In late September, the musician Hana Pestle, who goes by the mononym Hana, began an experimental project. She’d livestream herself making a new album—10-plus hours a day for four weeks, her creative struggles and triumphs laid out for everyone to see. Last week Pestle released that record, Hanadriel, a crystalline amalgam of dance-ready electronica and guitar overlaid with fluid, ethereal vocals.

The footage—which in its entirety would easily take hundreds of hours to watch—is at once pleasantly mundane and illuminating. What does it look like when Pestle makes music? She records a guitar track sitting in the office chair at her desk. She manipulates colorful bars of sound on her music-production software, faster than I, at least, can keep up with. She snacks on Kettle chips, sprays herself with Caudalie face mist. She stares at a notepad, singing snatches of songs to test out different lyrics. She greets her dog, Eevee, a rescue she suspects is a Korean Jindo mix, then walks off-camera to ask her boyfriend, Justin Bieber producer Michael Tucker, if he’s fed her yet.

It’s absorbing, but not because it promises a series of dramatic creative breakthroughs. Instead, you see a musician patiently building and testing, layer upon layer. Fragments of songs play on a loop; Pestle pauses the track, makes a modification, runs it again. It’s only hours later, when you see her listening to her work and dancing in her chair, that you blink and realize: That’s an actual song.

On the seventh day of recording, Pestle’s best friend and sometime collaborator Claire Boucher—otherwise known as Grimes—called. Pestle wanted to sample Boucher screaming; she held her phone up to the mic, and Boucher gave a short, trilling yelp. (“Oh, that was a terrible scream!” you can hear Boucher say.)

Pestle isn’t the first to take this unconventional approach to making a record: Grammy-winning jazz musician Esperanza Spalding spent 77 hours recording an album on Facebook Live in 2017. Like Spalding, Pestle went into the process cold, with no ideas jotted down in case of a creative emergency. But unlike Spalding, Pestle’s platform of choice was Twitch, the mega-popular website where people can livestream their video-game sessions.

With her waist-length purple hair, Pestle, 30, has an aesthetic sensibility well suited to the world of video games: The album art for Hanadriel—her go-to name for video-game characters, a combination of her own name and Galadriel, the Lord of the Rings elf portrayed on film by Cate Blanchett—features a futuristic backdrop, glowing blue flowers, and Pestle dressed in a gleaming, armor-like bodysuit that could have been designed by Iris van Herpen. The album’s sound often leans misty and epic, an assertive amplification of the style Pestle brought to her self-titled 2016 EP.