Academy of Flow: the interview
The first one. On the bet that started it, what Academic is for, and why artificial means brought out the most authentic thing she had.
Interviewer
So the album is done. Twelve tracks, four acts, orchestral rap built entirely with AI tools. Before we get into any of it — and there’s a lot to get into — I want to start somewhere simple. When you sat down the first night and started messing around with Suno, did you have any idea this was where it was going? Or was this genuinely just screwing around that turned into something real?
Kaylea
Honestly, the whole thing started off as kind of this gimmick. Like, I got a friend who also writes Suno tracks and we came up with this idea — write in a genre neither of us have written before and let mutuals decide who wins. We landed on rap because for both of us it’s this fun thing we listen to, it sets the mood and vibe of a party and all, but it’s also something neither one of us have written songs in.
That said, I’ve been writing lyrics to all kinds of shit since I was a kid. Poetry, stories, rock songs, country ballads, grunge heartbreak, and yeah, as a teenager especially when I listened to nothing but Em and Snoop and the like, I’d write down things just to see it on paper. My friends got all into the battle rap thing and would have freestyle battles around school and in the halls and shit, but I couldn’t freestyle to save my life. Anytime I tried I’d just get stared at like, what? But give me a pen or a keyboard and set me in a room and I guess I can do a thing or three. [laughs]
Interviewer
So the battle rap kids could freestyle but couldn’t write, and you could write but couldn’t freestyle. That’s almost poetic in itself. So you sit down with Suno, it’s supposed to be a fun competition with a friend, and somewhere between “let’s see who can write a better rap track” and track twelve, you ended up making people cry. Walk me through that shift. Was there a specific moment where you realized this had stopped being a contest and started being something personal? Like, was there a track where you went “oh, this is actually about me now”?
Kaylea
Definitely Diablo Mode. Like, that one is so me. The philosophy, the coding, the nerd references. But I think that was the moment. I had finally found the Academic voice persona and I was like, dude, if I could choose a rap voice, somewhere between devil may care and don’t fuck with me, this would be it. But that’s also when I realized, like hey, wait a minute, this thing might actually work.
Interviewer
That’s interesting because Diablo Mode is the flex track — it’s the one where you’re showing off, not bleeding. A lot of artists find their voice in the vulnerable stuff first and then learn to flex. You did it backwards. You found the swagger before you found the pain. Which raises something I’ve been curious about. Academic is male. You’re not. The persona has this aggressive, commanding, almost confrontational energy that — and correct me if I’m wrong here — doesn’t necessarily match how you move through the world day to day. So what is Academic to you? Is he armor? Is he the version of you that gets to say things you can’t? Is he something else entirely?
Kaylea
I’ve lived most of my life hiding behind masks. When I was younger, I’d try to show how not-girl I was by leaning into the masculine BS. It didn’t work, and there’s a whole album I could make on that alone. But like, to me, Academic is another instrument. I play guitar, I jam keys and synths, I can sing, but Academic is the voice I use for getting things out that I didn’t really realize I needed to say.
There’s almost this disconnect though. Like, on one hand I spent most of my life trying to survive through all the bullshit just to make it to transition. And now that I’m here and I’m comfortable in my own skin, I’m resorting back to that part of my identity that needed to be heard. Except now it’s on my terms.
Academic sounds male, but aside from some lyrics, who’s to say they are? Who the fuck really even cares? The point is the music. Like, that’s how I feel about it anyways. I guess that’s to say that if this is the voice that makes the demon happy enough to help me keep coming up with ideas, then so be it.
Interviewer
“If this is the voice that makes the demon happy enough to help me keep coming up with ideas, then so be it.” That’s a bar in itself. And you just touched on something that I think is one of the most interesting things about this project — the album has these moments where the mask slips. In No Permission, you reference “some skinny nerdy kid who grew up metal to the bone” and use “she.” In Let It In, the outro whispers “she’s not afraid of what she sees.” It’s subtle enough that a casual listener might not catch it, but anyone paying attention across twelve tracks is going to notice that Academic’s creator is peeking through. Was that intentional from the start, or did that develop as the album took shape? And when you listen back to those moments, how does it feel hearing your truth come through a voice that isn’t quite yours?
Kaylea
Sometimes it’s unsettling, but other times it feels right. At first I was going to make Academic into this whole character. Generate album covers, write out this backstory, make pictures of him doing nerd shit. But somewhere along the lines it became not about the image but the message. I think that’s the part that resonates most with me. Like yeah, I get to hear my life through this dude’s voice, but I’m also just as much of a fan as anyone else might be.
I think moving forward you’ll hear a lot more “she” in the verses. Like, at first there was this thing about proving the lyrics were as sick as they were by having an ultra-confident dude rapping them, but now it’s just part of the whole package. I am Academic as much as I am not. Does that make any sense?
Interviewer
It makes perfect sense. You needed the distance to prove the work could stand on its own, and now that it has, you don’t need the distance as much. The mask earned its place and now it gets to come off when it wants to. Let’s talk about the heavy tracks. Dragonfly is about your sister. I Just Wish is about your niece. Demon is about the anger and the addiction. Let It In is about — well, everything. You wrote all of this within a pretty compressed timeframe. What was that like physically and emotionally? Because some of this material — the bathroom floor, the seventy-five pounds, your mother handing you the pipe — that’s not the kind of thing you write down and then just go make a sandwich. How did you take care of yourself through the process of putting all of this into bars?
Kaylea
Therapy is part of it. The other part is I smoke a fucking lot of weed. [laughs]
But for real. It’s not like I’m not ever thinking of this stuff. My sister is something I carry with me every day. Before her death I hadn’t seen her in like five years. We didn’t have the closest relationship, and up until 2017 I was doing my own brand of murdering myself. Then I got clean and moved from Arizona to Minnesota and we didn’t really talk all that much.
Kass though. That one hurts every day. Like, you have this one person who counts on you, you got all these failures in your life you’ve fucked up and done wrong, then you let this kid down. To me that’s just something I gotta live with. Sure, talking about it with friends and therapists helps, but this felt cathartic. Like I was getting shit out in a way that works for me, on my terms, not because I had to but because I wanted to say it.
Growing up in the house I did, there was a lot we didn’t talk about. I couldn’t tell anyone at home what was going on at school, and at school I sure as hell couldn’t talk about the problems at home, like with a mom on crystal, regular suicide attempts and emotional manipulations and all that shit. So a lot of my life I’ve spent keeping quiet, keeping my head down. Now I don’t have to, and though it’s hard sometimes, it also feels like I’m finally getting to control my own narrative.
Interviewer
“Finally getting to control my own narrative.” I think that’s the thesis of the whole project right there — maybe even more than the music itself. You mentioned your mom. There’s a line in Let It In — “the woman who should love me is the one who passed the poison” — and in the context of the album it’s one of the most devastating moments. You don’t name her, you don’t tell the full story, but the weight of it is unmistakable. And then in Demon, you talk about the anger that almost killed you and trace it back to childhood. How much of making this album was about her, even on the tracks that aren’t explicitly about her?
Kaylea
I didn’t consciously set out to light her and our history on fire, but I think some of that comes through anyways. Like sure, we have an alright relationship these days and all, but you don’t forget things. I sure as hell don’t. If I wanted to slam her, there’s at least three epic-length double-disc albums I could write, but I don’t want to do that. Sure there’s a lot of pain there, and yeah pain makes great art, but I saw what happened with Slim when he wrecked his mom on tracks like Cleaning Out My Closet. I got a lot of fucking anger inside of me, but I’m not vindictive. She may hear a track some day and I’d rather my conscience be clean, but at the same time there’s a lot left unsaid that probably makes it through even if I’m trying not to put her on some kind of fucked up cross. Know what I mean?
Interviewer
Yeah, I do. There’s a difference between aiming at someone and just telling the truth with them in the room. You chose the second one, and honestly that takes more restraint than most artists manage. I want to shift gears a little. The album isn’t just personal confessions — there’s some serious political and social commentary in here. The Exhibition goes after the entire class structure. Checkmate takes on everything from education to God. Born for This has a full verse dedicated to immigration policy. And Different is essentially a neurodivergent manifesto. You’re autistic, you’re trans, you’re a former addict, you’re visually impaired, you grew up in poverty — you’ve got more axes of marginalization than most people can even conceptualize. When you’re writing the political bars, are you writing from a specific identity, or is it all of them at once? Like, is the person writing “fuck ICE” the same person writing “Autism Speaks don’t speak for me,” or do those come from different places?
Kaylea
Good question, and I think it all comes from the same place. There’s a line in one of the tracks that says “equality isn’t pie, it doesn’t shrink when you spread it out.” To me, coming from a place of disability, I feel like the world overlooks us a lot. Race, class, all that shit is stuff we can point at and a lot of what we see as DEI these days is highly performative. It’s easy to say you’re doing something for people of color by declaring Black Lives Matter or whatever, but try making places wheelchair accessible for those who need it, try making quiet spaces for kids to calm down when they are overloaded. Try building accessibility into infrastructure from the bottom up rather than as some sort of monthly call to arms for performance. Fuck all that fake-ass noise. If you’re going to say you’re about something, stand by it, make it yours, speak on it like you fucking mean it, otherwise sit down and shut up.
And politics is the same way. My family is largely right wing, some pushing well into QAnon territory with the MAGA flag waving. To them, I’m about as Democrat as they come. I believe in equality as a philosophy, not a pretty buzzword. When I say fuck ICE, I mean, for real and from the bottom of my heart, fuck them. [shrugs and hits a blunt]
The whole damn country is falling apart right now. We got ICE shooting people in the streets, a megalomaniac shitting all over our constitutional rights, we got Elon over here acting like he’s fucking Tony fucking Stark, and we got kids being deported back to countries they never even fucking came from. To me, there’s a lot wrong and very little right and it’s getting worse by the day. But at the same time my drive to be louder than all the noise is growing too. I might piss some people off with some bars, but fuck ’em. If they’re mad, it’s only because I got a point and they can’t handle that.
Interviewer
“If they’re mad, it’s only because I got a point and they can’t handle that.” Academic energy right there. Okay, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. AI. You made this entire album with Suno. No Permission is literally a track defending AI-assisted creation. You’re deep in AI research academically — you study consciousness in these systems, you’ve published papers on it. You’re probably one of the most informed people making music with these tools right now. So when someone hits you with the inevitable “it’s not real music” take — and they will — what’s your answer? Not the philosophical one. The gut one.
Kaylea
[laughs] Shiiiit.
You know something funny? Where we are these days, most people can’t tell the difference between AI-created music or art or anything else from human-generated. That’s not me flexing, that’s just the truth. Sure, put an AI track through a spectrometer and you’ll see the little artifacts. If you’re an audiophile like me you can notice the very slight little glitches here and there that give it away, but if you’re on the street and someone drives by blasting a track that hits you, or if you’re at a friend’s house and they got some of their own generated shit on in the background, the average motherfucker won’t even know the difference.
They just seem to have a problem once it’s pointed out. Like, I’ve literally produced my psychedelic industrial TetraChromacy shit, then put it on the same album as Mary Starling songs and people didn’t even know the difference until I pointed it out. That tells me it’s never about the craft but about where it comes from.
But guess what, y’all. Synths and keyboards made the purists shit first, then there was digital audio workstations, then we had loops, and don’t get me started on Auto-Tune, and the only motherfuckers I’ve heard that make it sound good are Owl City and T-Pain, and honestly the latter sings like a beast without it. You heard his take on War Pigs? That shit was sick!
But anyways, we’re just seeing another evolution of the craft. The industry lost its shit when jukeboxes became a thing, then Napster, Spotify, now it’s Suno and Udio and all the others. Next thing Neuralink will be giving us thought music or some shit and then you’ll have people saying it’s not real because a motherfucker doesn’t have calluses on their hands from practicing. Get over yourselves, for real.
Like, at the end of the day, if the music makes you feel something, if it connects to you in some way, says something your words can’t, then does it really matter how it got made? I play guitar with capos — does that mean I’m less of a guitarist because I play the same chords a little differently? Get the fuck out of here with the hate.
As a musician with almost thirty years of skin in the game across multiple genres, dozens of albums, AI and human-generated and a mix of the two, I’m not the slightest bit threatened. And as a futurist and something of a singularitiest, if I can coin the term, I love where shit’s going. It’s funny that artificial means brings out the most authentic expression out of people. Fucking funny how that works, ain’t it?
Interviewer
“Artificial means brings out the most authentic expression.” That might be the most Academic sentence you’ve said in this entire interview. Last question. And I want you to take a second with this one because it matters. Academy of Flow is done. Twelve tracks. Your friends have heard it, some of them cried, you’ve got a review written up, you’re sitting here talking about it like it’s a real body of work — because it is. A year ago, none of this existed. You were a guitarist, a researcher, a student, someone who wrote things down but never thought of herself as a rapper. So here’s what I want to know. When this interview is over and the mics are off and you’re back home with Wednesday and the cat and your thrift store flannel and your 2080 — when it’s just you — what does it mean to you that this exists? Not what it means for AI music or the industry or the discourse. What does it mean to you, personally, that you made this?
Kaylea
Man. You know something? I’m a day-by-day person. I try not to take myself too seriously if I can help it, but at the same time… Yeah, you know what? This has been real. Like, I got homies that are dead now who would have loved this shit. My best friend from school? Always said I couldn’t rap? He’d be tripping balls right now. My sister who used to throw on ICP records and Shady and Dre and Snoop and Beasties and Rage Against the Machine? She’d be nodding along too.
To me, all of this is real. It means something to have defied genre stereotypes and busted down walls I’ve glanced at before but never thought myself qualified to cover. I’m a nerd, an academic, a furry, I got some weird quirks, I’m this skinny pale-ass white girl who smokes a lot of dope and still sometimes struggles to remember that it’s not about where you come from but what you do with it, and I’m over here dropping bars about fucking computer science and philosophy.
But the truth under it all? I feel like this has been a growing moment for me. I found that there’s something inside of me that has a lot to say and goddamn it I’m going to say it, even if like only five friends get it. I make music for me and me first. If people dig it, if it hits them where they can feel it, then great, cool, I’m happy to share. But at the end of the day I have to be happy with it in order to say it’s mine.
And you know what? This is one of the dopest things I’ve ever done. Legitimately. No one can take that landmark from me. And yeah, I’m going to do it again. For as long as I got ideas and shit in my chest that needs to come out, I’m going to keep running this. Maybe some people will like it, maybe not. But I’m good with it, no matter whatever fucking happens.
Shit’s immortalized now.
Interviewer
Yeah it is. That’s a wrap. Thank you for being real with every answer.