Hey everyone my name is Nilüfer Yanya, I’m going to play you a few new songs that I have been writing. I hope you like them. They are all on my new  album which is coming out next month, it’s called Painless.

I think it is a bit of both, like you mentioned my family is very passionate about music and art so I guess it makes total sense I wanted to pursue similar things in life. However, when it comes to writing music I think it is natural intuition. It is something I would have always regretted not doing if I did not. It is also where I find I can validate myself and be myself.

I have worked with my sister Molly Daniel on all the videos to date. We always feel  inspired by the location and its possibilities more than anything else. I think we work best when we are free to basically roam about with the cameras and costumes and characters we have created exploring new places. For Paradise we decided to revisit the Princess Islands off the Bosphorus in Istanbul. I had been once as a very young child so my memories of it were very blurry.

I like to think you can see that in the guitar lines and kind of weird lyrics. Also maybe in my singing, it is not very technical or typically expected?

I like to keep things vague and open to interpretation. For me it is about finding the balance between saying what I want to say but not giving away all the details. I would actually hate for people to see what each lyric actually means to me. That would be too much. Then again a lot of the time I write something that is not real or even true or has no meaning at all , for it only later to come true!

I think it sums up the darker side of the album without being too sad because it has this manic energy to it. The rest of the songs sound quite different, so in a way it does not represent the entire album but yes I think it does a good job at bringing the message across.

I’m definitely a million miles off mastering the Saz. The line I was playing was very simple and it took quite a few takes and layering to make it sound like I can actually play it (laughs). However I really enjoyed bringing it to the song and making it work. I love how it has a thinner but richer quality than guitar but also softer than a synth line. I think it jumps out in the song but not in a bad way.

I’m not always the most vocal person when it comes to my personal life. I find when I write things down it always helps me process them. I think also finding my voice metaphorically speaking has gone hand in hand with finding my actual singing voice. I have found a new place over the years where I can be as confident and as self assured as the person I feel that I am on the inside. I think I used to struggle with that when I was younger because even If I felt confident it would not really come across or translate very well and it felt like people would kind of treat me differently because of it. As a result, I also found I was attracting domineering people into my life. Over the years as I have found my voice in music things have definitely shifted for me in that respect. I find it much easier to be confident and my music kind of guides me through it.

I think there are a couple of reasons. The main reason being I was focussing a lot more on the lyrics and vocals as I shared a lot more of the writing. I was freed up to really zoom in on the vocals and lyrics. It was definitely kind of liberating as a process.

Yeah, I like that. It is a lot more hopeful than Stabilise even though it is essentially about the same thing: being stuck, power struggles and moving in circles. For me the chorus is about following your instinct and how they can lead us out of dark times.

I think the key thing was we did not force or rush ourselves into writing it , it just kind of happened. We collaborated a lot on the last album and I found myself drawn back to working with  him again because of the kind of therapeutic way we go about it. When all the songs started coming together last year it was immediately clear to me that they were the album. It was a really nice moment because I had not planned it that way, I mean I had definitely thought about asking him to produce my next album but I did not really have any material to work with at the time. I did not think we would write so well together. I think it helps we both really listen to each other and give each other the time and space to work.

Travelling is so surreal and wonderful.

I need to write more, I’d love to write a book one day or make a film. Also making more physical things.