Interview with Melas Leukos: “Magic Is Alive” in You and Me
- Isabella Basile
- Aug 26
- 5 min read
Multidisciplinary artist, Melas Leukos, weaves the natural and outerworldly together to create her music, illustration, photography, ritual, and dance. Since Melas learned to talk, she was making up songs; it was her form of communication, and it was sacred. Shaped by the cycles of life, death, and rebirth, her music opens our eyes to the many journeys we travel. Her songs are tales from the unseen: animal messengers, nature spirits, and elemental truths. Written over the last eight years, Valiant One was released August 15th, capturing "angelic heights and shadowy depths of her vision, channeling the full range of her inner mythos." The single is a call to awake, to remember, and to listen with more than your ears; there is more to the world than what we see. It is not a metaphor; it's a truth. Magic is alive in you, me, and the world around us.
IB: Hi Melas Leukos, we are so excited to chat with you today! Your voice and music are very ethereal. What inspired this sound? Are there any artists that you draw from?
ML: The ethereal quality of my voice has always felt innate — not something I set out to create, but simply the way the songs move through me. At times it comes through raw and folk-rooted, and at other times it soars into something more operatic and celestial. I’ve never felt it belonged to a single lineage — it shifts depending on what the song is asking for. When I connect with artists who carry a similar otherworldly tone, it feels less like influence and more like recognition — like finding kin. I’ll hear the way someone stretches their voice, or the way an electronic texture cradles an airy vocal, and think, yes, that’s a palette I can live inside.
IB: Where does your belief in otherworldly elements stem from? Have you had any unworldly experiences?
ML: My sense of the otherworld comes from feeling rather than belief. I was born with unusual sensitivity — I perceive everything at once, which makes the unseen feel very near, as natural to me as the physical world. Leaning into those realms has always been a source of comfort and nourishment. Being with the elementals, the plant kin, the animal kin — this world of companions is just as real and sustaining to me as anything in the outer world. And yes, I have otherworldly experiences all the time — in dreams, in visions, in moments of knowing, in feeling my body dissolve into the fabric of existence, or in speaking with beings across the veil. For me, moving between realms is simply part of life.
IB: I saw that your music is rooted in folk and shaped by the cycles of death and rebirth. What drew you to the idea of death and rebirth?
ML: I didn’t come to the idea of death and rebirth out of fascination — I came to it by living it. Again and again, my life has carried me through passages of dissolution into renewal, shadow into radiance. The music becomes the vessel where I can translate those initiations, release them from my body, and offer them back in song. This is not a new idea, but an ancient one. For as long as we have existed, humans have turned to song, to story, to ritual as a way of walking through loss, through strife, through the thresholds of change. Much of that collective remembrance has been broken, but I feel my work as a small offering toward its return — an invocation of music as sacred rite, as the alchemy that transforms suffering into beauty, and shadow into radiance.
IB: I notice that you spoke about snakes in “Magic Is Alive” and “Valiant One,” and in various different cultures, snakes are known to represent rebirth, change, and growth, spiritual enlightenment, healing, protection, and wisdom. What is your interpretation of the snake? Specifically in “Magic Is Alive” with the lyrics “snake coil round my spine.”
ML: The snake is one of the oldest teachers we have. Across cultures, it carries the medicine of transformation, the shedding of skins, the renewal of life. In my songs, when I call the image of the snake coiling around the spine, I’m speaking to the way transformation rises through the body — how change begins deep within and winds its way upward until it reshapes our whole being. It is both grounding and transcendent, an image of profound renewal. To sing of Snake is also to awaken with it — to bring majesty, to kindle light, to return its ancient consciousness to the collective. And I feel it is no small coincidence that Valiant One arrives in the year of the Snake. These cosmic alignments feel like winks from the unseen, affirmations that this medicine is calling to be remembered now. My gratitude is immense.
IB: I read that you recorded the songs off your upcoming album, Valiant One, in "unconventional spaces” such as a yurt, small living rooms, and makeshift studios tucked into rural New Mexico. Do you believe this aided in your goal of connecting with nature? What inspired the addition of the more electronic sounds?
ML: The electronic sounds arrive to build the atmosphere — to let the unseen breathe. They create the space for beings, for creatures, for other dimensions to reveal themselves in ways that simple folk instrumentation could not translate. In that sense, the electronics are not just sounds but allies, each one a presence of its own. I was deeply blessed to weave this with Tone Ranger (Alex Simon), my creative ally and producer, who helped dream these worlds into being until the songs became living ecosystems. It was never about striving to connect with nature. We are already of it, inseparable from it. My intention was simply to listen: to the voices of place, to the trees and winds, to the spirit each moment carried — and to let that voice move inside the music.
IB: What is one song you wish Melas Leukos wrote?
ML: If I could choose one, it would be Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill. That song is pure permission. The moment it begins, my whole body wakes up — it moves with this wild, primal rhythm. Then these weird, alien synths pop in, carrying us in and out of their own strange currents. They weave around her voice like creatures from another world. And then the drums — driving forward with that relentless heartbeat. And over it all is the story, deep and consuming — theatrical, aching, ecstatic. I’m riveted. It is the rare piece of music that makes ache feel like enchantment, that makes you want to be carried deeper into the story rather than released from it. That is its spell. If there were a song I wish Melas Leukos had written, it would be a song like that: a groove so deep, a story so consuming, an anthem that empowers while it mesmerizes.
IB: When can we expect your debut album, Valiant One, to come out?
ML: Valiant One is out now! It was released August 15th, and you can listen everywhere — and on Bandcamp if you’d like to support directly.
IB: Thank you so much for chatting with us!
ML: Thank you so much. May the songs find good homes. <3
Stream "Magic Is Alive" below!
Credits:
Vocals: Melas Leukos
Production: Alex Simon (Tone Ranger)
