Courtesy Tauri
Pop artist Tauri, aka Nicole Orlowski, comes to us via Staten Island and Los Angeles, the latter of which involved a stint at Cal Arts and a degree in music technology. The goal, she says, was to be able to preside over every aspect of music production, though while at school, she became obsessed with live sound production. Tauri calls Santa Fe home now, and continues making music as often as possible. And though the pandemic has kept her from stages, you can find Tauri jamz on pretty much any streaming service. The jamz are so good, in fact, we had to get to know her a little better. (Alex De Vore)
We could sit here all day likening your music to various pop names, but is there a specific sound you’re chasing?
I have always been obsessed with pop music, since I was a kid—like, pop pop; radio music. But I’ve always wanted more out of it—weirder sounds, more interesting production, some sort of experimental aspects that kind of make each song their own thing versus just sounding like radio pop. I’ve always gravitated toward the weirder pop, like, take Katy Perry, the song “Dark Horse,” or Britney Spears with “Toxic.” Those are very pop songs, but they stand out against the catalogue of radio pop because they have some sort of weird production to them.
I’m just kind of playing around with different sounds, and I think one thing I’ve found is that I don’t really set out to write a specific kind of song. I’m very inspired by different types of music, but when it comes to sitting down and writing, I just do whatever sounds good. I’ll hear a sound and get inspired by that, I just jump right in. And I make it a point to do it every day, and it doesn’t have to be the same thing every day, writing music, but whether it’s working on vocals, recording, playing with production, I just want to be doing something every day, constantly.
There are maybe lyric or mini-melody moments I’ll have randomly, but that’s what phone memos are for. When I sit down to write something and my mind is blank, I flip through the voice memos. Something I’ve been working on is not being critical about every single detail. I can get really wrapped up in vocals and hyper-fixate on every single word.
You also do live sound work. Does having well-rounded audio know-how affect how you create?
I’m not sure, because live sound feels very…you’re working with the same things, you’re EQing things, mixing them, but live sound feels quick and dirty. I mean, ideally not that dirty, but it’s fast-paced and you’re focusing on a lot of issues that pop up. In recording, if anybody saw what my EQ graph looks like, they’d go insane. Recording engineers can very precisely edit things, go over it again and again. In live sound, how it went is how it went, so it’s a little different when you’re creating music because you do have the opportunity to go back and make it perfect. I think when I’ve performed shows, it’s come in handy because I understand what the engineer wants, but you also don’t want [your record] to sound like a robot created it, there has to be some humanness to it.
Say I’m looking to become a new Tauri mega-fan. Where do you hope people will start?
All of Tauri’s songs are completely different, and that just comes with a lot of experimenting, but I would say a good place to start would be the newest song, which is “In the Dark.” I would also say a very ‘true’ Tauri song is “Time 2 Kill,” just because of the breakdown in the middle—that’s also an incredibly fun song to play live, because I get to scream in the middle. Those two. One is softer, and the other has random moments. We’re working on a couple songs right now, and hopefully we’ll try to get those finished up and maybe do some shows, but with the pandemic it hasn’t felt very safe to do it, so we’re just going to see how it looks down the line.
