Aesop.

In May, the electronic producer/singer/songwriter TALA released The Duchess, a stellar three-song debut EP that we haven't been able to stop playing since. Here, the 25-year-old self-described "unsettled soul" shares her story so far.

I grew up in a town called Kingston in South London. It was green and quite chilled out — nothing ever really happened there. At my small, Catholic girls’ school, music was a big escape for me. I started classical training on piano when I was seven and would write songs and play music when I was bored.

My dad, who was Iranian and owned a Persian restaurant, was also a musician and the house was always a bit mad with sitars and drums all around. He’d be playing some Iranian or Arabic music in one room, while my mom, who’s English, would have cheesy pop music like Michael Ball playing in another. This was in the early to mid 2000s around the same time that the teenagers in my town were getting into UK garage. For me it was natural to start pulling all of those things together.

The first original music I wrote was a piano composition when I was 12 called something corny like “Dreams.” But when I was 13, a friend of mine gave me a music production software program called Reason. I was like, “Wow, I can do anything now!” That was the start of it.

I think my sound developed sort of naturally just by me making tunes in my bedroom for quite a while. Eventually, I just kind of found something that felt like it was working.