Today we’d like to introduce you to MoAnanda. Them and their team share their story with us below:
Singer-songwriter Moana Avvenenti was born and raised in Saint Martin in the Caribbean and moved to the US in 2009; first to study, then to work. In 2018, she taught as voice faculty for a semester at SAM, a music college in India, where she met producer/multi-instrumentalist/audio engineer Ananda Dhar-James.
The following year, Moana and Ananda got a contract together as the acoustic duo on the cruise ship Celebrity Infinity in the Mediterranean. Both of their name would not fit on the guest program, so they become MoAnanda!
Ananda moved to Los Angeles later in 2019 to study at Musicians’ Institute, and the duo started writing music. Since then, they scored a couple of ads for Renault Twingo and a toothpaste in Japan.
Now engaged, MoAnanda is working on an album.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
The first struggle to making this work was distance. We came up with the idea of working on a cruise ship as a way to meet in the middle. We filmed a demo and found an agent.
That was also a great way to save some money for Ananda to continue his education. He already had a Bachelor’s in Physics, and a diploma in Guitar Performance, so Audio Engineering made sense to bridge the two fields.
The pandemic hit about 2 months into his supposedly very hands-on studies. He had no access to a studio for a while, which delayed his course and made his work much harder.
Living in the US is expensive, so those times were definitely challenging financially. We shared a studio apartment to reduce costs and had to rearrange the space to have a studio area where he could work. That quickly became chaotic once he got a work permit and we both started teaching music online from the same room.
Eventually, though, he started engineering at Larrabee Studios, one of the top studios in the industry, and we moved into a bigger space. That in itself became a challenge as well, as we now had very full schedules and less time to dedicate to our music together. We’re only now finally getting used to this rhythm and are making time to write.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
We started as live musicians. We transitioned into writing music for “sync” (music in TV, films, ads, etc,) which first took the shape of releasing re-imagined covers of famous songs. More recently, we started just making our own originals. Our sound is ever-changing. From hard-hitting guitar riffs with loud, belty vocals; to gentle, singer-songwriter tunes; to attitude-driven electronic pop songs. We’re pretty proud of having made music for ads that received millions of views. Some of our combined credits include: Lucifer (Netflix,) Riverdale (The CW,) Disney Parks, Domino’s, Renault, The Sims (EA Games,) the NFL, Nissan, Arknights, Good Trouble (Hulu/FreeForm) Siesta Key (MTV,) etc. We also regularly do Work-For-Hires for our clients’ singing, production, and mixing needs.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
With AI becoming more and more human-like, we wonder how much creativity will continue to be valued. We predict that technology will play an ever-growing part in the creation of music and art in general, hopefully in a way that makes it more accessible to more people. People still seem to be enjoying live shows, so we don’t think those are going anywhere.
Many artists invested in home studio setups during the pandemic, and at first, we wondered if that was going to catapult us into a world where actual recording studios and audio engineers were redundant. But we realized that people crave human interaction and the technical and creative guidance that engineers and producers bring.
The one part we are disappointed about, though, is that there is a big trend of writing songs based on a reference, which is usually another song that did well. And so everything ends up sounding the same. It’s discouraging artists from experimenting because there might not be an outlet to promote their art if it’s too different from the rest. A good example of that is playlists. Songs in a playlist need to be similar enough that they make sense. A truly ground-breaking work of art would stand out too much to fit, and songwriters are complaining about having to write with the playlists in mind, or they don’t get any listeners.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.moanaa.com/moananda
- Instagram: instagram.com/moanandamusic/
- Facebook: facebook.com/moanandamusic/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkSLKCa-vcNC3idPySLcG-g
- Other: https://linktr.ee/moananda
Image Credits
Joshua Tree photos by Aman Venkateswaran
