with digital audio workstations and the accessibility of production, I think more people in general, regardless of sex, are finding an interest in it. But, I do think that, there's just some things that I feel like certain types of people are attracted to, and I don't think it has anything to do with gender. You have to be a real nerd to produce music, and men are not inherently nerdier than women are inherently nerdy. The reason I got into producing music was because I tried starting so many bands and I was always trying to make music with people around me because I didn't fully understand that I could produce things myself and I didn't need to rely on anybody. But to be honest with you, a lot of the people that I worked with on music when I was a kid and a teenager and I had bands with, they were guys and they all had these ulterior motives. And I'm not saying that it was like a threatening ulterior motive or something like that. It's just that, you know, I really got into producing to liberate myself from having to rely on anybody, also men, you know? 

But then as I've taken my work more seriously, there's limitations to what I can do. And it does kind of suck. There's not that much representation. I get lists of producers, especially now that I'm kind of finishing my record, I'm getting lists of producers to check out and see if I wanna work with, and I'm always kind of taken aback by the lack of women. I think music in general is kind of a boy's club, you know? There's so many incredible women in the music industry and women have hits, but the lack of female producers is wild. I think about it a lot, though. The reason that I even knew that I could produce my own music was because of Grimes. Her Visions record and her freedom with it… she's also a multi-medium artist, so I think she’d feel the same way that I feel about producing your own stuff, you know? I just wanted to have full control and be liberated and just be the one in control. 

Last couple of questions, hopefully they're a little more fun. If you were to cook a meal that needed to be completed in 10, 15 minutes. What would you make?

Probably chilaquiles. It's really fast. I mean, you gotta fry the fuck out of the tortillas, the tortillas have to be burnt almost, when you put the sauce on the top so it doesn’t get soggy, but it's a fast recipe, lot’s of protein. The macros are pretty good. 

What do you put in them?

Basically you would take corn tortillas, and cut them into little triangles, and then you just fry them for a while. Then you whisk some eggs, and then once the tortillas are pretty fried, you put the egg on top, cook the egg. And then, I use El Pato, it's a salsa brand, and they have one for chilaquiles. 

What's your go-to hot sauce, just cause that's always topical?

It's funny, I don't even wanna say this cause I don't even want this going on the record, but the hot sauce I have right now at the house is the Erewhon hot sauce. And it's gas. I hate to say that. It's really good. But other than that, I’m a Tapatío girl. 

Last question, at OnesToWatch, we love when artists put us onto stuff we maybe haven't heard before, stuff that's coming up. So are there any artists out there that are making an impression on you that you really dig, that you wanna share? 

Harsh Symmetry. I love him. His name is Julian. He makes really, really good, minimal wave, just like classic shit, and it's just so good. It's really stylish.  Also, Nourished by Time, another friend of mine, he’s incredible, just like a genius. Oh, I like Jane Remover too. 

Well, thank you so much for your time. 

Thank you!