@Gabrielasvision
Writer/Photographer

AnAkA’s Angel Music: Alchemizing Spiritual Experiences into Indigenous Wisdom and Artistic Resistance

AnAkA is evolving her musical experimentation with sounds inspired by her spiritual experiences as a reclamation of Indigenous wisdom and artistic resistance to colonization.

AnAkA is a multimedia storyteller archiving global Indigenous cultures through film, photography, dance, healing arts, and more recently, the production of Angel Music which has resulted in Angel Music EP and Angel Music Remix EP. These projects alchemize sounds she’s experienced in meditative journeys to and from the spiritual dimension.

On a rainy night in Los Angeles, AnAkA and her creative team head to an underground parking structure to dance and film the visuals she conceptualized for the song, “BLU NOISE (LVDF REMIX)”.

A cool gray basement envelops them and lightly flooded cement floors catch a consistent drip of rainwater, creating a muted, reflective backdrop for the electric blue in her braids, layered jean outfit and backup dancer’s masks.

“Healing is seen as a soft and sensual thing. Angel Music is my way of getting into the void and expressing myself freely without fear.” – AnAkA

Occasionally sticking her tongue out and rolling her eyes back, she flows with backup dancers LVDF and Justin Conte for an interpretive representation of what she describes to be a cathartic release inspired by both metal music and Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and change.

“I’m gonna bring out this uncomfortability that I’ve been told to contain as a woman,” she says. “Through this song’s production, I release that containment.”

Under an upbringing highly influenced by the American educational climate that systemically denies the multifaceted history and presence of Native American culture, she reached a turning point and committed her musical career to centering the essence of her Indigenous Native American, Celtic, and West African lineages.

 “Angel Music is the source energy of my ancestry culminated into mantras that affirm the wisdom that has been severed by colonization,” she says over a phone interview, while traveling in London to perform this intention throughout Europe. “Colonization is a regime that suppresses our true emotions.”

“This music is an offering for people to use as a tool to tap into their memory and can be used as meditation music and ancestral frequency medicine regardless of cultural identity,” she says. 

Enticing body movement, emotional release, and a deeper awareness through meditative music is amongst her many approaches to healing, whilst also being an herbalist and documentarian of present-day Indigenous rituals. 

“Healing is seen as a soft and sensual thing,” she reflects, “Angel Music is my way of getting into the void and expressing myself freely without fear.”

Story written by @gabrielasvision