Today we’d like to introduce you to Maia (Cristina Fuentes).
Maia, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I started going to shows regularly when I was 14 at all ages clubs and clubs that didn’t look at IDs. I was the very naive looking goth girl you’d see playing Galaga between the bands to avoid eye contact with creeps. I would tell the old punks I liked Skinny Puppy and Wax Trax and they would immediately adopt me.
I began playing out as a musician in Charlotte, North Carolina when I was 17 with kids toys and keyboards. By my early 20’s, I was asked if I wanted to be the vocalist for my friends’ hardcore band Choke Their Rivers With Our Dead and that was the beginning of my addiction to playing shows and touring.
With that band, I toured the east coast heavily, learned how to play keys live with a band and book shows, recorded an album and a couple of 7″s, and learned how to travel dirt cheap on the floor of a van relying on the kindness, or sometimes neglect, of strangers.
All this time I had a deep passion for uncategorizable electronic music that I thought no one else knew about, later to find out it was called “breakcore” for lack of a better word. The kind of white labels and small presses you’d find in the “Miscellaneous” bin at independent record stores. Now that it was the mid-2000’s most small artists had websites built on friends servers and were uploading larger music files online for free. I discovered a DJ by the name of Baseck. He was this wild and crazy talented kid living in Milwaukee, and I contacted him wanting to do some artwork for his mixes.
Long story short, two weeks after talking, he bought me a plane ticket to the midwest, we started our band Sonic Death Rabbit the first day we met, overstayed our welcome on other people’s floors, and decided to drive to LA where he was from with pretty much nothing but 14 crates of records weighing down his honda civic, some clothes, spray paint and stencils, and my Korg MS-2000B synthesizer I bought on credit with no intent on paying back.
Once in LA, we played dozens if not hundreds of shows from 2004 to 2006 in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Belgium, Spain, and Holland, and gained a loyal following in the electronic underground. We met cEvin Key from Skinny Puppy and Download through our friend Otto Von Schirach who is our Miami brother-from-a-different-
From 2006 to 2008, Baseck and I continued to wreck our health and played together and separately as I went back and forth from NC to LA while we worked on our album. In 2009 I moved back to LA permanently and cEvin released a Baseck and Sonic Death Rabbit split full length called “Creatures” as part of his record label Subconscious Communications box set.
By 2008, I wanted to be completely in control of the production process of making electronic music and so did Baseck, so I started my first solo project Wet Mango. Just like SDR, it began as a project where all the music was made on Gameboys using LSDJ with synths layered on top, but this time it was completely my own. After a couple of years of that, I was gifted a Macbook and Logic Pro from some friends, and I started learning multi-track recording and mixing on my own. I expanded my use of hardware and software as the project progressed, eventually leaving the Gameboys behind as I felt I had exhausted the medium for myself.The project is still ongoing and evolving, but mostly on the back burner after 2016 which is a pretty long run. I’ve done excessive amounts of shows nationally and internationally with Wet Mango have but never have gotten my shit together enough to put out a proper EP, just one I’m not totally proud of on Bandcamp and some tour demos and tracks on compilations.
In 2015, I finally started to go to therapy way later than I should have. The partying wasn’t working anymore, and the self-medication with booze, weed, and sex had become blindingly apparent. I met a friend named Neenah Cosmayah, also a fellow female electronic producer in the underground electronic scene known as Joy Through Noise. She invited me to a shamanic circle at the beach lead by her teacher Whiteeagle from Peru, and that led me to go with her to Sedona, AZ for a weekend retreat.
That’s when I woke up. Something had to change. I was jeopardizing mine and my partner’s happiness. I was wasting my life chasing “fun,” and although I had already done a lot in the animal welfare sector, I wanted to do something more than what I was doing with my life.
In 2016, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was teetering towards schizophrenia with hallucinations caused by THC and my mental illness mixing (Yes, it’s a real thing that can happen). So by the recommendation of my psychologist, I went sober and got on medication. I’ve been sober ever since. I changed a lot. The facade of who I thought I was started to melt away and what I was left with was the truth or at least the beginning of it. This was when Tree Skeleton emerged, my current and much more serious music project composed of singing, analog and digital synthesizers, and acoustic and electronic drums.
It began as a survival tool, I had obsessive thoughts and a lot of addictive emotional and physical habits to peel off of myself. Singing gave me a way to pray for help from the universe, express, create, distract, and pretty much blood-let my pain. Over the next couple of years, I started to refine my studio skills while I looked for new audiences to play to. I got more used to being sober, led a calmer life, got off of my meds, narrowed down and made new friends, and dedicated myself to my spirituality.
By 2017, Tree Skeleton became not only poetic expressions of pain but also bittersweet glimpses of hope, like a crack of light through a doorway. For the first time, I became more used to creating music not from anger, depression, or manic fun, but from beautiful self-empowerment. My studio became my temple, literally and energetically, and I finally finished and self-released the gothy singer-songwriter album of my teenage dreams “Healing Through Shadow and Light.”
Now in 2019, I have expanded Tree Skeleton to not only be my personal story in music, but a spiritual tool to expand my consciousness and share healing with others. I’ve started playing shows outside of the unmarked buildings of the LA underground (although that will always be my home) and have been playing and coordinating spiritually based healing and music festivals, as well as creating oracle-style intuitive based sound healing music.
This year, I am planning a tour with fellow synthy light-goth veteran Cindergarden, and I’m super excited about that. She’s been a huge supporter of my music and shows for the last 15 years. I also plan to release another full-length album as Tree Skeleton.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Tree Skeleton was a rough start in that it’s always been easy for me to act strong and aggressive in the past. That used to be my favorite defense mechanism. I’ve had to learn how to be vulnerable for my own healing, and that’s much harder than fighting. I also wanted to improve my production, singing, songwriting, and productions quality. I decided to do this at a time when I was the most isolated from other artists in my entire life when I was living in Sacramento from 2016 to 2018. I still have a lot to learn but am happy with how much I have.
I wanted to be proud of my album and feel like I was giving my talents the respect and dedication they deserve. I don’t think it will ever be “easy” because if it’s easy, I’m probably not challenging myself. There are certainly times where things come out naturally, and tracks are made in a night. Most songs come to me in pieces in my dreams, so I often have templates and intentions to work with when I start the writing process. I cherish those fluid streams of creative consciousness.
My biggest challenge has been finding my new audience. I have definitely always been a “musician’s musician” and again am making music that is not easy to put in this box or that, at least entirely. Is it too positive and spiritual for the goth scene? Is it too heavy on the shadow work for the new age scene? I don’t know entirely yet, and I think the answer may be both yes, and no. My former following with electronic music has not totally transferred over and I’m not surprised by that. It’s very different.
Also, the way people share and listen to music has changed for the positive and negative, including people listening to music on crappier speakers like phones and laptops. That’s frustrating for me. Playlists and podcasts are where it’s at and I’m trying to figure out where to stitch my own web within that circuit with a limited budget. The online marketing world for solo artists while having many more options and outlets now has also become increasingly more complicated and expensive. The age of free online advertising of personal projects and small businesses is definitely over for the most part as far as I know. Maybe I am wrong? It’s harder to get music heard without paying as everyone and their mom is a recording artist now thanks to home studio technology (which I think is wonderful).
So that’s why I am hitting the road again soon, starting from scratch really. Seeing what opportunities chance and fate send my way. Face to face is where many counter-culture music fans fall in love with new artists and where I make the most lasting connections personally. I also would love to find a label, but again, that’s not my forte so we’ll have to see how that works out.
Tree Skeleton – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Firstly, competition has no place in the sincerity of my artistry. That’s capitalism’s brainwashed idea as far as I am concerned. I believe all good art encourages other art. I am only trying to be the best me and that’s it. My competition is myself.
Tree Skeleton is deceivingly simple aesthetically. It’s sneaky music in that it’s often quiet, takes advantage of the space between frequencies, but when you listen to it, definitely is full of sound. Recording wise, it’s definitely laying in your bed with the lights off and a good set of headphones kind of music. That or quit time sipping tea in front of a good speaker. I am quite proud of that. The album I just put out feels like you’re in the bedroom with me but still has a professional studio quality to it as well. It’s a good balance for me as over compression and production is not what I wanted.
My most intimate moments with albums are the ones I can remember having to really pay attention to and/or had to surrender to completely as I am a big fan of ambient, Avante Garde, and experimental music. I also make sure to make the words and messages behind the songs very clear even if the subject is vague. I want to inspire listeners to seek introspection and not just entertainment and distraction. It’s also music that may be difficult to date as it has nostalgic elements and current ones as well. For those who are of a certain age and background, it’s obviously influenced by This Mortal Coil and other gothic and goth associated artists like The The, but because of some of the beats, recording style, synths, and general aesthetic feel, it’s not a replication of the past either.
I think what has always helped me stand out as an artist is that I don’t go into making music trying to sound like something or someone. It’s always organic and unique even if my influences come out which is totally natural and welcomed.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
My goals have evolved over the years and have become much less about how popular I am and how much I “entertain” people, but rather about how proud I am of what I have made. In the past, I could have a hundred or more people clapping for me, but if I felt like I wasn’t living up to my integrity as an artist and individual, it didn’t make me happy. I’d go home from shows where people would shower me with compliments feeling like crap. I want to be happy with myself as an artist. That will make me feel successful.
Of course, it never feels good to me to fall on deaf ears either. I’m not trying to sound like I’m too cool for school. I do have as part of my own personal definition of success to be exposed to a wide audience of listeners who are open to and enjoy my music. An example of this is that I had on option in the past to play for a band I knew was going to be very successful in its genre, but chose not to. This because it wasn’t what I really needed and wanted to express as an artist. The other musicians were phenomenal, and it would have been a tremendous learning opportunity, and the music itself was awesome too, but I didn’t want to end up at bars with a bunch of metal bros around all the time and being referred to as the “female background keyboard player.” I wanted respect.
I wanted autonomy as well. Success for me is being able to make my music with the resources I need and desire at the best possible quality I can for where I am at on my path. This also includes being able to reach an audience that also desires what I am creating no matter what the size or demographic. I also value being respected by my creative peers and colleagues and being known at large for truly being myself without compromise.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.maiahealing.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/vesselofcreation
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/treeskeleton/
- Other: https://song.link/healing
Image Credit:
Cristina Fuentes, Martin Vazquez, JessicaJoy Dispoto, Jake Yoshida
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