Inside The Bubble: Exclusive Interview With Realma

We have found a very special talent in London that goes by the stage name Realma. Realma is a wildly developing phenomenon for lots of reasons, one being the theatrical background she possesses. A self-described sorceress at the heart of a songwriter, the music she makes is incredible. It has a jazz matazz rapture to it that is compelling. The singer just released a new single called “Wandering” that gave us the good willies. The song has a video that gives a nod to Realm’s love of film and how it can be paired with music. We caught up with Realma for a chat about her career and her music style. Check out the interview below.

The Artist

Bubblingbox: A name means a lot to an artist, how did you come up with the name Realma?

Realma: A little over a year ago, during the initial Covid-19 lockdown, I conceptualized an audiovisual project with the main idea that each song will embody a different music style with a visual narrative set in a new story world. Along these lines, the name ‘Realma’, being a punny wordplay on ‘realms’, came about. The witchy aspects of this persona really tied in all the disparate worlds I had planned. And so, the songs symbolically became like the crystals of a sorceress that help us gaze into various story realms. On top of this, I grew up watching series like Charmed and in recent years I was more and more interested in the Wicca culture too. With the pandemic going on, I really wanted a little distance from reality and I believe the name and the whole concept capture that dreaminess and yearning – perfect for all lost souls out there.

Bubblingbox: Where are you from? What made you want to be a musician?

Realma: Being half-Chinese and half-Serbian, I spent my life in both countries, surrounded by folkloric forms of music from these distinct cultural environments while growing up. My family likes to say I was very reactive to any rhythms and melodies since my earliest moments of childhood, and so, they’ve signed me up to study classical violin at the age of 7, and I’ve had training in Western counterpoint, harmony, musical form, composition and orchestration since my teenage years. Though at home, my parents always played popular music ranging from pop, country, rock, jazz, etc. With that said, music has always been something intuitive in my life and I guess being a musician was just a natural thing for me. However, interestingly, I didn’t have actual plans to go into the music industry until just last year really. I had a lot of other artistic paths in front of me, including my film and drama studies, then my interests in dance and painting. Maybe that is why only now with Realma, where I could unify these other artistic aspects, is when I decided to tackle the path of the music industry.

Bubblingbox: Tell us about your style, what inspired your approach to your own aesthetic?

Realma: With the diverse background that I’ve mentioned, which encompasses a spectrum of folkloric, classical, and popular music, my taste is quite eclectic. When I write music, this translates into an exploration of all the musical topoi that I’ve discovered in my life and fell in love with, the result being polystylistic music. However, I tend to have a very experimental edge and I like to always question certain musical devices from every genre. Therefore, rather than relying on pastiche, I tend to challenge everything with a kind of postmodern irony to put my own signature onto things. Then, I also have what I would describe as mild synesthesia, so for me, any piece of music is really a seed of a visual narrative too, and something I experience. I tend to compose through an image, a sensation, a feeling, and when producing, I tend to mold sounds into an atmosphere for me to sense first. Then, there is also this idea of chronotopic narration I like to use – how a piece of art tells a story through its space-time relations, which is how I tend to develop things further. Finally, I also studied film and drama as my BA, and the aspects of film soundtrack are undeniably there in my music.

The Music

Bubblingbox: We know about two singles out so far, “A Hint Of Pink” and “Wandering” why is this song important?

Realma: Yes, it’s only my second major single, however, ‘Wandering’ is really striking in its theatricality and the way it explores that fine line between love and obsession through the lens of film noir. In fact, ‘Wandering’ is what I call my love letter to this bygone cinematic era, which I am a huge fan of. But regardless of fitting into this style, the song also contains modern whimsy and charm in certain elements. This resulted from my peculiar re-examination of the classic pop ballad form, whereby I seem to have discovered a side of it that contains bitter irony of obsessive relationships. All this has been translated into dramatic orchestration, with components from jazz music serving as tributes to the past transposed into the present. This single also marks another of my fruitful collaborations with the wonderful animator and 3D artist, Mihajlo Dragaš, who brought the song to life in an extremely creative way with his unique visual stamp, which I believe even added a new dimension to the whole theme of the music.

Bubblingbox: The video for “Wandering” channels a “Sin City” vibe, can you tell us how you conceived the animation and explain the people that worked on the project?

Realma: Of course. So, as I mentioned earlier, the beginnings of animations I really owe to my synesthesia. For ‘Wandering’, when I started playing the basic theme on the piano, I was surrounded by an image of a woman in red, smoking and contemplating a relationship, while sitting in a room filled with shadows cast from the window blinds. I then spoke to Andreea Vijulan and Lia Stefanescu, who I studied with at the University of Kent in my film modules, and we sketched a concept story. Having watched quite a few noir-ish and suspense films together during our studies, we came to an idea of using the duality in the timeline to create a suspenseful narration, as well as the duplicity of the blond female character within the story, probably inspired by Hitchcock’s Vertigo and how the doppelganger dynamic between Madelaine and Judy played out there. Thereby, we had the twist of the video planned out very early on. From there, I got in touch with the award-winning animator Mihajlo Dragaš who I collaborate with and since Frank Miller already had an influence on Mihajlo’s drawing path and attitude towards graphic design, he was instantly reminded of the author’s graphic novel and film Sin City. Through 3D animation and experimenting with the visual possibilities of the software, Mihajlo managed to achieve a similar look, which is graphically powerful and in the service of the song itself. After a couple of months, the video was finished, and the atmosphere of mystery and tension of the music has been brought to life.

Watch the official video for “Wandering” below.

Bubblingbox: How did the pandemic affect you as a musician?

Realma: Honestly and weirdly enough, if not for the pandemic, I don’t think I would have gone into the music industry at all and Realma may not have come to existence. During my last year of university in the UK, I actually wanted to go into acting instead and was vigorously preparing for MA auditions at drama schools. However, with the pandemic, as I had a traumatic police mishandling upon arrival back to Serbia and with an exaggerated self-isolation period of 28 days, the music seemed to be the only thing helping me escape my dark, scarily lonesome circumstances at the time.  In a peculiar way, music was like an imaginary friend that sang into my ears and told me tales of other realms – this is when the idea of Realma formed and started taking shape. So although the pandemic had a tragic effect in the form of PTSD on my personal life, at the same time it brought me this project and it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve worked on, especially in terms of collaborating with many amazing artists, some of whom are from my small hometown, Bor in Serbia.

The Everything Else

Bubblingbox: What are your short-term goals in terms of your career?

Realma: At the moment I am really focused on finding my audience one step at a time and working on new content. In terms of the audience, I’d love to get the first thousand followers on all platforms by the end of the year, but it’s not crucial. Some of the comments and reactions in my DMs and on my profiles/pages are already plenty more than I’d expected – I am so amazed by all the love and support I’ve received so far. In terms of the content, we are working on some live videos and we will start filming behind-the-scenes videos too to make the project more personal to the audience. Next, I am really excited about the comic versions of the first two realms being in the work as we’re currently looking to extend their stories. We would love to also do mini video games and I’d already planned some soundtrack ideas. Finally, I have started producing the next two songs and we are also thinking about creating our own podcast. So yeah, a lot is going on, haha.

Bubblingbox: Are you performing live? Where would people most likely see you perform?

Realma: I actually have yet to have a live performance under the alias of Realma, especially due to the pandemic, unless we count a recent online music festival in Serbia called Femix Fest by Project Femix, a platform that supports female artists in the country, where alongside the animated music video, they also showed a video of my solo performance of Wandering. And to be really honest, I wasn’t even thinking much of live performances due to Covid-19, focusing instead on creating multimedia audiovisual content for the project. However, it’s something that is increasingly on my mind, which is why we are planning to have live performance sessions of each song recorded in interesting locations. For example, for ‘Wandering’ we made a live session performance video at the underground club ‘Dim’ in Belgrade with a talented young jazz ensemble and string quartet, and I had so much fun writing this arrangement. Next, we will be recording a live version of the first song ‘A Hint of Pink’ at the historical site called Felix Romuliana in July and I’ve made a very different arrangement of the song. From there we plan to do two more videos of the next two songs and hopefully, I’ll slowly build up to full performances next year with more music out.

Bubblingbox: Who inspires you musically?

Realma: I have to say Annie Clark a.k.a. St. Vincent really inspired me to embrace my alternative side as an independent musician. Similarly, the legendary David Bowie too in his reinvention and visual presentation. In terms of the musical material itself, I take inspiration from a broad range of sources, including film and video game soundtracks, classical music, and similar, so I often look at scores by Beethoven, Ravel, Bernard Herrmann, and many other musicians that may not seem to be a direct influence.

Bubblingbox: What advice would you give to any young musicians just getting into the business? What have you learned?

Realma: I would say don’t do anything the easier way. Really research everything you’re doing, because it will benefit you in the long run. I think more and more, the industry is becoming a numbers game – especially so for independent artists, and it’s good to be aware that there are many people out there waiting to take advantage of those less informed. My recent experience as someone new to the industry felt a lot like a maze with quite a few traps to avoid. I also saw this interesting thread on Reddit a while ago, where the state of the music industry was compared to the selling of shovels during the California gold rush in the mid-1800s. Back when there was this craze to dig gold, that whole industry was thriving because economies were set up to exploit this desire to get rich quickly. Except in music, it’s maybe not even so much the desire to get rich quick, but more than anything, get as many streams as quickly as possible. Though this sounds defeating, keep it one step at a time, keep connecting with people in a sincere and honest way and keep working on your craft. This really is the most beautiful aspect of music, that we can build communities around what we do and that there is always something out there to learn. So even if the growth is slow, don’t get discouraged – it’s the journey, not the destination.

Bubblingbox: What do you want your fans to know about you?

Realma: Hmm… Interesting question. I think at the moment there is a bit of that aura of mystery around who Realma is, that I really enjoy, haha. I am also a very private person, so I tend to keep a lot of things to myself. But really, I say it all through music, so my songs really contain my whole inner world in the most intimate way. It’s truly a gateway to my soul, for those curious, haha. In a less abstract manner, I’m really enjoying this whole process and journey with Realma and I’m really amazed by all the support – I can’t wait to unravel more exciting things we’ve planned. And maybe this is the place to reveal that we are starting to plant Easter eggs in the animations (there are two in ‘Wandering’ from the first single ‘A Hint of Pink’) and in fact, there is going to be a converging point for this whole project. So stay tuned! And I’d like to conclude by saying thank you for this opportunity, I’ve really enjoyed this interview 🙂

We really enjoyed it too. We appreciate the insightful, in-depth answers to our questions. We like to offer musicians a chance to express themselves directly so that fans can get a better understanding of how the music is made. We would like to thank Realma and her team for helping to facilitate the interview. We wish Realma the very best in all future endeavors.