Finding Beauty in Darkness with Io Echo
Singer Ioanna Gika
After undergoing life-threatening lung surgery at 9
years old, Io Echo (@ ioecho) singer Ioanna Gika found
solace in the movie Beetlejuice . “I confronted the concept
of death very early on,” she says. “A film like that made
death seem like such a party because they were dead but
they were finding moments of comedy. That was
comforting for me.”
That balance between light and dark is something Ioanna
has fully embraced in her work. Before forming Io Echo
with Leopold Ross — the brother of composer Atticus
Ross — she lived briefly in Jakarta, Indonesia, where her
stepfather and mother were stationed, and then spent
time staying with her aunt in Tokyo. Her experience in
Asia would go on to have a major influence on the Los
Angeles-based band’s debut full-length, Ministry of Love,
from the use of Chinese violins to the Japanese koto
harp.
More broadly, though, Ioanna is inspired by literature and
paintings created for a bigger purpose. (“I connect with
art and literature that rouses and electrifies a feeling,
and sometimes that’s art with a social message.”) She
cites artist Ai Weiwei, painter Allison Schulnik,
photographer Ren Hang and activist Malala Yousafzai as
recent examples of people who’ve informed her work.
There are also some personal struggles that find their
way into her writing: Her father passed away from a
degenerative brain condition as Io Echo was finishing up
its debut album, and her stepfather was nearly killed in a
2004 terrorist bombing near the Greek embassy in
Jakarta.
“They had targeted the Australian embassy but the force
mainly impacted the Greek offices, so much so that my
mom’s passport was in my stepdad’s drawer, and the
copies of the papers ended up on the street below so they
thought something had happened to my mom,” she says.
“It was a tumultuous time.”
While she recently accepted a role in a performance piece
called 20/20 Accelerando by artist Lita Albuquerque at
the University of Southern California, Ionna is mostly
spending time with her bandmate on the second Io Echo
album, which is already halfway done and set to drop
some time this year.
“This will be different than our first album,” she says.
“[Ministry of Love] was influenced a lot by my time in
Southeast Asia, but since that album, a lot has changed.
My father died as we were finishing it, a long-term
relationship broke down and I can feel that our sound is
evolving as I push myself. I want to expand and improve
through the various personal vicissitudes. I want to be
more open.”
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