INTERVIEW: Experimental Art-Pop Artist Snow Aster Provides An Inside Look At New Album ‘Primavera’

snow aster is a Boston-based composer, arranger, producer, singer-songwriter, DJ, and multi-instrumentalist. they make a wide variety of different styles of music ranging from classical to progressive folk to EDM. recently snow released an album called *Primavera*, a collection of introspective folk songs set amid a cinematic, blooming sound world, produced entirely by snow themself in their bedroom over 2 years.

What inspired you to start making music?

I’ve been making music as long as I can remember, so I don’t know if it was a specific thing that inspired me. I believe it was more so just a product of my environment. There’s a picture of me at, like 2 years old sleeping with a guitar in hand, and plenty of other photo evidence of me at a young age surrounded by musical instruments. It was always just a thing I did.

Who are your biggest inspirations?

Jacob Collier, Mid-Air Thief, and Animal Collective are some of my biggest inspirations, as far as where a lot of my ideas come from. Although, I generally don’t try to put other musicians on a pedestal because everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Like, you can respect someone for their musical talent or how much cultural impact their music has, but at the end of the day everyone has something that makes them worth learning from and looking up to.

You dropped your first single in 2022 titled “lady in my life”. How do you feel you’ve grown artistically since then?

Over 2022, I was pretty focused on honing my craft and expanding my production toolset, so I made a lot of upgrades and put in a lot of hours making beats the whole year. I’ve seen a lot of growth from that, but I’m also now more painfully aware of a lot of bad habits that I still need to break. I’ve also gone through a lot of changes in my personal life- a lot of which are reflected in the music you’ll be hearing from me in the future in addition to the stuff that’s on Primavera.

Tell us more about your new album Primavera.

I started working on Primavera a little over 2 years ago. I was originally inspired by the Botticelli painting of the same name, and I wanted to sort of capture the sonic landscape of that painting. As I continued working on it, though, it became more of an emotional outlet for me. I was diagnosed autism during the time I was working on the album, so a lot of the songs turned out to be about that discovery and how it affected my personal life. I’m pretty satisfied with how it turned out.

What was the creative process behind it?

It was a pretty chaotic process from start to finish. I wrote down as many ideas I could in a notebook whenever they came up. I’d record whatever I felt like recording whenever I felt like recording it, and then somehow I found ways to weave those two threads together. There were a lot of moments where I felt like I had to cut corners in order to get a more feasible result, which was often disappointing, but ultimately everything worked out ok.

How would you describe your sound?

Snow aster: I feel like I have multiple “characters” that I play when I make music. Sometimes, I go for a folky sound that’s more complicated and uses mostly acoustic instruments, and sometimes I’ll do the complete opposite and make hyper pop. It really depends on what aspect of my life I’m confronting in the moments that I’m creating.

What are 3 words you’ll use to describe your album?

Snow aster: Tough one! I’ll go with “cinematic floral scrapbook” or something like that.

What do you want people to take away after listening to your music?

I guess I want people to feel as if they’ve been taken on a trip to somewhere different to what they’re used to. Or just for them to experience a new perspective on music that’s outside the norm. But apart from that, I hope that everybody takes something different away from my music, because I think it’s cool how people have different experiences and take away different lessons from the same pieces.

What’s been the most memorable part of being an artist to you?

I’m really not sure, and I had to think about that one for a long time. Most likely, it would be just seeing people react to hearing my music for the first time, because that’s an experience I can’t imagine having myself. Once you hear something for the first time, it’s kind of hard to go back, you know? So I kind of live vicariously through other people in that sort of way.

What’s next for you after Primavera?

I’ve been writing some songs that are a different vibe from Primavera. I don’t have a timeline yet for when they’ll be out, but hopefully soon.