TaniA Kyllikki: "It’s the sound of me refusing to stay quiet or complacent"
For TaniA Kyllikki, music is a space for expression, strength and connection. Through her voice and songwriting, she transforms her experiences into stories that resonate with listeners. The result is a musical world where soul sensibilities, faith and a desire to connect run through both her most intimate ballads and her electronic productions.
Her independent creative journey unfolds at home, where she writes melodies and vocal arrangements while her husband and collaborator, Rynellton, builds the instrumentation around her ideas. This creative autonomy extends to music videos and photography, finding a natural home in their label, Awe Inspiring Records.
With “HUMAN”, this vision meets the energy of techno-house and the expressive power of a voice rooted in gospel and soul. At its heart lies an invitation to compassion: to look beyond our differences and recognise the vulnerability we share. This meeting of personal experience and shared emotion is where our conversation with TaniA begins.
"HUMAN" began with a Facebook post inspired by the division and hostility you were seeing online. At what point did you realise those thoughts needed to become a song, and what message did you most want listeners to take from it?
Honestly, I was just sitting there scrolling, and the sheer amount of bickering and hatred between people of different cultures and backgrounds online was making me feel physically heavy. I’m a sensitive person, I absorb everything. I started typing out this big post on Facebook to vent, but halfway through, I just stopped. I looked at my husband, Rynellton, and said, "This isn't just a post. This needs to be a song." I didn't want to lecture anyone; I just wanted to write a massive reality check. At the end of the day, if you strip away the screens, the backgrounds, and the opinions, we all bleed the same, cry the same, and need the same basic compassion. That's the heart of it.
With "HUMAN", you bring together gospel-soul vocals, emotional storytelling and techno-house production. What inspired you to explore this unexpected combination of sounds, and how did you and Rynellton shape that balance in the studio?
People always try to box you into a specific genre, but I’ve always found that incredibly boring. I have deep gospel and soul roots, but for this track, the emotion needed something that felt alive and moving. I went to Rynellton and said, "Hear me out, let's put these raw, heavy vocals over a proper house beat." In the studio, it was all about trial and error. We didn't want the electronic beats to swallow up the vocal runs or the storytelling. It was a delicate dance of keeping the music high-energy enough for people to dance to, while keeping the vocal space intimate enough that you could still feel the ache in my voice.
Your creative partnership with Rynellton seems very instinctive, often beginning with your vocal melodies before the instrumentation is built around them. How has working together influenced the way your sound has evolved over the years?
We're husband and wife, so there’s zero ego when we create. I usually get a melody stuck in my head, there's literally a constant music box playing in my brain, and I’ll just sing it directly into a voice memo on my phone. Rynellton knows me inside out, so he takes those raw, unstructured vocal clips and builds entire worlds around them. Over the years, because we trust each other completely, we’ve stopped playing it safe. We don't care about what the industry expects an indie artist to sound like anymore. We just follow the raw emotion, which has allowed our music to become a lot bolder and completely uninhibited.
Much of your recent music has been created from a bedroom setup while you have faced significant personal and health challenges. Has working within those limitations changed the way you approach songwriting or made your connection with music even stronger?
The last couple of years have been incredibly brutal on my body, dealing with endless Urosepsis UTI / Kidney infections, emergency surgeries for my uterus, miscarriages, autoimmune disease flare ups, and moments where things were touch-and-go. I even flatlined. Grateful to God to still be here. So, when you're physically trapped in a room and fighting your own body on a daily basis, you don't have the energy to fake anything. It’s also been a lonely and exhausting experience. People you thought would be there for you in your battles, ended up ghosting me. But in these moments I also got closer to God. I appreciate life on a much deeper level now. And even though having chronic illnesses is a taxing reality for myself and millions of others around the world, it’s definitely humbled me more.
Our bedroom became our studio and our absolute lifeline. Songwriting changed because it became pure survival, it was the only place I could put my pain, my frustration, and my hope. Although it’s been incredible when I’ve had moments of recording in a world class studio, it has taught me that you don't need a fancy million-pound studio to make something powerful. Real life, raw grit, and an unbroken spirit can be recorded anywhere if you have the skill and the courage to make it happen. And to be honest when I record in my home studio, I give just as much professionalism as I have when I’ve recorded in major recording studios.
"HUMAN" introduces another side of what listeners can expect from your forthcoming album FREE-SPIRITED. How does this single represent the direction and spirit of the album, and what can we expect from this next chapter of your music?
"HUMAN" wasn't even supposed to be on the album! But after everything I went through, writing it felt like a total breakthrough, so it had to be included. The album title FREE-SPIRITED is exactly what it sounds like, it’s me breaking out of every cage, whether that’s industry expectations, genre limits, or the physical limitations of my health. This single is the perfect teaser because it proves I’m not sticking to one lane. In this next chapter, you can expect the absolute unexpected. There are deeply emotional ballads, but there are also wild, boundary-pushing dance tracks. It’s the sound of me refusing to stay quiet or complacent.
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