In a time saturated with algorithmic loops and market-ready tracks, Key Clef and Rheremita Cera offer something else entirely. Their practice is not simply music production but a re-ritualization of sound. They activate the body, question structures, and create spaces where the unheard can be felt.

Their collaborative project, LiveAlive—New Pussybilities in the Face of Mono-Culture, is not just a release but an ongoing investigation into sonic autonomy, queer cosmology, and the decolonization of listening.

How did your collaboration take shape?

Key Cle: It began with a shared punk sensibility. We met as extras during a film shoot at Teufelsberg, where we were freezing and keeping each other warm with laughter. From there, we stayed in touch. Eventually, I invited Mita to play at one of my events. It was intuitive. Sonic kinship.

Rheremita Cera: It was an energetic click. Curiosity led to resonance. Our languages are different, but our frequencies are aligned.

What does liberation through music mean to you?

Rheremita Cera: It’s about occupying the mic, about rewriting the sonic grammar imposed by the system. Sound is a weapon and a spell. It’s both abstraction and affect. For me, it’s not only a form of expression but also a mode of transmission. I use poetry as a tool of embodied resistance, queering time, and expanding voice beyond the throat.

Key Clef: Music is communication and presence. Liberation comes through resisting categorization. The act of sound design itself becomes a method of refusal. I manipulate, distort, and transform waveforms to construct spaces where structure dissolves. This approach is deeply inspired by punk, riot grrrl, and hip-hop histories. They taught us that to be against is also to be radically for something else.

What are the biggest challenges you face as women and queer artists?

Key Clef: We both have a clear awareness of the structures we exist within. Fortunately, we’ve often found ourselves in spaces that allow freedom and care. We’ve chosen not to chase validation from places that are not ready to hold us. That’s a conscious decision.

Rheremita Cera: As a queer immigrant artist, I have faced many coded barriers. But I’d rather focus on what energizes us. Spiritual and physical development, community care, interdependence. The system is expert at distraction. So we cultivate focus. And intention.

How do you balance personal expression with creating for a collective?

Key Clef: Which balance? The personal is already collective when it is honest. What role does Berlin play in your work?

Rheremita Cera: Berlin is a cultural pressure point. So many timelines converge here. It allows for mutation.

Key Clef: It gives us room to reimagine ourselves. We are not here for the weather.

Your soundscapes are incredibly immersive. What inspires your approach?

Key Clef: When I say sound design, I mean something far from post-production or soundtrack work. I’m talking about sculpting electronic sound as pure material, pushing it toward abstraction. I work through synthesis, through degeneration. Sound is not a tool; it’s a flow. Like thought.

How has your work with Ipnotica Erotica influenced your path?

Key Clef: Ipnotica Erotica is not just a label. It’s an ecosystem. A sonic and physical space for eroticism and trance, for collective release. It’s about the freedom of bodies in motion, and it extends through events, radio, and gatherings. It’s an organism more than a brand.

What do you hope listeners feel from your music?

Key Clef: I never impose meaning. Music speaks directly to the nervous system. Sometimes my sets feel melancholic. Sometimes they’re ecstatic. It all depends on where I am emotionally and what the dance floor offers me. It’s a feedback loop.

Tell us about the process behind LiveAlive.

Key Clef: I invited Mita to perform without even having seen them live—their energy was already enough. We built trust quickly. They proposed the album as I was about to ask to release something with them. Their vision was vivid, and my role was to sculpt it sonically. I helped structure it, refine it, and let it breathe. It was pure pleasure to bring it to my label.

What do you see as the future of electronic music as a liberatory force?

Key Clef: Electronic music has been commodified. But the tool is still there. The spiritual side is harder to access now, especially as club spaces become about visibility rather than transcendence. The loop has shortened. The trance has been reduced to a function. But history teaches us that waves return. I trust that deep listening and ancient rhythm will re-emerge.

Your album references astrology and spirituality. How do myth and tech interact in your work?

Rheremita Cera: These are infinite lineages. Myth, the stars, the network, the blood. It’s all language. It’s all body.

How has Anti-Corpos shaped your voice?

Rheremita Cera: That band was a ten-year archive of yes and no. The shows were ceremonies. The truth was always the core material. Punk taught me to be real.

How do your performances push against binaries?

Rheremita Cera: Through heat. Affection is a tactic. If you’re laughing, aroused, or disarmed, your borders loosen. That’s when real shifts can happen. I offer vulnerability and ask nothing in return. Except maybe that's how you feel.

What does LiveAlive—New Pussybilities in the Face of Mono-Culture mean to you?

Rheremita Cera: It’s literal. A new wet future. It pulses in our veins. It rejects dryness. It resists extraction.

If your music were a space?

Rheremita Cera: The womb I was formed in.

Key Clef: A landscape outside of time. Metaphysical.

A sound you haven’t worked with yet?

Rheremita Cera: Thunder.

Key Clef: Pure acoustic instruments.

Musical influences?

Rheremita Cera: From The Breeders to Racionais MCs. From Elis Regina to Bikini Kill. From funk to ritual.

Key Clef: Aphex Twin cracked me open. Vangelis, Detroit electro, and psychedelic rock. Also Drexciya, UR, and Juan Atkins.

Dream installation?

Rheremita Cera: Like a queer opera runway. With choirs, mapping, tears. Key Clef: A 360 audiovisual field. Sound you can feel in your bones.

Advice to new artists?

Rheremita Cera: Ask permission to enter your own void. That’s where truth begins. Key Clef: Go inward. Your subconscious knows. Everything else is noise.

In a cultural moment where spectacle often overrides substance, Key Clef and Rheremita Cera remind us that sound can still be sacred. Their work insists on vulnerability as strength, ritual as resistance, and listening as a radical act. LiveAlive is not only an album, it’s a threshold—a call to reimagine not just how we hear music, but how we exist together inside its frequencies. Through distortion, disruption, and deep care, they are tuning us back to our bodies, back to each other, and toward futures where sound is not consumed but communed with.