Ehua: the power of finding your voice

There often comes a moment in time where an artist sheds their skin and lets the world in. A moment, a project, a time where they’ve been able to express their true self, in every sense of the word. This moment has come for the London-based, Italian artist Ehua who after a string of stand-out releases on labels such as Nervous Horizon and 3024, where she has impeccably showcased her approach to sound and rhythm, she now graces us with her debut album ‘Panta Rei’.

Due to be released on the 2nd May via 3024, ‘Panta Rei’ was produced over a year and a half. On the album, Ehua brings us into her world through beautifully crafted melodies and exploration of percussive and other analog and acoustic instruments whilst using her voice, as a lead, for the first time within her work. It’s an album of both celebration and confrontation, dealing with the ever-evolving journey of life with ‘Panta Rei’ translating to ‘everything flows’ in Ancient Greek. This flow is evident throughout the body of the work from the rhythm of the music to the process of Ehua finding her voice and the challenges that come with unlearning ways of dealing with emotions. On ‘Panta Rei’, Ehua is taking control of her narrative, both personally and artistically, by using the space that the long player format offers you to say and show more - no longer afraid of what people might see.

Accompanied by unique artwork created out of concrete by Jeroen Erosie, a booklet with background and photography and a short eponymous film, 'Panta Rei' represents an intricate 'gesamtkunstwerk'. An artist who always brings through those close to her, ‘Panta Rei’ is an exciting blend of various media with contributions from a range of artists that exist within Ehua’s orbit to bring her intimate world to life.

Hi Celine! We’re here today to talk about your stunning debut album, Panta Rei, which is coming out on 3024. Huge congratulations! An album is no easy feat, what has the process been like for you working on this project?

Thank you for having me. It's been a rollercoaster, emotionally and artistically speaking. Working on this record allowed me to learn and grow in ways I did not expect and I'm so glad I've done it. I want to show all the sides of what I do as a musician.

Yeah it’s such a huge body of work. Starting from the very beginning, how did the seed of an album come about? What was it that motivated you to start working on an LP?

So a fun fact about Ehua; she is a music producer and DJ. She is known for making music for the club, but she actually spends most of her evenings writing ballads and humming and singing to them. I'll stop talking in third person now haha. So I've never really thought of doing an album. It was more of a natural journey of me wanting to show all the sides of my artistry because I love club music. I love making club music. But I felt, especially in the last couple of years, that it had become a little bit of a cage for my self expression because every time I tried to branch out of it sonically, it wasn't received as I wanted to, at least in my opinion. So I just wanted to be in a musical space where I could say more, where I could show more and also change the narrative about what is said and the way I'm described as a musician, because I feel I'm described as a very percussive influenced or oriented musician while I love melodies and love making melodies. I've never really studied music theory, I've never learned to play an instrument, so I have a very instinctive approach to harmonies and melodies. I don’t know what I’m doing but I have to do everything by ear and it makes sense to me. It allows me to channel my emotions in ways that the percussive world doesn’t allow me to so I think that’s where the motivation comes from.

So a lot of your process is gut feeling, your intuition, is that how you know a track is done as well?

Definitely, it's all about intuition and about feeling things. There is something that happens to me when I'm in the zone and I just start humming and seeing things and thinking about very specific things in my life. Sometimes it's happy, sometimes it's really painful experiences, and I don't know everything just makes sense. It's like, yeah, this is what I'm going to talk about. This is what this song is for. This is why I'm creating this world. I see music, both club and more, as a way of journaling. I journal a lot. I love writing. Writing has always been a huge part of my artistic journey and doing that with music is just like adding another layer, like going deeper into my emotional state and really being able to be as raw and truthful to my feelings as possible.

It’s incredible to have an outlet like this to be able to process your emotions. The album has been a year and a half in the making, what has the overall creative process been like for you?

The process has been an incredible learning curve because I produced the album completely by myself in my home studio and that meant, first of all, filling in the gaps in terms of music theory knowledge in order to sustain the vocals and create the, let's say, harmonic context for my vocals to exist in. Then, of course, putting together songs that could make sense and could work, not just from a percussive perspective but also a more melodic perspective as well.

One of the main things was working on my voice and really finding my voice, because I've always wanted to be a singer. That’s the first thing that I remember as a child wanting to do in music and I've never believed I could do that, I've never believed that I was allowed to do that because I grew up in a very challenging environment. I grew up in Italy and it was very welcoming and very warm in a lot of senses but also you would never know when someone would come for you. I grew up with this sense of safety and unsafety that has made my flight or flight mode very, very easily triggered. So working on my voice and finding my voice has also been a way for me to hear myself speak up about things that I'm no longer willing to accept. There’s many different layers.

Another thing that I want to mention is my artist residency at Willem Twee Studios in Den Bosch in May last year, and that was such a huge part of making this album because I had the privilege to work with a lot of super rare instruments such as the ARP 2600 and the ARP 2500. There's only a bunch of these synthesizers in the world. I also used 1950s test measuring equipment for the album that I was able to use there. I was really able to record so many hours of music on these instruments and bring them back home to try and use them in the drafts that I had already made. It was just just an incredible little cherry on top because I'm so used to making music with non-instruments that to be able to work with these really rare, amazing instruments like that was incredible. I’m very happy with the process behind it.

It’s so beautiful to hear you talk about the process of finding your voice and being able to speak your truth within this album. Whilst we’re on the topic of the recording set up and the chance to use these instruments in your work, what was your home studio set up like?

My setup is quite simple: laptop, microphone, MIDI keyboard and my audio interface with access to a wide range of selected virtual instruments and other plug-ins. I also used a Lyra-8 organismic synthesizer that a friend lent to me. It is such a special machine to work with because it uses some principles of living organisms and it feels like it has its own will and personality. It is really hard to recreate the same patch twice, so every moment is unique and might not be achieved again. Of course, I also used a bunch of homemade instruments for the percussive elements such as stones and shakers. I also used flutes - they are a massive part of my understanding of music because it’s the only instrument I got to learn in school when I was a kid. I also recorded a massive pipe organ in the Netherlands which is most of the lower bass notes in the album. There’s a techno track called ‘Sola’ which means ‘alone’ in Italian and the whole bassline is made with the pipe organ I recorded at Willem Twee. This was all used alongside the jam recordings on the instruments mentioned above.

Going back to your voice, you sound incredible by the way, when I first listened to the album and heard you singing, I instantly thought of Tirzah. The rhythm of your voice really reminds me of her. Who were you looking to for inspiration when it came to singing and the use of voice specifically?

Thank you. First of all, I absolutely love Tirzah, she’s one of my favourite singers and writers - the ‘Devotion’ album is a masterpiece. To be honest, I didn't have a sonic reference for my singing in terms of what I wanted it to sound like, it was more about what can my voice do? I grew up with so much Soul and R&B, singing Destiny’s Child and Lauryn Hill all day long. That was a world I wanted my voice to exist in. Especially the Lauryn Hill MTV Unplugged 2.0 session, that performance changed my life. That rawness. She has a cold whilst she’s singing that and she doesn’t care, she just goes for it. That’s what I wanted to sound like but I didn’t look for that specific reference in terms of that’s the sound I want. It was more about working with a vocal coach to bring out the tones in my voice that would make sense in my sonic world.

I trained for a whole year with Anya Ysabella, she's an amazing performer, musician and vocal teacher. She really helped me to bring the best out of my tone and my timbre by understanding my range, playing with it and challenging it as I practiced a very wide selection of vocal tracks, from Adele to Ella Fitzgerald. I've also trained on YouTube a lot. I do jazz and blues training on YouTube. Generally, I'm an autodidact. I need to learn things by myself so I spent the last year and a half on YouTube trying to figure out how to do things.

There's also the reversing of my voice. When I started singing properly, it was approximately 2020 when I used to live in a warehouse with 13 other people in Hackney Wick. I was so shy about singing. I started doing it secretly because I was very afraid of people understanding my lyrics and so I would reverse the vocals. I created this work flow of singing forward and then reversing my vocal, using the vocals more as a sound designing tool rather than the actual lead. Eventually, the great Martyn, who I will forever be grateful to, pointed out that me reversing the vocal, even though it sounded beautiful, may have had some sort of psychological aspect to it that I may want to work on. That’s true. I'm scared of people understanding what I'm saying. So this process goes together with three years of therapy to really listen to myself, to find my voice and to not be scared anymore to be me. If people are going to come for me, bring it on, I’ve now got the tools to deal with that. With this work being done, I’ve decided to no longer reverse my vocals and sing forward. The reverse singing is now the backing vocals in most of the songs. There are two songs that are fully reversed because they were too painful to sing forward. I don’t say anything crazy but they’re about my family and things that make me cry, things that I find really hard to sing.

Was it the long player format that made you want to use your voice? Like why now versus your previous releases?

At the end of 2023 I went through a very hard period of my life because a member of the family had some very serious health issues and I was so scared to lose this person that nothing else mattered. I was in between gigs, some of the biggest gigs of my life, and taking a million flights to be with my family whilst also being this DJ, this entertainer, you know? And it was painful. I was songwriting a lot, journaling a lot during this period to try and keep it together. In the same period, Martyn approached me about doing a second EP for 3024. I was sending tracks to him but then mentioned that I had been working on this other material which was all singing in reverse at the time. I sent these tracks over to him which was most of the stuff that I had been working on. It was 18 tracks which you should never do. When you send demos to a label, it should be your best 3 or 4 tops. But Martyn came back and was like: “why don’t we do an album?” So I suggested the idea of doing an album of bangers and ballads and he loved it. The album started as me just facing things that made me so scared that the idea of being scared of singing in front of people suddenly felt ridiculous. There was a silver lining to this hard experience, an experience where there’s a lot of growth with the strength you need to face stuff. This is what ‘Panta Rei’ is about. Bringing with me the bad, the good, and everything else that makes me who I am today and the artist that I am today.

The title ‘Panta Rei’ is ancient Greek for ‘everything flows’, can we delve into this idea a bit more and how it relates to the themes behind the album?

When the album idea came about I always knew that it was going to be called Panta Rei because I was going to put everything into this record. Another thing that people probably don’t know about me is that I’m quite a geek. I studied ancient Latin and Greek as my major in high school. I was also studying philosophy, history, Italian and humanities in general. I came across this concept very early on in my life, around 15 years old, and during another life defining period of my life, post-pandemic, and it came to me whilst I was writing about stuff that happened as a way to reassure myself, like don’t worry silly, everything flows, panta rei. It became a mantra. Panta Rei to me is like a period of low tide, that’s how I describe it, everything is exposed and revealed. There are cracks, there are bumps, there are folds and they’re all beautiful. I’m not scared to show them and let people see them. They’re a part of me and make me who I am. It’s the most empowered I’ve ever felt and the most ready I’ve felt to show who I really am as a musician.

The theme and the songs are about my past, my future, my imaginary life, in the sense that there are things that never happened, there are things that have happened, and there are things that will happen, maybe. ‘Bricks’, for example, is about telling all the bullies in school that I don't hear them anymore and that I solemnly swear that I'm never going to hear them ever again. ‘NYC’ is about me getting psoriasis from stress but the only way of getting rid of that psoriasis was letting these feelings out and facing those things. They were making me sink. There’s ‘Candies’ that’s for my family. There’s a recording in the beginning that is me and my mum giving my little brother his first bath when he came back from hospital on the 12th February 1993. My brother has a twin that didn't survive, Julien, and he's not there with us in that moment but he's supposed to be. That goes back to everything flows, things that are there, things that are not, things that are only in your head.

There’s the happier side too. There’s a tribute to Corona in ‘Aria’ which is a Eurodance sounding song. Corona’s Rhythm Of The Night was the first tape that I was given by my dad at the age of 5 and she actually made that record with Italian producers. She was a massive role model for me as a kid. I didn’t have many role models that looked like me back then. Rita Watson is in the thank yous of the album because yes that’s my style, that’s what I want to sound like and that’s who I need to see in the mirror when I go out everyday.

This album is you in the purest sense of the word. There’s an accompanying short film that flows through the themes of Panta Rei, exploring rhythm, language, other people and movement from one place to another. Can we dig into each theme a bit deeper, your relationship with them and how you’ve embodied these within the music?

Panta Rei, the short film, is another way for me to explore the theme of transformation through conditioning. That transformation and conditioning happens in the film through four main elements: Rhythm, Language, Other People and Movement from A to B. I wanted to explore these themes visually as well because I love writing, I love making things and I wanted my first album to have a visual element to it as well. So these 4 themes are just going deeper into the themes of the album.

The first chapter is about what happens to you when music goes through your body. The second is about language, i.e. about how learning a foreign language affects you, and also on the constructive or destructive power of words. The 'Others' chapter looks at how we adapt to create identities that would fit or not in different contexts.

I’ve been in the UK for almost 16 years and I’m so different from who I was. I found my home in a different country that isn’t my home so how does moving from A to B changes and empower you, makes you who you are? All of this is expressed visually in the short film which I shot with two of my best friends from Pisa. They're super talented videographers, Niccolò Natali and Nikola Lorenzin behind the company Santabelva. Another person I want to mention is Federica Carlini, who's a floral designer, she did the set design - again she’s someone who’s been in my life for a very long time.

It’s quite different sonically from your previous releases, something that caters to both home listening experiences and dancefloor sensibility and rhythm. Were there any styles of music that you hadn’t explored yet on previous releases that you really wanted to channel on Panta Rei?

Definitely. I really wanted to show my more melodic side. There’s a whole piano song, ‘NYC’, that I wrote in about half an hour and I’ve never played piano in my life. I just put my hands on the keys and let them do their thing. I can’t play with two hands but I just layer the various parts. This is something that I do every day, on my own, and people have never heard that side of me so it was really important for me to work with melodies. The club world is great but it kind of relegates you to this “kick-snare-hi hat” dimension that for me is beautiful because the drums are my favourite instrument but my other favourite instrument is the double bass that you can hear plenty on the album. I also wanted to create new worlds, new softer layers to my music that I think have always been there but I didn’t want to worry about changing the production so that it could be for the club as well as home listening - even though everything flows, everything is very linked together.

Who were you looking to for inspiration production wise for this release?

So every time I start a song it’s a blank canvas. I hardly ever think about what I want it to sound like. But there are musicians that bring me to a state of mind that is very similar to the state I write in when I’m working these ballads - the flow state. Those are Duval Timothy, Rosie Lowe, the early Little Dragon, Tirzah, Mica Levi, Sam Gandel, Lauryn Hill - those for me are musicians that touch raw parts of me in terms of emotional expression, they have a musical vocabulary that speaks to the deepest parts of my soul and that’s what I want my songs to do.

It’s been 7 years since you made your release debut, what has the evolution of Ehua looked like since that first release? What have been some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned?

My evolution I think has been great. I’m very proud of all of the achievements that I’ve made as a DJ and producer. I’ve released on some of my favourite labels and I still have a lot on my list that I want to tick off. I think the greatest thing that I’ve learned is that I’ve held myself back a lot. I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who's been part of my journey so far, and who's been enabling my journey, but I feel that I've just scratched the surface. The biggest thing I've learned is that I have so much to learn about myself. I have no answers. This is just another milestone in my journey. Yes, it's my debut album but it's not the last. I feel that this is just the beginning in terms of new sounds and new avenues for me to explore as a musician. I am working on my first live show as well, which I'm so happy about. I'm learning so much. I’ll be accompanied by Ruben Sonnoli, who's a composer from Pisa who’s been a friend for around 20 years and he played the cello parts on the album.

How do you feel about the album now that it’s complete and about to be released?

I feel very proud, but also nervous because I don’t think people expect this from me. I think some people will be drawn to the club tracks and others to the ballads. I want to give both types of people a massive hug and I want to dance with those who want to dance with me and I want to go deep with those who want to go deep with me. I think if there is one thing that makes us all the same as humans, is feeling good things, bad things, suffering and, most importantly, sharing experiences. If we can do that through music, and if music can bring us closer, then we should definitely do it.

What do you hope people take away from Panta Rei?

I hope that people take away the feeling of wanting to express oneself and their experiences. This is just my truth through music in the most simple way possible. This is who I am, and I'm exactly like everybody else. I'm here. Look at me, hear me. I want to hear myself too and not feel that I've got anything to prove or anything to improve to please people. I say it is this with zero arrogance but with a sense of empowerment and knowledge of who I am and where I want to go as a person and as a musician.

‘Panta Rei’ by Ehua will be released on the 2nd May via 3024 - pre-order here.

Photo credit: Daniel Cohn