INTERVIEW: ORIANA GIDI

Mexican composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Oriana Gidi steps confidently into her own sonic universe with iloteca, a richly textured second album that sits somewhere between experimental pop, cinematic composition and adventurous songwriting. Entirely self-produced, the record feels less like a collection of conventional songs and more like a living soundscape, shaped by curiosity, instinct and a willingness to follow an idea wherever it leads.

Gidi’s multidisciplinary background is central to the album’s appeal. With experience spanning film, television, theatre and contemporary art, she approaches songwriting with a composer’s ear, allowing field recordings, intricate percussion, layered harmonies and playful melodic structures to coexist naturally. Opening with ‘Frozen Spiderwebs’, the album immediately establishes its delicate but detailed character, with piano and vocal lines intertwining to create something intimate yet expansive.

With 'iloteca', Gidi turns experimentation into a language of its own, delivering a thoughtful, playful and distinctly personal record that confirms her as an artist equally comfortable inside and beyond the traditional boundaries of pop.

We sat down with Oriana to learn all about the new record, the story behind it and much, much more here at FLEX!

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Hey Oriana, welcome to FLEX! How are you doing? 

Doing great, thanks! Excited for this conversation. 

We absolutely love 'iloteca', could you sum the album up in three words for our readers? 

Thank you so much! I would go with: whimsical, cinematic and experimental 

‘iloteca’ feels like a record built around curiosity and creative freedom. What did you want to give yourself permission to explore on this album that you hadn’t explored before? 

Luckily, I’ve always had a very free approach to music. In the sense that I don’t impose any musical constraints on myself when I’m writing or producing, I just go with whatever excites me and brings me joy in that moment, which is why my music has always been fairly eclectic. With “iloteca”, I let go of even more constraints, such as traditional verse-chorus song structures. I also think my film scoring work quietly informed this album and made me gravitate towards more cinematic production choices. The main thing is that I didn’t overly intellectualize anything, I just let myself be guided by intuition and confidently driven by that sense of freedom, curiosity and playfulness. 

What does being completely self-produced change about the way you approach an album? 

A word of caution about this. You may end up with an album with 1) strange jazzy songs about a guy who gambled his face away, 2) maximalist theatrical songs about spiders and trees, 3) percussion-driven songs about a little recycled boy, 4) and a fully instrumental piece for harp and flute. All because no one’s there to stop you! 

No but truly, I just have so much fun producing and sometimes I have such a clear vision for what I want that it only makes sense to produce it myself. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t have lots of collaborators on this album! I brought on my friend Alejandro Yelin, who also mixed the album, to co-produce one song with me. I also had an amazing mastering engineer, Juan García, and I had lots of amazing musicians who all enriched “iloteca” tremendously. 

With ‘Blue Bin Boy’, you create this fascinating balance between minimalist percussion, layered harmonies and intricate melodic movement. How important is contrast to your songwriting and production? 

It’s definitely important, I think it keeps things interesting and helps create a more immersive experience for the listener. For “Blue Bin Boy” it was fairly intuitive because the whole song is just two elements: percussion and voice, which are inherently contrasting. It’s something I thought more about with “For Better”, where I wrote this sort of interlude with lots of stuff happening. The chorus goes “for better or for worse, I feel it all” so I really wanted that interlude to be a space for the listener to feel it all, and in order to do that, it needed to be full of contrasting elements and textures that were evocative of all kinds of emotions. 

You’ve worked extensively in film scoring, including co-scoring the HBO documentary MUXES. How does writing for an image differ from writing music that has to exist entirely on its own?

It’s very different in the sense that with film scoring, you’re at the service of a story and the director’s vision for it. You’re there to enhance an audience’s experience of the film, and facilitate or deepen an emotional connection to it. With my own music, every lyrical, harmonic and stylistic choice is purely at the service of my imagination and amusement; it doesn’t have to fulfil any specific role. It’s just me thinking and feeling in song form and hoping other people can derive meaning from it. 

What draws you towards experimentation with rhythm, structure and musical expectation? 

Fun, basically. The process of creating through free, ludic experimentation has always been at the core of how I make music, and for me, it’s what makes it fascinating, interesting, and deeply enjoyable. 

There’s a real sense of playfulness running through iloteca, even when the compositions become technically intricate. How important is joy to your creative process? 

It’s probably the most important thing for me! Before I even think about sharing it with other people, this music is for me. So whatever I’m making needs to excite me, move me and keep me inspired. Sometimes the joy comes from a feeling of release, or catharsis, sometimes it comes from a sense of artistic fulfilment, and oftentimes it comes from plain old silliness. I remember recording vocals for Frozen Spiderwebs and having to stop mid take several times because I kept laughing at the absurdity of my own lyrics. Alone in my room like a crazy person. I absolutely love those moments and cherish when they happen with just me or with collaborators along the way. 

And finally, what has making 'iloteca' taught you about yourself as an artist that you didn’t know when you began the record? 

I think it taught me to assign less value to labels. People have often struggled to categorize my music in terms of genres, clear-cut influences, etc. And with the tiktokification of music, the expectation to have your “elevator pitch” and an all-around easy to digest version of yourself ready to go, I thought I needed to label myself for people to care about my music. But with “iloteca” I’ve realized that people do care more about how something makes them feel than what they can call it. This album is the most intuitive, authentic music I’ve ever made, it just free-flowed out of my heart. So I don’t care if it doesn’t fit 100% into any genre, in fact, I like not having a single answer to the question “who do you sound like?”. So I’ll just keep making music that comes from that truthful place, and the labels will have to catch up.

Stream 'iloteca' now: