About

Briana Marela is a Peruvian American composer, vocalist, and performing artist based out of Oakland, CA. Her recent music centers the voice, technology embodied through gesture and enhanced objects. Her gestural and lyrical song performances draw from elements of both experimental electronic music and vocal driven pop music. Using the visual coding language MaxMSP and machine learning, she is able to make custom tools to create compositions with varying fixed elements that transition into moments of improvisation.

She is a 2024 Montalvo Lucas Arts Music and Composition fellow as well as an AAUW Career Development Grant recipient. She is currently a spatial sound artist in residence at Audium in San Francisco. She has toured with artists such as Jenny Hval, Waxahatchee, Emel Mathlouthi and has toured across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Europe. She has played such festivals as Sasquatch, Decibel, and Green Man (UK). She has been interviewed by Vogue, Interview Magazine, and Billboard. In 2018 she received a commission from Radiolab's More Perfect Podcast to write a song about the 4th amendment for their album celebrating the constitutional amendments. 

Her most recent albums include the independently released You Are A Wave, an experimental electronic music album, marked by the grief of the sudden passing of her father in April 2020, with a focus on voice and Buchla 100. As well as a collaborative album of poetry/spoken word lyrics, noise, and ambient electronic textures with Oakland artist Sally Decker, titled Small Tremble in Slow Motion, released by Surface World in June 2022. This collaboration with Decker was the result of a remote residency with the organization Qubit in NYC. This audio visual collaboration was an exploration of the expansive possibilities of being present with oneself within experiences of deep emotional contraction such as grief and loss.