With the launch of the new noctonal site, I figured I’d give some backstory behind the project.

AUNTY EM:
I started producing in my bedroom in the early days of Myspace. I found some success with a few house tracks and got my feet wet with a few live sets here and there. But beyond that year, I never made a legitimate push into my music. 

Even when I stopped “trying to be famous” and got a big girl job, I never stopped making music. It was one of the few things that made each day worth living.

In order: 

1. Seeing the smiles on my kid’s faces
2. Having the opportunity to layer note after gritty note, long into the morning hours.

After getting laid off during ‘The Great Tech Reckoning’, and getting no response from over 400 applications, I decided to spend some time earnestly trying to take my sound to new levels and then pushing my music out to the people.

With no sense of direction, I had files from all types of genres/BPMs sitting on my hard drive… But nothing cohesive to share.

I decided to start small and use a stop-gap moniker. Something to put out a few tracks on to see if people bite. The name itself wasn’t too important to me and I knew it wasn’t going to stay, so I kept it simple.

The genre I stuck with was one that I’m intimately familiar with and found consistently challenging to work with:
Experimental Dubstep and UKG.

My government name is Emily, and My niece and nephew call me “Auntie Em” (like in The Wizard of Oz). It’s adorable and no one else was using it, so I adopted it for that period of my production.

After a bootleg of ‘Kevin Flumes’ – Mansion Tears I dropped did surprisingly well (with no marketing), I knew I had something.

Maybe not to make it big or anything, but enough to feel butterflies with every positive comment.

It was time to make a real persona.

Noctonal:
I had a list of probably 60 or so names before finally landing on the one.

I needed something that represented at least two things about me.
If you know me personally, you know that I understand music more than I understand people, and I’ve had poor sleep habits my entire life. 

Nocturnal + Tonality = NoctonaL  

There’s not too much I can share at the moment about this project.
But if you like dirty, filthy bass music that bangs out of Los Angeles, CA… Then I hope you stick around for the ride.

I’m beyond excited to share what 15 or so years of production have taught me. 

– noctonal🦉