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LEYA’s music sounds like a dream that teeters into nightmare and becomes lucid, leaving you in a sleepy trance where reality and fiction are indiscernible. Violinist and vocalist Adam Markiewicz and harpist Marilu Donovan combine their musical abilities to create uneasy, detuned lullabies that coo melodic, drawn-out anti-harmonies, dragged through an avant-garde pop filter. Late last year, the New York-based duo released I Forget Everything, a six-song follow-up to 2022’s Eyeline, building on their eerie, hauntingly gorgeous reverberative sound, but this time around in a more pared-down, simplified fashion.
WW caught up with the band from their hotel room in Iowa, ahead of their show in Portland at Holocene later this month.
WW: How’s the tour going so far?
Marilu Donovan: It’s been so fun! We’re both feeling a little bit under the weather, though. It’d be more fun if we weren’t sick and having to just go to bed, but we’re dealing with it.
Oh no!
Donovan: It happens on tour. I think it’s our bodies saying like, whoa, this is happening.”
Adam Markiewicz: It’s better that it happens at the beginning so we get it out of the way.
Donovan: [Laughs and coughs in agreement] We’re gonna have even more fun once we’re better.
Let’s get into it: What are your musical backgrounds? I assume you both are classically trained?
Donovan: We’re both orchestra nerds. I actually did an undergrad and a master’s degree in orchestral harp. I was kind of always like a weird outlier in that world. My MFA is more in composition and the sound-art process. We’re both very much “one foot in, one foot out” of that world.
Markiewicz: My background is a little less rigorous than Marilu’s. I’m especially someone who never really fit into that world of strings and all that particularly well. We technically have this formal background, but I feel like we’re moving further and further away from it. But Marilu’s the one with all the chops, I’m kind of more…[laughs] rough around the edges with technique and stuff.
Gotcha.
Donovan: You learn something, and then you get a chance to unlearn it eventually. I’m not really interested in virtuosic classical music playing, and that’s what all of my background is.
Markiewicz: I love to unlearn things.
Your lyrics are often very abstract, and almost heard as instrumental notes as opposed to defined lyrics, as if they were an indecipherable poem. What’s your songwriting process like?
Markiewicz: I’m pretty inspired by people in history, such as Joni Mitchell or the Cocteau Twins, who have kind of composed songs using vowels and sounds and colors. As a singer, I really like the luxuriance of pure tones and vowels specifically, so when I write, I envision the vocals and melodies as sounds along the way, and the meaning of the song makes itself known over time.
Yeah, your music reminds me of opera a bit, in that the words are almost meant to be experienced sonically as ambient sounds—unless you understand Italian.
Markiewicz: I think opera’s kind of funny; it’s amazing and also really boring. Opera is like life itself, like watching it, you cry and laugh and fall asleep at some point. But, yeah, I think that difficult to understand, yet accessible sound is something we do too.
You both have taken on some pretty interesting assignments, such as scoring music for fashion shows, performing alongside Eartheater at the Museum of Modern Art, and soundtracking Brooke Candy’s directorial debut on Pornhub. How do these unique projects find you?
Donovan: Well, Eartheater, or Alex is her name, is a very old friend of ours, and we’ve been touring with her and playing on her records for years and years. And then Brooke actually found us through Instagram when she was casting for her film I Love You. We had just released our first single in 2018, called “Sister.” It was the first song and music video we ever released, and her creative director saw it and DM’d us asking if we’d score her porn, and we literally thought it was a joke.
Markiewicz: For the most part, we just make music with our friends, and it so happens that we have a lot of friends doing cool, interesting things.
You’ve worked with some pretty amazing musicians, such as Okay Kaya, Julie Byrne, and Actress. Do you have a dream collaborator? What about a dream project?
Donovan: Oh my God, we have so many [laughs].
Markiewicz: Let’s try to manifest a couple of them. Like Lana—
Donovan: Lana Del Rey, yeah.
Markiewicz: She’s been up there in the sky for a long time; I don’t know if we’ll ever connect to Lana. I think we have one common connection to her, but I don’t know if we’ll ever talk to her.
Donovan: I would love to play some sort of stripped-down string and harp piece for Billie Eilish. It would be so weird and left field, but working on one of her breathy piano songs would be a dream for me.
Ooh yeah, like one of her slower ballads. Maybe hit up her brother?
[Both laugh]
Markiewicz: Yeah [laughs], we’ll just DM Finneas!
SEE IT: LEYA plays at Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison St., holocene.org. 7 pm Wednesday, April 30. $23.