INTERVIEW: Sandrayati is on the rise

Written for The Line of Best Fit [2/9/25]

Iceland-based artist Sandrayati is paying homage to connections and natural cycles in her music – while incubating new life in herself.

Before Sandrayati Fay moved to Iceland six years ago she’d somehow already imagined the earthly, cavernous sounds associated with its landscape would have a place in her future.

The Indonesia-raised, Filipino-American singer-songwriter’s music has always had an intimate quality to it. She wrote her close, folk-spun 2023 debut album Safe Ground in Reykjavík during the pandemic, a writing experience she calls very “personal” despite some input from her husband, the Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds. That first album provided a fertile test bed for ideas. Now, ideas have been fleshed out for its grander follow-up INHABIT.

As Sandrayati has settled more into her adopted home, her voice, creativity and her music has taken on a new gravity. “I dreamed of this sound before I even came to this country,” she tells us on a video call from her Reykjavík home. She “longed” for a grander sound for some time but perhaps hadn’t tried or had the right resources to unlock it.

INHABIT has been fully realised through “band-y” collaboration with other musicians, Sandrayati explains, as well as being influenced by location. “The deepness in my voice has kind of come from the coarse environment here. I grew up in the tropics where everything is so lush and close to you,” she says, pushing imaginary fronds away from her face. “In Iceland it’s the opposite; you have so much space and vastness. In a way you can see yourself a little bit clearer. That’s influenced me and how I want to hear things.”

The record is how you’d imagine Iceland’s landscape and character to sound. Sparse rhythms creep at a glacial pace. Crepuscular EBow guitars chime. Spirited strings recall the awe of majestic fjords. All the while, Sandrayati's vocals freefall between falsettos and soft, guttural growls. Her key collaborator, the British musician SOHN, crafted much of the album’s stirring soundscapes from which Sandrayati was able to riff off vocally.

Credit: Sunna Ben

Many of the songs were written and/or recorded in Iceland in spring last year including at Sandrayati's home studio. A handful were made in Brooklyn, US and in Devon, UK. Arnalds helped with some musical arrangements, such as on the song “La Loba”, which recounts a Mexican folk tale on resurrection, heritage and nature.

SOHN and Sandrayati took up writing residencies at a friend’s cabin in Iceland and at Studio Silo in the tiny village of Stöðvarförður in the Eastfjords where they were surrounded by dramatic peaks and mountain lakes. The studio’s analogue recording setup facilitated “more improvisational” creativity, explains Sandrayati.

On album highlight “Jawline”, which sits somewhere between the hushed atmosphere of a Jenny Hval offcut and a slinking Julia Hotler tune, the half spoken, half sung verses unfurled during a live recording. “The verses are from an improvised state where I’d written some lyrics down in a really messy form and picked words out, not really knowing where they were going to go,” Sandrayati says. The freeflowing rhythm meanders like the overflowing river described in the song. “All the places shaping me”, Sandrayati sings atop noir guitar twangs and shuffling drums, pulling thematic focus on nature and identity. Later, she begs for the river to retreat, unspoiled by humans (“take the river back with time”). Connection – be that through re/connection with nature, with oneself or with others – emerges as a key tenet of INHABIT.

These motifs have been simmering in Sandrayati's conscience for years. She wrote the track “Waken”, comprising waterborne lyrics about awakening one’s inner wildness, a decade ago. Those kindling feelings of connection have since been sparked by engaging with what she calls a thriving music community in Reykjavík.

That’s not to downplay how healthy the music scenes were where Sandrayati spent the formative period of her life. For years she organised and played at folk nights in the south of Bali, armed with her voice and guitar. “In terms of support systems and infrastructure, it’s not as strong as Iceland,” she reflects. “It’s all very DIY but it’s great.” She made the best of her music career while living in Indonesia and, for a time, also in the Philippines where her mother is from. “I was playing with rock bands, backup singing. I also toured with this really big Balinese band called Superman Is Dead.” Live shows took her to other places in southeast Asia such as Thailand. She taught music at a primary school in Bali before her career started to gain traction. Music has always been her life.

But it’s half the world away from there where Sandrayati's music has taken a new shape. There’s simply “nowhere else” she could have made INHABIT, she tells us, nodding to the record’s collaborators and its unique sonic character.

It’s put to Sandrayati that some lyrics on INHABIT reference a surrendering to love for another but also a surrendering to love for – and an understanding of – oneself. On the delicate, piano-driven ‘Wonder’, she sings, “Loving me is like loving the sea / She is wild and formless and free, ungraspable.” Had she previously grappled with her own identity? Has finding love allowed her to know herself better?

“That’s interesting what you received from that initially,” Sandrayati answers after a pause. “Because that’s how I was writing it: not necessarily feeling understood.”

Credit: Karolina Wielocha

Fast forward to today and those words have evolved in parallel with her life. “That formlessness and that wildness is connected to surrender,” she continues. “I’m feeling that these days because there’s good in that surrender; there’s an acceptance to how things are without trying to control something or push something to form.” She’s since embraced love and embraced herself.

It somewhat explains the album’s title. Sandrayati once saw a stencil image of a person harvesting wheat with the word “INHABIT” printed on it in her sister’s bedroom. She found the art to be “confrontational”, forcing her to examine just what it means to inhabit. “Is working the land what it means? How am I inhabiting?” Sandrayati recalls asking herself.

“It started from that point, then questions [appeared] like, ‘how are we in relation to everything right now?' Things got very existential. At the same time, I was thinking about a person chopping wood or carrying water, things that are so innate in human nature in terms of relating to what we need,” she says. It made her question how we as humans might be able to reclaim that relationship with the land. “As a society, in a way we’re disconnected from these origins of identity. And a big part of those origins is love, right? Because love is community.

“But then something that has been really personal for me for the past decade is connecting to the menstrual cycle and what that means in relation to the world,” she adds. “I see it so much as a mirror to seasons and how we let go of things. And bringing it back to the earlier points [about harvesting], like, ‘what happens to our food waste? Where does it go?’ It’s supposed to go back into the earth so that we can grow something else – as simple as that. The natural rhythm is there but we literally don’t have the system in place for that to happen,” she says.

That spun out a broader question. “How do we wake up to this and still participate in life and inhabit it in a good way?” It’s why “inhabit” struck such a chord.

Sandrayati's “in-depth study” of menstrual cycle worlds has reminded her that despite searching for better connection with the land, “you are nature”. Inhabiting isn’t just about being in nature. “You are it and it is in you,” she says. “There is wind inside your breath. There are stones and earth in your bones. It helps a lot to think about that relationship with the body, recognising [the cycle] as nature,” she adds. That cyclical concept is being recognised by releasing INHABIT in four themed stages (or “waves”).

The album’s title track contains lyrics about an amorphous love “expanding”. As we speak, Sandrayati is eight months pregnant with her first child. She explains that she wrote all the song lyrics before she knew she was expecting. “It’s bizarre because I didn’t understand what the song lyrics to ‘Inhabit’ were about in particular,” she says. “Like, describing an expanding love that you have no idea how to hold. Maybe that’s what motherhood is going to feel like? But I’m not sure. It’s crazy that those lyrics feel really relevant in this moment. Literally, I have a human inhabiting my body,” she says.

Making INHABIT, then, has been its own kind of pregnancy. That gestation will conclude not long after the album’s full release this month. Promoting an album as a new mother of course presents different challenges. How does she plan to do that?

“It’s a big question for me, especially because this baby was not planned. How can I be a mom and an artist in terms of the ambitions I had and the things I find really important, like getting out there, touring and moving?” she says. “The things that I’ve dreamed of for years in terms of letting the album be alive in the world?”

It’s caused her to shift her idea of how to share INHABIT, at least for the first few months. To solve the problem of not easily being able to tour, she’s devised a rather novel project called Inhabiting Bodies. Sandrayati has reworked INHABIT’s instrumental stems for movement practitioners to use how they wish to guide and soundtrack their workshops – from dance classes to yin yoga.

“It’s such a cool way for touring the record because the focus isn’t me and my guitar,” Sandrayati explains. “[It’s] an opportunity for people to get connected with the music or a different way of hearing the music because you’re literally embodying it. That’s so much about what I was saying about inhabiting.”

The image of people connecting communally, spiritually, physically and in different parts of the world with Sandrayati's brooding, beautiful music ringing out is perfect. For now though, she hopes that INHABIT will serve a purpose in helping with connection to nature, to community, to oneself – those connections looping round and round.

INHABIT is released on 5 September via Decca Records