Káryyn grew up between the States and Syria with her mom and “badass classical guitar player” dad. (He was a doctor by day.) In her youth, for three months a year, Syria was young Káryyn’s anchor, a second home. Her Syrian-based relatives lived in Aleppo and the nearby city of Idlib, where they owned a hotel and restaurant before ISIS took over in 2011. After the country’s civil war spread to the capital, it became too dangerous for her to return. “I thought I’d get married there,” she tells me. “It is devastating to know that there’s an entire place in this sepia tone in my mind, dusty and bustling, that is gone.”

She moved from Alabama to Indiana as a baby, and then, at age 10, to L.A., where she lives today. By her teens, she was writing hyperactive, narrative folk songs; her singing was inspired by Arabic music, and she says she played her guitar “like a machete.” This volatile oeuvre eventually won her an unlikely sit-down with a high-profile record label. “They made me listen to the Beatles for an hour,” Káryyn recalls, raising both eyebrows. “They told me, ‘You should do this, and then that to get here.’ I literally left. My sister was waiting for me outside, like, ‘That’s your way in! You have to go!’ I was like, ‘No, I’m going to do my own thing.’”

She did. What she calls a “reservoir of confidence” buoyed her to young adulthood, and at 16, she quit high school and transferred to Mills College in the Bay Area. A class called Women in Creative Music, tutored by the electronic composer Pauline Oliveros, inspired her to abandon medical studies. She made music by smashing light bulbs, manipulating tapes, and mastering various samplers and programming units. Her anarchic shows—fusing punk, electronic, and jazz—were a hit, at least among the 40 or so people who showed up. (Part of the reason she declines to publicize her full name, it seems, is to avoid detection of music from this period in her 20s.) Again, labels gathered. And again, something in Káryyn snapped. “One day, it was like, ‘Oh, I’m very deeply unhappy,’” she recalls.

Káryyn: "Binary" (via SoundCloud)

Unable to stop creating, she privately experimented with various electronic instruments, tools to make unstable beats and contort her larynx. In 2011, she decamped to her sister’s unoccupied house in Cherry Valley, N.Y., three hours from New York City and a half hour from the nearest store. She entered a hermetic state lasting roughly 18 months, sustained by odd projects making music for friends’ films. Then she met a guy, and for a couple of years, they lived together in Berlin.

While still protective of her private compositions, Káryyn began to doubt the resolve of her musical retirement. It was in the German capital that a friend drafted her to contribute to an opera called Of Light. Early on, a co-composer dropped out, leaving Káryyn to create the score alone. It proved liberating, a stage for a reawakening. She presented her songs at an early workshop in L.A. Having grown accustomed to a solitary style of singing, she says, it was “the first time I unleashed my voice.”

Last summer, Of Light was finally staged in Iceland. One of the 300 attendees was Björk, an artist to whom Káryyn, in her previous incarnation as a solo artist, had drawn so many comparisons she began to doubt her originality. “The irony is, I went on this long journey to find my voice,” Káryyn says. “And at the first performance, [Bjork] comes up to me out of nowhere, like, ‘I was so moved—this was like rebirth.’ I’m looking at her face going, ‘Is this real? Look at her eyeliner! It’s so pretty!’ It felt like the heroine’s journey. What a funny, beautiful cosmic joke.”