Artist Profile: Kinna Mone
Kinna Mone, the Tel Aviv-based singer-songwriter, music producer, and DJ, has spent the year since her relocation refining her sound and honing her craft, and, with the release of her debut album, Therapeutic Nights Out, she has finally found the ideal outlet for her unique blend of sonic textures, transplanting the vulnerability and openness of her usual lyrical structures to the booming, bassy atmosphere of club music.
Growing up in San Diego, Kinna was introduced to classic rock and reggae through her father, and he was also the first one to introduce her to the practice of playing music by getting her enrolled in piano lessons as a young child.
Yet, the strictures of classical music did not appeal to her initially. She later picked up a guitar as a teenager and, when Frank Ocean and SZA entered her life, the manner through which profound emotion permeated their tracks inspired her to truly attempt to make her own music for the first time.
Therefore, by the time her family relocated to Haifa, she had already begun her first tentative experimentations with writing and recording, and, from there, her first two EPs sprung to life.
“Growin’” and “RIGHT HERE, JUST NOT NOW.”, while taking sharply different sonic angles, represented the earliest leanings of her artistic searchings, taking on, in various forms, the landscape of R&B, hip-hop and pop.
Although they diverge sharply from the sound she pursues now, Kinna says that she chooses to leave them available to the public because they serve as representations of the constant journey she has undergone to reinvent herself artistically.
“I listen to it now, and I'm like, ‘No, no’ [laughs]. But I'm very proud of it. I make a statement to not take it down from Spotify because it's really my journey. I feel like I've been on this musical grind of trying to be better as an artist and to perfect my sound… to [realize] what makes my sound different from things that I'm inspired by or that I hear around me.”
Yet, her move to Tel Aviv, and her exposure to the hectic nature of the club scene there, has caused her to reinvent herself in more ways than one. As someone who was too shy to dance as a child, the community she found there opened her up to that form of expression, and, as she fell deeper and deeper into what Tel Aviv held in store, she gained an appreciation, and a passion, for the rhythmic capabilities that dance music possessed.
“This city has a hectic, weird pace, and the clubbing scene here is so eclectic. It seeped into my musical identity in a sense, and it's very interesting. I feel like it's changing me, and what I want to create is also change. It's less like the songs in my room; the sounds I'm creating are for a big audience, for the club, to be heard in a big space like a festival. I picture what I want to create a bit differently.”
Therapeutic Nights Out, therefore, represents her first steps in this new direction, taking on the mantle of the club atmosphere that she has fallen in love with while maintaining the emotional aspects and the vulnerability that she has grown fond of in her lyricism. Artists such as Fred again, Charli XCX, Tame Impala, 070 Shake, and Troye Sivan inspired the artistic core of the album: a project that attempts to capture the highs and lows of a modern healing journey.
From the ascendant synth pads of tracks like “High, Somewhere” to the bouncing rhythms of tracks like “hurtsmorethanusual”, the album not only displays the wide sonic range that Kinna is capable of stringing along from thin air but also the various nooks and crannies that Tel Aviv has presented her with. It is at once a love letter to the city and an open letter to herself: a project that documents her process of coming to personal and creative maturity through her art.
“That's why I decided to call it Therapeutic Nights Out, because I wanted to make a soundtrack for being vulnerable, and wanting to break free. It’s for myself, but it's also for other people who might be going through similar things… Most artists are like little seeds; we’re very delicate, and we make big, boomy, bassy songs. But, at the end of the day, it's to express the tiny essence of ourselves, and it's very freeing.”
Now, as Kinna works on a remix version of Therapeutic Nights Out, with tracks more explicitly intended for a DJ setting, she hopes to bring the project to larger audiences, continuing down the unique path she has forged for herself with the project.
