Black Heart

Corina Cinkl has managed to get her name out there thanks to her collaborations with such labels as Aufnahme + Wiedergabe. This Austrian songstress and producer has recently started a new solo project Black Heart, something she labels as being Dark Pop. Catching up with Corina and her new project, I talk about her album All Is Lost as well as history and influences. Be sure to stream her new album All Is Lost as a soundtrack for the discussion below!

 Hi there Corina! Welcome to Brutal Resonance! Let's start off with simple stuff. Give us a little introduction to Black Heart, where you are from, and your favorite food. Corina:  My first instrument was my voice, followed by a short and unhappy love affair with the guitar, which led directly into a much happier romance with synths and drum machines that is ongoing to this day. I do not have a classically trained background, I am completely self-taught, and that meant learning from a diverse range of people along the way. So my inspiration came from many different sources. The first singers that inspired me were all female folk singers. I remember being drawn in by the intensity and the raw power of the vocal performances. The strength of the emotions and the unabashed way they manifested them through singing resonated deeply. 
Corina:  Artists like Björk, Tori Amos and Diamanda Galas have been influences throughout most of my life. Their music embodies qualities I strive for in my own artistic expression: honesty, intensity, relentlessness. As strong, powerful and loud, almost archetypal women they were also points of reference for me when I grew up and delved into the question of what it means to be female both on a personal and a socio-cultural level. 
Corina:  In the last three years I was in two different bands. With Ghost Actor we did kind of a vocal dark ambient style, had a few releases with Berlin-based-label aufnahme + wiedergabe before calling it quits for good last year. I had already started working with french-swiss industrial-folk collective Black Egg, where we also released a full length with aufnahme + wiedergabe and another via Spanish-french label Unknown Pleasures Records. I am not part of Black Egg anymore but I am sure they will continue as a collective with ever changing contributors for singing, writing, producing like I did for the last two albums.  
Corina:  I started writing music for the project more than two years ago. The moment the project was born was when I decided on the name Black Heart in mid-2015 and everything started to fall into place after that. 


Corina:  I released 'Alekto' earlier this year, a single track written and produced for a digital non-profit-compilation by Repartiseraren, a small Swedish webzine/label, and I have a few songs that were written for Black Heart that are not featured on All Is Lost. I might release them in the future, but the tracks on the record feel very complete to me as they are, and I cannot predict what the next record will look like in terms of its themes and general feel. So maybe these few songs will stay unreleased and only come to life when I perform them at shows. 
Corina:  Writing music generally comes easy to me. I feel blessed to have quite an open channel in terms of inspiration. With Black Heart that wasn’t different. Once I had started with the first song, which was a different version of the track 'Shadows', song after song came to me. I try not to intellectualize the writing process too much and just go with it and create a space that is free of judgement and ego. Of course, that is an ideal and most of the time I fail to achieve this, but I have found that as long as I strive towards it, it works well for me and allows the magick to happen. 
Corina:  I have always been very interested in mythology from all kinds of times and places, and for this album figures from Greek mythology inspired me deeply. The main themes of the album are loss and longing, and the pain and despair this brings. One of the myths that resonates with that on an almost primal level is that of Echo & Narcissus. With its psychological and spiritual depth, it is one of the most fascinating and most received stories of Greek mythology. Here we have two figures, archetypes that embody polarities of the self, in its blindness and its muteness. The failure to relate to another in a meaningful way is ultimately the failure to relate to oneself. It is the space of violence, of emptiness, of extinction. I wanted to explore the emotional experience of it through words and music.   
Corina:  I didn’t specifically set out to write music to fit the restrictions of any genre. The labeling came after the writing. It was more of a process of understanding it all backwards, kind of like sitting yourself down and asking, "Ok, what happened here musically?" Dark Pop is the label that I found fits best with what is going on within the music, the atmosphere it creates and it’s the darker color it gives to the timeless themes of the songs.  
Corina:  Inspiration for the lyrics came from intense examination of its main themes. Personal experiences always play a role when I write music or lyrics, but never in a direct way. Rather, they serve as a starting point for further exploration. Before I started writing for All Is Lost, I was in a place where I was asking questions about love and loss, about the self and the other and how we find ourselves in situations of extreme longing and pain and I went on a quest to find answers. Some of those answers found their way into the songs. I tend to look upon the end product, the lyrics as little treasures I bring back from those dives into the unknown. I might not understand them immediately in all their depths and shades, but they always have meaning and they always belong.  


Corina:  Creating art and putting it out there for others to consume is a deeply ambivalent experience for me always. On the one hand I absolutely revel in making music and connecting with others through that. It is the most blissful joy and I am head over heels in love with it. On the other hand, like many other artists I know, I experience extreme bouts of self-doubt about the worth of my work and the quality of my abilities. So when I finish a melody, a song, an album it is never a question of either finding it amazing or finding fault with it. It is more of a process of personal evolution, every time, like being on a rollercoaster of joy and pain, going full speed, relentlessly and continuously challenging me to go with the flow of it. 
Corina:  I just played my first full show in my hometown to celebrate the album release and I would love to play more shows across Europe in the months to come, starting this September.  
Corina:  Starting off with a video for the track 'Shadows' (coming end of June/beginning of July), I will be releasing more videos for the album in collaboration with Portuguese visual artist Pedro Inock. His artistic perspectives on the concepts of time and space go really well with mine and he is a multi-faceted, wondrously talented and truly interesting person and I am very happy to be working with him on parts of the visual angle of the Black Heart project. 
Corina:  Thank you for asking interesting questions! And for your interest in my music!

ORDER YOUR COPY OF ALL IS LOST HERE.