On the Rise
Adelaida

“Some people would call [these things] habits, but to me I like to see life by putting on sacred lenses. So a habit can be a habit, or a habit can be a ritual,” she tells me. “To me, my habits are rituals. Some are more sacred than others, some are more grounded than others, and they may change.”

The nature ritual is newer for her, one that became part of her practice after returning home from a long stretch in London, where she attended Central Saint Martins and later began her solo career. She arrived at the art school determined to make a diversion from her previous path as a classical vocalist – she had sung in a professional choir for 10 years – and took up the study of moving images. “When I was 16, I basically got really mad at the classical music way of teaching when I quit. I was very much like: ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with this,’” she explains. “So then I went and I started writing poetry and studied fine arts.”

“To finish the degree, we did a [final] show, and I showed moving image pieces. For those pieces, I had made all the sound, and everyone who watched was like: ‘Oh, this is really good. Who made the sound?’ Everyone was noticing the sound. So, that was kind of like a seed implanted back towards music,” she continues.

She stayed on in London for another few years – tied there both by a romantic relationship and an artist’s grant from her university – a period of her life she says was pivotal to her artistry now. Time spent living in an old, Victorian house, for example, inspired the world and magic of her first album, Cántaro. The energy of the city, she says, was ultimately unmatchable for her budding creativity.

Eventually, the call of home was hard to ignore. The pandemic threw a wrench in her life, and being in London simply no longer made sense. “When I left Barcelona, I didn’t value it as I do now, because it was the only place I knew,” Adelaida explains. In high school, all she saw was a small city that had little to offer in comparison to its other European neighbors. But after years away, the creature comforts that once seemed safe and boring looked uniquely fulfilling and meaningful. Being close to nature, close to family, and enjoying a slower pace of life all nourished her art, she realized, rather than draining it of opportunity, as she once thought it might.

Moving back to home, she found herself ready to upend not just her personal life, but her creative one, too. “It gave blank canvas to actually change and stop with the fine arts thing and just focus on music,” she says. The seed that got planted at her graduation show had only grown stronger.

In 2021, based back in Spain, Adelaida wrote her first song. Barely a year later, her debut album had been released. That first dip back into her musical world was freeing, an exercise in following her own instincts to transcend rather than be constrained by the conventions of her training. “I actually always wanted to make music, but I thought I didn’t know how. In that moment, I decided that I actually could make music and that I set the rules on how music is made. Like, I don’t need a band to make music, you know?” she says of her early process.

“The first album was very impulsive, and it’s very soaked in my choir practice,” she continues. “A lot of the production choices are very influenced by things that happen in choirs and the layers of the voices and canons.”

Listening to Adelaida’s records – both her 2022 debut, Cántaro, and her latest record, last year’s Muérdago – feels like an encounter with the sublime. Her ephemeral vocals float across experimental electronica arrangements, coming off as much an immersive soundscape as a so-called piece of modern music. While she admittedly has leaned on her choir learnings to get her start in music, what she has gained as a solo artist has allowed her to step beyond those confines. In a choir, she tells me, everyone must sound similar. Textures must be uniform, and personal expression must be subdued for the harmony of the whole. But in the new world she’s built for herself, she gets to create in technicolor. “Even if I do have a lot of technique, expression goes above it.”

Indeed, Adelaida’s creative world is one of ecstasy and fantasy. Leaning heavily on natural and baroque imagery, layers of varied breath tones, bug and bird noises, and lushly stacked harmonies are all fair game for Adelaida, who seems as earnestly devoted to the childlike exploration of her craft as she is any one release or another. Her visuals juxtapose the grounded with the surreal. Muérdago’s album art, for example, features her face superimposed as the center of a flower, mouth agape as a frog peers out. In her videos, she writhes and roams through fields and gardens like a haunted pixie. In her live set – which she has taken to hallmark festivals such as Primavera Sound, Festival BAM, She Makes Noise, and, next week, Eurosonic Noorderslag – she performs in a shroud of smoke, backlit so as to appear almost as a shadow, making you question whether what you’re seeing is real or all just a dream. Each of these pieces – the set, the production, the visuals – are all pieces of what Adelaida is developing into a whole persona, one that finds its roots in the thoughtfulness and, yes, ritual of her life in Barcelona as well as the theatricality of her formal artistic training.

“The project is still growing. I say that I’m a baby musician. There’s a lot of growth ahead of me, and I’m still adapting to it,” she says with ease. “I think it’s good that the response has allowed the project to grow but also grow naturally. It’s not like from one extreme to the other. It’s allowing me to adapt and to see, you know, how I feel. For example, do I like to travel? I mean, I go alone on stage with only my sound technician. It’s all beautiful and it’s great, but it’s good that I get to adapt and understand my needs within the project.”

Understanding those needs will ultimately, she believes, be the highest possible service to her art. Whether sonic experimentation or daily ritual, Adelaida knows – rightly so – that the only way she will reach her highest artistic potential is by tapping in as deeply as possible to herself. She spends her days in the studio focusing on music as play, testing out different synthesizers, programs, and beats just to add new tools to her toolbox.

Music making for her, she says, is like poetry. In fact, as of late, she’s added a new ritual to her days. About a month ago she discovered the famed American poet Mary Oliver. As soon as she wakes each morning and before she falls asleep each night, she picks a poem from Oliver’s book Devotions at random and copies it out by hand. Her wall in her studio is now full of these little inscriptions, and she lives by them like testaments. “I’m just surrounded by words,” she says and smiles. “Look at this one,” she says excitedly, finding one in the centre of the pack that she says has been on repeat in her brain for days.

She turns her camera to show me and begins to read aloud Oliver’s “The World I Live In” in full:

I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
what’s wrong with Maybe?

You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
ever, possibly, see one.

This, Adelaida tells me, is the script she lives by. Finding that angel in her head is what she is striving for – and so far, succeeding at. A dual enlightenment both in art and in life. By all accounts.