Despite remaining anonymous since the duo’s inception, sym fera’s aura has transcended the boundaries of the studio, capturing the intrigue of a dedicated fanbase and garnering critical acclaim. All whilst shrouded in secrecy and delivering compositions of atmospheric electronic rock music.
The duo’s most popular single, “11/8”, has gathered significant traction, standing as a thought-provoking exploration of the intricate ways in which social media distorts our minds, cultures, a concept that resonates deeply in the digital age. The song also featured in hit show, Ozark, further adding to the group’s burgeoning cult status. Now the, duo reimagine, remould and reinivograte the standout single delivering an enigmatic set of remixes.
Listen to the EP…
Read the interview…
Hey guys! Your duo is very interesting in that both of you are anonymous. Do you feel your music challenges and subverts notions of celebrity and fame in the music industry?
Oh, definitely not, I don’t think we’re trying to challenge or subvert anything. And I’m sure nobody will believe this, but it’s not some deliberate attempt at being mysterious or provocative. We’re not trying to get anyone’s attention by pretending we don’t want attention. It was more just a personal choice. We were burnt out on overexposure and selling our lives to invisible voyeurs all the time. And at the same time, like everyone else, we’re addicted to it, addicted to reaching out and trying to connect to strangers. I don’t just mean as artists, I mean just as normal people, in our everyday lives. Seems like everyone I know is kind of their own little PR team in crisis mode, no matter what they do for a living, so much so that it’s trite to criticize it at this point. And we all kind of know this para-social stuff is bad for our brains, and yet we all dive into the deep end of the digital pool anyway. We’re not exceptions, we’re tangled up in the same wires as everybody else. This project was just a weird way we could pretend to have control for a little while, create an entity outside of ourselves just the way we want it, and live inside it temporarily. Instead of taking yet more photos of ourselves and showing them to the world, as though having a face were an accomplishment, we decided to try just not having faces for a while.
Of course, we still both feel compelled to “make art in public,” like so many others. So, we contradict ourselves. We push our music out there through an opaque curtain with our eyes closed, we wear masks made of our open diaries. See-me-but-don’t-see-me. Making this stuff is, hopefully, a way to make peace with being this sort of hypocrite.
If any of that translates to some sort of big “statement”, I guess we would just say that the way we feel is probably the way a lot of people feel. Does anyone not feel overexposed and paranoid? When’s the last time you didn’t feel like you were being surveilled in some indirect way? Paranoia is practically the theme of our generation.
I think we’ve said this before publicly, but we know that it is a little ironic to hold people at arm’s length while simultaneously releasing intimate and personal lyrics and music. We’re making music about ideas that we would usually disclose only in therapy, and withholding the surface level stuff everybody usually gets to see like our names, our faces, our clothing. We like to say, we’re turning ourselves inside out like feeding starfish, exposing our guts rather than our faces.
How do you feel this contributes to cultivating a fanbase? Is it harder or easier? Or do you find fans are intrigued by the anonymity?
If they’re intrigued by us being anonymous, we hope they don’t think that’s the reason we did it. Like we said, it has nothing to do with “art,” or deliberately manufactured intrigue, or some pretentious marketing ploy. Others have done this sort of thing, but I think mostly for different reasons.
I think it’s been harder to get it out there, especially on social media, without asking all our friends and followers and the like to promote it as much as we could have. But it’s also been much more gratifying when it works out unexpectedly. It feels more pure, and when good things started happening for us it gave us a sense of self-actualization. We controlled for the variable of identity in everything we did, even when it came to getting signed by a label and getting synced to television, so the only thing people encountered from us was the music itself, and the videos. If people liked us or hated us, we knew it was only because of the material, not our haircuts, our social media presences, or our relationships. So, it was a great way to test whether our stuff was any good in a vacuum. Even though it was difficult to get it out there like this, it’s been the most satisfying experience of our lives in the end. It feels worth it.
How has the Los Angeles scene inspired your music?
Probably in much the same way as the biblical hell inspired Dante’s Inferno – it terrifies and fascinates us.
It’s our hometown, and we’ve both got such a love/hate relationship with it. It is full of real, normal, decent people. But it can also be a cesspool of horror and sociopathy, and for that reason it’s kind of fascinating to explore. Not to mention this city is all about the importance of a manufactured, grandiose identity as product to be bid upon. So, we created a manufactured identity that rejects manufactured identities. I guess we’re trying to have our cake and eat it, too. If you overthink too long about this stuff, you’ll discover its masks all the way down, so I guess one more mask can’t hurt.
Your music featured on the hit show, Ozark. How do you find your music fits with the show?
That one was a bucket list item, definitely. It’s a dream sync, the kind of thing we didn’t even have the audacity to hope for. That the people in charge of that thought our stuff was good enough to include was the greatest compliment I can think of. More flattering than an award or an accolade, it meant that someone with power had to believe that our work was good enough to stick on top of their work. It was an honour to be a teeny tiny part of it.
You’ve just dropped your latest single “no/bodies”. Can you delve into the narratives and themes behind the track?
That song is about the fallout from a bad breakup. There’s this type of grief that can make your head feel like a house that’s haunted by the memories of a person that’s still alive. It’s a dark topic, but we wanted to make it beautiful as well. A few people have told us that they find that song sexy, which is funny, because I don’t remember feeling very sexy when I was deeply depressed about a breakup. But we’ll take it. If our lane is a “dystopian sad bastard sex music,” I think I can live with that.
Listen to the track…
What can fans expect from you both for the rest of the year?
A lot more. We’ve been too precious and slow to release, so we’re looking to change that and just start putting tons of material out there. We’ve got another single, and possibly two more music videos coming, and then a full-length album of stuff.
We also did a super random, unexpected collaboration with an artist that is much, much more successful than we are, who reached out and told us they just liked our stuff and wanted to be a part of it. So that was surprising but encouraging. It felt nice that that came about not through networking, but just through an individual liking our stuff and wanting to make something for its own sake. That song’s been recorded and is in the mixing stage.
We’re happy to be poking our heads out of the closet now that we’re satisfied with the way things went. Our experiment with this thing went better than we expected, and now we just want to see how far we can take it without one hand tied behind our back. And, of course, we’re excited to be able to play live soon without collecting everyone’s phones in bags every time and hiding our faces with lighting rigs. Even though it was amazing to see an entire audience forced to live in the present moment for once.