Biography
Káryyn operates as a producer, singer, songwriter, and videographer whose practice spans classical, pop, and electronic spheres. Although her wide-ranging vocals and layered constructions recall Arca, Holly Herndon, and Björk, she asserted a singular presence soon after her opera Of Light first appeared in 2017. That drive intensified with her debut full-length, 2019’s The Quanta Series, which honored her Syrian and Armenian lineage while bridging the personal, scientific, and spiritual facets of her sound.
Born in Alabama to a Syrian-Armenian-American household, she relocated to Indiana at the age of one. Rural Midwestern life sharpened her inventiveness and ear, prompting her to start recording piano at seven. At ten she moved with her physician father to Los Angeles so he could serve a larger Armenian community. Each summer the family returned to Aleppo and Idlib, where relatives ran a hotel and restaurant until ISIS seized the city in 2011. The fortitude of her forebears—her great-grandmother having survived the early-twentieth-century Armenian Genocide and the subsequent march to Aleppo—led her to write Arabic-inflected folk songs as a teenager.
Leaving high school at sixteen, she entered Mills College in Oakland and studied with composer Pauline Oliveros. The music she produced then was bold and exploratory, merging jazz, punk, and electronics through tape loops, samples, and untamed vocals. Dissatisfaction lingered, and after two relatives died in Aleppo she relocated in late 2011 to her sister’s home in upstate New York to reckon with grief. For a year and a half she worked in seclusion, drawing and composing songs meant only for herself, before taking on commissioned vocal work that included the video game Beyond the Bounds.
She settled in Berlin in 2013, continuing to develop her own material alongside the opera Of Light, which was directed by Samantha Shay and supervised by Marina Abramovic. Following the April 2017 premiere, Björk expressed admiration for Káryyn’s music in interviews. By then Káryyn had returned to Los Angeles and was prepared to issue her own recordings. On her Antevasin label she released the long-gestating singles Quanta 1 in February 2017, Quanta 11 in June, and Quanta 1:11 in October, along with “Moving Masses,” a piece originally written for the opera.
Mute Records signed her in 2018 and issued the single Quanta 11:11 that November. The following February she released “Tilt,” which featured contributions from producer Darren J. Cunningham and his A.I. project Young Paint. Her debut album, The Quanta Series, gathering previously unreleased tracks with the earlier singles, appeared in March 2019.
Born in Alabama to a Syrian-Armenian-American household, she relocated to Indiana at the age of one. Rural Midwestern life sharpened her inventiveness and ear, prompting her to start recording piano at seven. At ten she moved with her physician father to Los Angeles so he could serve a larger Armenian community. Each summer the family returned to Aleppo and Idlib, where relatives ran a hotel and restaurant until ISIS seized the city in 2011. The fortitude of her forebears—her great-grandmother having survived the early-twentieth-century Armenian Genocide and the subsequent march to Aleppo—led her to write Arabic-inflected folk songs as a teenager.
Leaving high school at sixteen, she entered Mills College in Oakland and studied with composer Pauline Oliveros. The music she produced then was bold and exploratory, merging jazz, punk, and electronics through tape loops, samples, and untamed vocals. Dissatisfaction lingered, and after two relatives died in Aleppo she relocated in late 2011 to her sister’s home in upstate New York to reckon with grief. For a year and a half she worked in seclusion, drawing and composing songs meant only for herself, before taking on commissioned vocal work that included the video game Beyond the Bounds.
She settled in Berlin in 2013, continuing to develop her own material alongside the opera Of Light, which was directed by Samantha Shay and supervised by Marina Abramovic. Following the April 2017 premiere, Björk expressed admiration for Káryyn’s music in interviews. By then Káryyn had returned to Los Angeles and was prepared to issue her own recordings. On her Antevasin label she released the long-gestating singles Quanta 1 in February 2017, Quanta 11 in June, and Quanta 1:11 in October, along with “Moving Masses,” a piece originally written for the opera.
Mute Records signed her in 2018 and issued the single Quanta 11:11 that November. The following February she released “Tilt,” which featured contributions from producer Darren J. Cunningham and his A.I. project Young Paint. Her debut album, The Quanta Series, gathering previously unreleased tracks with the earlier singles, appeared in March 2019.
Albums
Singles
