Confessions of A Celibate Slut

There are two things I learned when I decided to interview our subject. One of those things is that her stage name, TILCARA, comes from the city of San Francisco de Tilcara, a province located in  Jujuy, in Argentina, the country of her mother’s origin. From what little I’ve seen, Argentina looks as enchanted as TILCARA’S place of birth in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

What else is enchanting is TILCARA’S music. What better subject to make music about than sex? I think that we can all agree that of all the tactile activities we engage in, sex surpasses them all. The singer is unapologetic in her expression of what turns her on (and off), and why would anyone apologize for making songs about fucking? I think we all owe it to ourselves to do more of it, and let TILCARA be our soundtrack to our bedroom gymnastics.

You mentioned to me that you’re from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and, until that day, I had no idea that your state’s official nickname was “The Land of Enchantment”. That’s a hell of a boast. What is it about your life growing up there that makes it so enchanting to you?

The landscape. The sky. The rain. I can’t get enough of it. I really grew up eating flowers and rolling around in the dirt. You can run away and get lost and come back and feel right at home.

Does the environment there have any kind of influence on your music, maybe help get your head in the mood to create something?

It’s really quiet out here. I think it lends itself to a certain kind of dedication in being an artist. Getting to go outside and quiet my mind allows me to be open to inspiration when it comes. It also can feel really solitary. I try to start dance parties as often as possible, wherever possible.    

Which generation of electronic musicians influenced you?

The current one, mainly. I’m really curious about what artists are putting out nowadays with the resources they have at hand. But I’ll always be nostalgic for 2010’s dance music. Every Time We Touch by Cascada and Turn Down For What by DJ Snake and Lil Jon are still on rotation in my playlists.

Who did you grow up listening to, and who do you listen to now?

I grew up listening to Bob Dylan and Britney Spears. I actually really like listening to sad songs and folk music, but I appreciate lyrics that stick with me for being witty in their storytelling. I like to see my favorite artists in concert and soak up their performances. This last year I saw Ashnikko and Lady Gaga, and I adore the level of theatricality they work into their world-building. I met Grandbankss through a cold email after listening to his work with Madge. I love what LIONSTORM is doing. This past year, a friend introduced me to Oklou, and she was one of the melodic influences on this EP.

When did your interest in making music begin, and when did you actually start making it?

I’ve been making my own songs for fun for probably as long as I can remember, just making lyrics up on the spot, shouting them in public parking lots. I’m an exhibitionist, and I have no shame. It wasn’t until two years ago that I sat down and actually committed to starting this project, and it was like a joke at first. Once I decided to do it for real, it all started to come together pretty naturally. I started writing in January of 2025, flew out to L.A. to record my first EP in June, and then released it in September. 

You recently dropped an EP produced by GrandBankss, do you handle any responsibilities during the recording process?

I handle the concept from start to finish. I write the lyrics, choose the sound, and creatively direct the vision, all the way through to my music videos on the back end. When I’m collaborating with GrandBankss, he is responsible for beats, production, and mixing and mastering. We work together in the studio for about five days straight. This year, I collaborated with my vocal teacher and Los Angeles-based artist Yianna to weave in some more melodies.

What, if anything, is the most difficult part of the recording?

Writing in the studio. I usually have all my songs written before the session, but sometimes a song calls for something different, and it’s all about thinking on the fly, and there’s a lot of pressure to that. I have to say, though, sometimes some of my better lines have come out of that process. Writing the last verse in Celibate Slut was like that. I had no idea what to say, and then the lines just became apparent: “Got you verging on the edge of a seasonal obsession, keep you waiting your turn stuck in the great Depression, thirsty mouth motherfucker, drink when I’m done, swallow when I say so, 86 the hit and run”.

There are periods of time I’m writing every day, and you never know what might appear on the page. I love that. I love being surprised by what comes out on paper. 

I like to write on stone paper. It’s like my special treat for sitting down to work. It’s so soft, I never want to go back. I want to have a stack of notebooks filled with all my free writes. Years and years worth of them. Oh! And sometimes, I like to give myself gold stars on the days I write. I’m all about making the creative process as fun and whimsical as possible.

The way I’ve been working recently is I’ll write for a given period of time, like a month. I won’t worry about the quality, and then I’ll gather it all, type it all up, print it out, and cut it into little pieces. Then I’ll reorder everything until it comes together. 

You make what you call “electronic sex music”, and while I’ve interviewed plenty of artists whose music is full of explicit sexual themes, this is the first time any have described their music this specifically; I usually get the generic responses. Of all the types of electronic music one could make, why sex?

I think the first time I heard it referenced that way was from Reysha Rami, but someone also came up to me at one of my performances and introduced me to Kim Petras’ term “slut pop”, which I think is appropriate too. Honestly, I like writing explicitly about my intimate relationships, and I like to see how far I can take my lyrics, how far I can push it while staying true to what I’m trying to say. It’s a fun genre to be playing in. What can I say? I like to play.

I want to run through some of your songs and ask you questions based on the lyrics, song titles, or personal sexual proclivities. Let’s start with “Little Spoon”. That’s your first track, yes? It sounds like a colloquial term for something, but what does “little spoon” mean?

Little spoon is my second track off of my first EP, COITUS. Spooning is when you’re cuddling someone from behind, or being cuddled from behind. The song is about letting your partner be held. I’m all about proselytizing men into being held, giving in to being the little spoon sometimes. I love myself a little spoon.

“sippy cup”. What is that in reference to?

I wrote sippy cup about a couple of people, actually. It’s in reference to toying with power dynamics, sort of hating the position you’re in, but having a hard time letting go. I wrote it in defiance of being in a power dynamic where I felt infantilized. I was like, “I’ll play your game, but at the same time I’m gonna ‘sip addiction out of my sippy cup’, I’m gonna turn that infantilization on its head and make a mockery out of it.”

“8 inches”. That should be obvious, but are you talking shower or grower, or do you not have a preference?

Oh, I was talking about my heels. That song is about the girls.

What kind of party is happening back at your place?

Tea party. Granny panties. No bras. Cuddle puddles. Kissing booth. Hide and seek in the dark. Staying up until dawn and falling asleep in each other’s arms.

How would you respond to this question: The best thing about sex is…?

Forehead kisses.

How would you rank these sexual acts: Anal, oral, vaginal, or self-gratification?

I would rank them from least to most pleasurable, but that’s for me to know and you to find out.

Cunt or cock?

An old man called me a cunt the other day, actually. I’d rather be a cunt than a cock, to be honest.

Giving or taking?

Taking!!!!!!!! 

Gentle or Rough?

Gentle.

While High, or while sober?

Sober 100%. I want to be able to write about it later.

In public: Yes, or no?

In private, maybe so.

Wedding, or slutting?

Why not both?

Statistically, most of us only have sex 51-55 times per year; out of 365 days, that’s really not a lot. Where are you on that scale: more, less, or just about equal?

Ok, so I had to consult my calendar, but honestly, this year, I’ve been more of a celibate slut on average. I’m a picky girl, ok?!

I was strolling through your Instagram profile, and I saw flyers for different shows where you performed. What were the vibes like at these venues?

So far, I’ve really enjoyed performing for the virgins and the perverts. Those are my people. My queer audiences are where it’s at.

How many clubs are in your neighborhood, and which would you say is the liveliest of them all?

That’s confidential information, but I will say my house is the liveliest.

Or, are you loyal to one particular club?

The bedroom.

How has your music been generally received?

The guys in my DMs love it. What else can a girl ask for?

In a little more than two weeks, you’ll be dropping your sophomore EP. Do I have it right that it’s called Candy from A Stranger, and that there’s a single with the same name accompanied by a video, coming out September 6?

The song comes out on September 4th, and the music video will follow. It’s the biggest music video I’ve made up to date, and I’m really excited for it to be out in the world. It was so fun to make, and I had the best team. I worked with local production company Liminal 77 Productions and special effects studio Vault Studios in Albuquerque. Everyone really came together to make it come alive, and I love that we made it with our hands. It’s full of bodily fluids, lol. You’ll see.  

How does this one differ from your previous EP?

I think whereas COITUS is more triumphant, Candy is a little darker. Candy is so much about consumption and taking part in dynamics that never quite feed you enough. No matter how much you take, you always walk away feeling a little empty in the end. Sex positivity is important to me in this work, and part of that is also diving into the parts that crave more.

So, you’ve got new music dropping in September, a new video as well. What are you going to do with the rest of the year; will you be making more music, or just sip cocoa wearing a big sweater and mittens, watching the snow fall? Santa Fe sounds like that kind of place. It sounds cozy.

My Venus is in Gemini, so I’ve been told I like to have a lot of different passion projects going on at once. There’s definitely new stuff on the horizon. But I think rest is an important part of the creative process, so I’ll definitely be enjoying the snow. Maybe fall in love in the meantime?

Do you think humanity would be better human beings to each other if we had more sex? Not just more sex, but sex everywhere at any time. It could be the park, a shopping mall, the train, a bus, just anywhere, and we make sure not to get in anybody’s way. Does that sound like a good idea?

Consensually, but it’s got to be like only hot people allowed. 

Photography by Willa Jay Edwards.You can find TILCARA’S music on Spotify and Apple Music, and follow her on Instagram

cUTEbRUTE 2 cUTE 4u

I’ll admit, in the beginning, I was confused about who the Australian hyperpop musician known as cUTEbRUTE was. The moniker blends feminine and masculine adjectives, and while I thought it was cool, I didn’t know what it meant. When I listened to the songs and heard this high-pitched voice, I thought “Oh! It’s a woman!”. It turns out that I was wrong, but hardly disappointed; after all, this was my kind of music, so what did I care. I’m not just a hyperpop fan, I became curious about vocaloid software, and downloaded lots of vocaloid music before I even knew what it was. It’s a sound that Mat Ward puts to good use.

Mat’s music is (to the best of my memory) the first hyperpop artist whose songs address the topics heard in this album, such as the artificial intelligence industry, consumerism, Iran, and more. Everything becomes clear when you listen to the songs he’s created under “Mat Ward”, his actual name. The electronic element is there, but stylistically, the songs are electronic pop punk. Being a huge fan of Atari Teenage Riot, I always considered electronic music as the perfect vehicle for subversive social and political commentary, but I wasn’t ready for the coded cuteness that is cUTEbRUTE. The sound doesn’t take away from the subject matter, instead, it makes it stand out.

I don’t think I’ve ever asked a musician this question, but as an electronic artist, did you start off with a traditional musical instrument (say, a sousaphone or mandolin), or did you jump right into the synths?

Yes, I usually come up with most of my hyperpop riffs on a sousaphone, in the bath. Nah! Just kidding. I did play something similar to a sousaphone as a kid - a cornet, similar to a trumpet. I was pretty good and played principal cornet - like a lead soloist - at competition level. But then I got cold feet before one competition and ran off and hid in McDonald's. That was the end of my cornet playing.  So these days I usually start tunes by coming up with chord sequences or riffs on a synthesizer. But for most of this album I just listened to endless samples on the Splice app for inspiration, then came up with lead melodies that would form the catchy hook of each song, by whistling into my phone. From there, I wrote lyrics to fit each catchy whistled hook. Then I recorded me singing the lyrics. Then I  started building each song around that, by designing weird sounds that hopefully haven't been heard before.  

Musically, who were you inspired by and what caught your attention about these musicians?

Aggh, fuck. Well for more than a decade I've been writing a monthly protest music column that requires me to listen to more than 30 albums a month, of all genres. Spotify, the evil green platform, told me I listened to more than 500 genres in one year, or something ridiculous. So I'm more inspired to come up with something I haven't heard before. I specifically created this persona, cUTEbRUTE, because I wanted to blend cute vocals with brutish bass and drums. The thing was, when I started mixing and mastering the songs, I needed similar "reference tracks". Reference tracks are successful songs that sound roughly the same style as yours, so you can try to match your songs' sound to them. But I couldn't find any. Then someone told me about a website you can feed your songs into, for it to suggest similar-sounding tracks. Of course, it turned out there were loads of songs out there that sounded exactly like the supposedly unique genre I had in my head - a cute and chaotic version of hyperpop. So the singles I've already released from the album have already landed on playlists occupied by some of those great artists, such as 100 Gecs, Food House, underscores, and Petal Supply.    

What difference, if any, is there between the recording process for trad musicians versus electronic musicians?

The main difference would be that you're moving air as a traditional musician. You're playing an instrument to make air vibrate, which is captured by a microphone, whether you're playing an acoustic guitar, a mandolin, or a sousaphone. Electronic music can all be recorded within the computer without any sounds having to be captured by a microphone. So you could make a purely electronic album just on a computer, or "in the box" as electronic musicians like to say. And you could endlessly edit it to fix your mistakes, whereas traditional musicians would usually have to practice the part and play it perfectly for the recording. In reality, most trad musicians these days are recorded into a computer and endlessly edited and tweaked later. And that is probably the most inadequate answer to that question you're likely to get from anyone! Argue in the comments!

Prior to your email to Neuerotica, I thought I already had some of your music in my library. No? Or am I imagining things?

Well, I released 11 albums under my real name of Mat Ward over the past 10 years, but they're all still available. As for cUTEbRUTE, Dissident Ditties is my debut album, but you may be confusing me with the homoerotic cartoonist Cute Brute. Or it could be because you actually reached out to me first when you came across my first cUTEbRUTE single when I shared it on Bluesky. That's still available too, though.

The first time I heard your music, I thought you were a woman because of the high pitched vocals and, of course, your name. Why the name, and why the high pitched vocals?

Well, the longer story is I'm a huge fan of future bass artist San Holo, who incorporates a lot of emotional lyrics into his songs. I usually write a lot of political, angry, protest music. But I wanted to try to write more personal, emotional songs like San Holo. A dear friend of mine was sexually abused as a kid, and had told me how her abuser would often enter her nightmares and so on. Thinking about that, I'd come up with the lyric "always see your face" which was inspired by San Holo's far more innocent love song "I Still See Your Face". I usually sing in a punk style. But my friend is into Japanese culture and preferred my old albums where I'd not sung in my own voice, but used a very time-consuming piece of Japanese software called Vocaloid. Users program Vocaloid to sing lyrics in a cute, robot voice. So for my friend's song, because it was inspired by her perspective, I recorded my usual, punk-sounding vocals but changed them using voice-changing software to sound more like the cute, female-sounding Vocaloid. That was the first song on the album. Then, because I'd always wanted to make music that contrasted cute vocals with brutish drums and bass, I just kept that sound for the whole persona of cUTEbRUTE. The name came to me after watching a comedy sketch by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer in which they advertise a dodgy-looking security dog called "Licky Kicky"with the marketing line: "He may look cute, but he's a brute!"

Are you a music first, lyrics later kind of artist, or is it the other way around for you?

Definitely always music first, and more than that, it has to be catchy. I'm lucky to be able to come up with endless riffs, but only a fraction are catchy enough to be made into a song, and then it's even harder to come up with lyrics to fit them, and then harder still to sing them in a way that doesn't sound ill-fitting or awkward.

How long does it typically take you to lay down and finish a track?

I have a timer on my music-making software, so I know it's usually at least 60 hours, sometimes 100. I manage to complete a song a month, and an album a year. I don't watch TV or go out much.  

What’s your recording studio look like, in regards to what you require to compose a track?

I do it all on a Windows laptop running Ableton, the most popular digital audio workstation software. But I record my vocals using a cheap Behringer copy of the world's most popular microphone, the Shure SM58. I simulate a professional vocal booth by putting a duvet around my microphone (see photo) to block out unwanted noise. I play software synthesizers using the free synth controllers I make - basically touchscreen versions of real keyboards.

Electronic pop music seems to be more prevalent now than at any other time in music history. Do you have any ideas why that might be?

Yep, the party drug MDMA and the revolution it caused back in 1988, when people started raving all night to repetitive electronic beats. For kids, Ableton became what guitars were for their parents.

If Love Songs Were Honest reminded me of a Threads conversation about problematic love songs, but your song addresses the disingenuous nature of the genre. What prompted you to write it?

Just the realisation that, with honourable exceptions, we're all on rails as a species trying to reproduce, and that the magic of love is an intoxicating state because the species has to reproduce to avoid extinction. Most people probably realise that far earlier than I did. 

You cover a lot of social and political ground in your album, which leads me to believe that you’re one of those “radicals” the Terrorist In Chief and his Klan here in America incessantly babble on about. Yes? When did that journey begin for you?

My mum and dad are hard-left unionists, so that's where it probably began. But for the past 17 years I've been doing voluntary work for an activist newspaper, so a lot of it comes from that. I do that work more out of a desire to give people an alternative view of the world to that doled out by the corporate media, otherwise known as mainstream media. Having said that, a friend who I do a lot of walking and cycling with is a right-wing stock picker. I enjoy his company because he tells me things I'm not already thinking, and challenges my views, not that my views change much!  

None of us are fortune tellers, but I assume you have your own view of where the current political landscape that has drastically changed the United States, and the world, is heading. We don’t want to return to the norm, which is how we got here in the first place, but does your music (or even music in general) help you get through the hell we’re all experiencing these days?

Yes, no one can predict the future, though a lot of people think they can. There's a great book about that called "Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better." I've been meaning to write a song about it. So yes, I have my suspicions that we're heading for climate catastrophe or nuclear oblivion, but you never know. And yes, making music is my main source of therapy for coping with that dread. I don't think I've gone insane, yet...

Stream cUTEbRUTE by following this link, and download the album free on Bandcamp

Mika Montag