This Junto Profile is part of an ongoing series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.
What’s your name? Coraline Ada Ehmke. I also record under the name Sudre’s Violin and, previously, A Little Fire Scarecrow.
Where are you located? I live in Chicago — technically, across the street from Chicago — which is a city full of music and art and culture. No place feels like home exactly, but I’ve been here longer than anywhere else so I guess this counts.
I came here when my daughter was just over a year old, and I was just getting started in my tech career. After she was born, I had to make a transition from living in Austin, Texas, where I was primarily playing live in bands, to being a parent in Chicago with only occasional time for music, now spent recording in brief and scattered bits of free time. I went from thinking about songs to thinking about albums, and really started taking my time with things. That’s how I spent a lot of years.
Now my daughter is grown, but the recording albums habit has stuck. That said, I’ve got a new project going now — called The Disaster Society — which will be performance-based. So I’ll have a chance to contribute back to some of that music and art and culture that I love so much here.
What is your musical activity? Today, I would call what I do a studio practice. It took some time for me to come to terms with considering my own work “art”, but once that happened I started taking it more seriously and pursuing music with more purpose and discipline. I have blocks on my calendar twice a week for dedicated, no-interruption studio time, on top of whatever free time I can find. The Disquiet Junto has been great for keeping me on a schedule, too.
I tend to organize my musical activities into different projects, each with its own constraints and context. Sudre’s Violin is the container for my (mainly) instrumental postpunk stuff, produced to create the illusion of a consistent musical lineup with consistent instrumentation. There’s the Drone Day project, “Gangs of Ireland”, which is a five-year sort of thing inspired by an interview segment on Irish TV in the early ’80s. And there’s always some sort of one-off project going as well.
What is one good musical habit? In my music (and in my life I guess) I like to leave plenty of room for serendipity. I regularly browse Wikipedia for rabbit holes, either technical or philosophical or metaphorical, and write down what I find. I also keep ambidextrous spiral notebooks, writing in one direction for specific projects, and abstract techniques or ideas in the other.
What are your online locations? I’m on Bluesky (bsky.app/profile/coralineada.bsky.social) for professional stuff, and Mastodon (ruby.social/@CoralineAda) for personal and music stuff. Everything I do goes up on Soundcloud (soundcloud.com/coralineada), and I highlight the interesting bits on nosignal.zone. During the quarantine years I streamed live from studio on twitch, so there are a bunch of production videos up on YouTube at youtube.com/@livemusicproductionwithcor3585.
What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? My voice has always been problematic for me. I just can’t sound the way I want to sound and it really upsets me sometimes. I used to try to sing anyway, but I found that even if I didn’t hate it in the moment, I would hate it two months later when I heard it again. I had to come to terms with the fact that I just do not have a viable singing voice, and that led me to focus on instrumental music.
But one alternative that I’ve turned to in some pieces, including several of the Disquiet Junto pieces, is using AI-driven text-to-speech to create custom spoken vocals. I like what I’ve been able to accomplish with them just fine, but. But.
Then came Disquiet #0681, in which we were invited to turn a walk or run into something dramatic, like a scene in a thriller. I wanted to avoid the trope of a woman alone being followed at night, so I went with a story about the vengeful ghost of a hitchhiker. For story as well as aesthetic reasons, I needed the hitchhiker to be singing “Walkin’ After Midnight” to herself as she stalked along the highway looking for her next victim. I didn’t really think about it. I put on headphones, grabbed a mic, and played a part. I sang without making it about singing. I wasn’t trying to sing well or sound a certain way; I was just playing a part.
That was pretty transformative, and it’s inspiring me to find other ways to incorporate my natural voice into my work.
The track is here, and it would be criminal to listen without headphones:
I think many people reading this Q&A will register interest in what you describe as time “blocks” for studio work. Can you talk in some detail about how much time you block, and how you structure your studio time? First of all, I should confess that I live a life that combines precarity with flexibility, which is a fancy way of saying that I live paycheck-to-paycheck but do fascinating and diverse work that, for the most part, does not require working business hours.
Although I can work pretty much whenever or wherever, I keep “office hours” for interacting with people in a business context. But on Thursdays and Fridays I front-load my workdays, mark BUSY on my calendar, and spend from 2pm to 6pm doing work in the studio. That’s my studio time, it happens every week, and I take it very seriously.
And it can be anything in my home studio: from organizing cables, to noodling on the piano, to recording a song for the next album. It doesn’t matter, as long as I’m engaged with the context and space.
I’ve felt tremendous growth in my understanding, capabilities, and creative output since adopting a regular studio practice. I find that it creates more opportunities to get inspired and create new art: sometimes just being in the space primes me for creativity.
I recognize that not everyone has the privilege of flexibility that I do, but if you can try to set aside even a couple of hours a week on a regular day and time, you’ll reap a reward.
The names of your projects — Sudre’s Violin, A Little Fire Scarecrow, Disaster Society — are evocative. Can you talk a bit about how the process of naming helps you in developing these distinct musical efforts? I was a software engineer for many years, and there’s an adage in that field that “naming things is hard”. In my music doc (see screenshot below), I have a whole section called “Naming things is easy,” full of words and phrases that I come across in my wanderings and readings and conversations. Again, Wikipedia can be a great source for unique finds. (The name for Sudre’s Violin came from an article I found when I was researching artificial languages; Sudre was a 19th century musician and composer who could hold fluent conversations via violin.)
Strange words and phrases can come from anything really– it’s a matter of listening for things that are evocative or suggestive, especially when taken out of context. Things that have creative potential. Ideas that want a soundtrack.
In terms of projects, I typically have several going at once and move between them frequently, so having distinctive names for them helps me with context switching. The name has to contextualize and differentiate, and it has to reflect the individuality, constraints, goals, and character of the particular project. It’s an important part of how I maintain separation and cohesion between different creative endeavors.
For a piece of music, giving it a name is like recognizing that it’s alive. When I’m working on a new piece, even for a few hours, I don’t hit “save” for the first time until I feel like it’s ready for a name. Sometimes I’ll browse the “naming things” list to see if anything I’ve collected resonates with the music, while other times the piece evokes its own name.
Naming something takes a combination of attention and divination, seeing clearly what is there and having a sense of what is to come. The name and the shape of the thing intertwine as it unfolds, and you can’t always go back. It’s like quantum entanglement. Or maybe just psychology. But I prefer to think of it as magic.
