Today we’d like to introduce you to Mars Avila.
Hi Mars, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I think we’re all pretty much lost at sea in middle school. At least, that was certainly the case for me in Oakland, CA around 2008. There are so many unfortunate experiences a teenager can undergo: trouble making friends, one’s developing sexuality, uncontrollable acne, not owning any black clothing despite identifying as emo. I was one of the lucky few who got to experience all of these things at once.
Being young and gay, the only respite I had from any of this was pop music, and my best efforts to recreate it on my laptop in GarageBand. I lifted dance drums, synth riffs, and vocals from pop remixes and warped them into handmade beats, DJing private dance parties alone in my room. Later, in college, I met my creative partner, Adrian Jade Matias-Bell. It’s one of those friendships so close, you can remember each other’s childhood memories. It was only a couple of months before we decided to make music together under the name Deathless Gods with Human Bods. Our first album, 123456789, explored personality through the lens of the Enneagram, and our second, Inheritance, followed members of a family through their explorations of their identities.
It wasn’t until late 2018, during the making of Inheritance, that I realized I was a woman. When I tell people about it, the response is often “when did you know?” or “could you tell as a child?” For me, it was one of those things that lived right under the surface of me, not so much as a truth that I suppressed, but as a lens for self-reflection I never quite realized I had. The moment came with the realization that I deserved to give myself happiness, a thought really simple to think but almost impossible to know. Looking back since then, I see that transitioning really isn’t different from other life transitions or acts of self-creation. My body, my self, is fluid, a “body of water,” as Adrian puts it. It flows from brooks into deep lakes, through life’s delta, finally into the sea. It’s all the same water, just in different shapes.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The main thing to watch out for is getting in your head. As a creator, no one is a fiercer advocate for you than yourself. I had a lot of work to do with myself before I could let anyone hear what I made. I was so blinded by the little imperfections, I let them keep me from bringing innumerable projects into the world. I’m sitting on so many fully finished songs. Hopefully, you all can hear them soon.
Can you give our readers some background on your music?
It’s such a fascinating time in music: in the past decade there’s been an amazing influx of young producers learning how to produce on DAWs like Garageband and Audacity. It’s the democratization of song-making. Now that the market is so saturated with so many super talented producers, it’s a push in the direction of specialization. We’re definitely seeing hyper specific, micro-genre music popping up. Personally, I am enamored with genre. Stylization and pastiche are ever present elements in the media that shapes me. I feel like my production style is a love letter to cinema and camp. When I produce, I construct these sound environments, like little movie sets of music, weaving them out of vintage audio samples and virtual synths. I think of it like a diorama, built from diegetic and non-diegetic sounds.
As I’m producing, I’m envisioning them as emotion mapped onto spatiality. And at this point, Adrian will populate these musical scenes with characters, people who yearn and fear and grow through his lyrics. In fact, all of our songs are written from these fictional POVs, each song a different episode from their life. Adrian’s lyrical style is influenced by his love of folk music and his background in creative writing. The result of our combined efforts are elaborate, expansive dance ballads about murder, mambo, and identity fraud.
What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
LA is famously a city obsessed with self-creation. I can’t help but wonder if my own journey through self-creation became inevitable when I moved here five years ago. I think that’s what I love about LA, that the culture here is less interested in the being than it is in the becoming. It nurtures the plurality of who we are, who we just were, and who we’re hoping to be. However, with such a focus on changing and growing, LA could stand to care more about the past—lineages, histories, and memories. There’s so much we’re divorced from, living here in a postindustrial, American city, from our own histories to that of this occupied Tongva land. To meaningfully move forward and grow, we need to acknowledge and hold space for the past.
Contact Info:
- Website: deathlessgods.bandcamp.com
- Instagram: @updatesfrommars
- Other: marsovula.bandcamp.com
Image Credits
Miguel Isaias Maldonado, Lynn Torres
