Soundscapes Unfold
Meet on-the-rise musician MAYA MARIA, who is working on her first solo EP titled “the bed-ties”. After collaborating on various projects and evolving her talent through The Heartist writing program, participating in the Popronde travelling festival with the group Wolfskers, co-producing The Chaos of Becoming developed through the UpNorth talent program, and much more, she is now in the process of rolling out her solo music career starting with her performance at ESNS 2025.
Available via MAYAMARIA’s Instagram. Photographed by @jantinatalsma. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
24-year-old Maaike Maria van Dieren was born and raised on the island of Terschelling, Netherlands. Breaking free, she moved to Groningen in 2020 to pursue love and creativity, on her way to blossom into the musician she is today. Initially, Maya worked behind the scenes, building her skill set and curating her vision until she met manager Ico Balt, producers Atser Damsma and Paul Maaswinkel, and her team at Lake Woozoo. Over the past years, she has been building her EP conceptually before revealing it to the world. This is a story of resilience, metamorphosis, and rebirth.
Although MAYA MARIA’s approach to music resists categorization into a genre, it is often classified as alternative R&B mixed with Art Pop. However, if it comes down to it, she would describe her music as “experimentally mystical but annoyingly catchy.” She continues: “I wanted it to be very weird and very fluid. I was experimenting with sounds and making up different words. So, it's like a mystical forest. But also because people understand catchy melodies, it gives them something to hold onto and understand.”
Your dance, fashion, and photography styles are all very uniquely you. It's almost like MAYA MARIA becomes an energy, a state of mind, or even a philosophy of sorts. How would you describe that aura that you infuse your work with?
“I find joy in searching for the most real version of myself and trying to express it so that others also feel like they can be more than one box. It's kind of sad that we all feel like we have to be only one person with set boundaries. It's like we are trained to shut out our feelings. But, if you don't feel, you're not experiencing, and if you're not experiencing yourself, how are you supposed to know who you are, what you like, and what your needs are, you know?” To her, “MAYA MARIA” is an older version of herself who is “calm, deeply rooted, super wise, and confident.” Additionally, she states: “I also like to play with three versions of myself. So there's the younger version of me, my current self, and then this older, very godly woman. Sometimes, I feel like I make music for my younger self, but I'm guided by my older self. When I feel like I'm called to do something, it gives me peace of mind knowing that there's this energy that knows what I’m doing and knows how it's going to unfold. I'd say that's the aura.”
Available via MAYA MARIA’s Instagram. Photographed by @harrybijIstra. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement.
When people make music, they lay themselves bare for the world to see which is a relatively vulnerable process. It also features heavily in how you present yourself on social media. How do you create that space of vulnerability for your music?
She describes how “it's an ongoing process for me. As a person, I tend to hide. I don't like to showcase a lot of myself. It's scary. People assume that I'm very confident and comfortable in my skin or that it's easy for me to share things, but it’s the opposite most of the time. For my art, it’s about testing myself and daring myself to take up that space. On social media, I'm very open about everything, and it's very easy for me to express myself. When I'm on stage, I'm still very vulnerable, but it's always an intense process to make the shift from off-stage to on-stage. I don't yet know how to take on the space and be comfortable with it. The shift takes a lot of mental work, but when it does happen, it is like ‘I'm here now.’ In a way, I embody myself most when I'm performing. And my brain gets shut off, and I just exist.”
What drives you to make music? Who do you make music for?
Maya describes how she was a “creative” child who was also “emotionally intelligent and very sensitive,” leading her to be “aware of” and “stuck in” other people’s expectations early on. However, at the age of 13, everything changed when she got sick. “I spent six years isolated because I was at home in my bedroom, and there wasn’t any hope for it to get better. Eventually, I did some soul-searching. I tried to figure out what I still had, and what came out of it was that I still had my voice.”
At some point, she did respond to treatment and was faced with the question of how to rebuild her life. After being asked by her then-coach what she would do if she did not have to follow any societal expectations, she said: “I would be a singer. I was too scared to even imagine being a good singer and it being even possible, but I think that conversation planted a seed that kept growing. Now, it felt like I had a second chance at life, so I felt like I had to do it now for myself. After that, it became an obsession. My music is written for that girl in bed who wasn't able to do anything to tell her story, but also it is a story of power for myself but also for other people.”
MAYA MARIA at the site of the Interview: Mahalo. Photographed by the author. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement is intended.
Music has a cathartic quality, an incredible ability to heal the heart, the mind, the soul, and the spirit. What does music mean to you, and what has it helped heal?
Maya asserts: “First and foremost, using my voice and singing is therapeutic. As a kid, I had a bit of aggression issues, and people didn't know what to do with it because I was a very sweet kid, but I would be so emotional, sensitive, and overstimulated, and that would result in me having outbursts.” To cope, Maya would let out her emotions vocally by screaming, which eventually became singing. “I realized that I could let out my frustration that way, but it also helped control my breathing. Singing is my way of expressing things I feel that I can't always share. It’s a way of navigating and making it manageable.” Throughout her music, she emphasizes sound and experience followed by “finding words that embody the sound. So the words tell the story, but for me, sound comes first; it comes more naturally.”
The music-making process often shapes how music turns out. What does it look like for you?
In the process of working on her EP, Maya revealed that it took her some time to come to the mental space necessary to unpack her experiences and that it was made “bearable” by simultaneously going to therapy. Once ready, she describes how her team was instrumental in a “beautiful, but confronting” process. “We started with a writing camp at my parents' home in Terschelling. We built a home studio, and we went exploring. My manager would read one chapter from Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act every day to set an intention. During these days, we made demos, and we called them seeds. We would plant a lot of seeds. Afterwards, I would look back and see what still spoke to us and could grow to become actual songs. But that was a very, very special time for me because it was the first time where I felt I didn't have to have this pressure doing something that had to be good. In those days, we were just existing. So that's how we started.”
Available on MAYA MARIA’s Instagram. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement is intended.
“Even now, we'll just be sitting on the floor in the studio with low lights and candles and some incense. And then we'll be making sounds until something feels special, and we build from that. Once we have a melody, the puzzle starts. For some songs in this EP, I picked diary pages and cut out specific lines. I put them in a box. I would lay them on the floor and kind of see, okay, this is about this part of my story and goes with that song.”
