Isabella Bustanoby, the artist behind pierre, talks the way some people dream—they bridge topical divides with ease, one thought flowing into another across disciplines and space. During our conversation about her debut album, Faux Ghost, we moved from Suzuki pedagogy to theoretical and experimental physics, from medieval revivalism to tarot, from nuclear apocalypse dreams to the emotional landscape of Los Angeles. 

Released last fall, Faux Ghost gathers songs written over nearly a decade into a meditation on fate, consequence, memory, and recurrence. It’s a world full of whispered recordings, sonic layers, and fragments of resurfacing past lives. Speaking with Bustanoby, it’s clear that the album’s sprawling, spiraling emotional and theoretical logic is simply the way they see the world, rather than a retroactive construction.

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CAROLINE:  First, could you just tell me a little bit about your musical background? Where did you get started?

ISABELLA: I started on the violin when I was seven, and I wanted to play the violin because I was obsessed with Lord of the Rings, and loved the string-led themes in that soundtrack. I told my parents this, and that news then got to my grandmother, who, apparently, was a concert cellist? She also had another job, so I'm like, when did you have time to be a concert cellist? But whatever. Anyways, grandma was like, “Isabella wants to play the violin? I'll pay for lessons. We'll go to the best music school in Los Angeles.” I ended up going to this fancy community music school in LA, but they almost rejected me because I was seven and apparently that’s too old to start.

CAROLINE: It was an application-based thing? 

ISABELLA: You had to apply and they had to suss out your vibe.

CAROLINE: It was a seven-year-old vibe thing?

ISABELLA: Yeah, they wanted three and four-year-olds, that’s part of the pedagogy of the Suzuki method. When I started playing at seven I had a difficult relationship with it because I was older than the other kids I was in class with and they were zooming ahead in the repertoire material when my teacher wanted me to really dig into stuff. I had a hard time with practice and a hard time with this relationship with discipline that was apparently required to be a good musician. 

CAROLINE: Especially in the classical world, I'm sure.

ISABELLA: Yeah, but I really loved it. I would get really frustrated and I'd sit on the front porch in tears as a kid being like, I don't want to practice, I don't want to practice. So my mom would come out and she'd say, “Well, we can stop. You know, you could stop playing if you wanted to. We won't pay for lessons anymore.” I knew I would miss it though, so I had to continue.

CAROLINE: I was gonna ask what kept you going. That fear of regret? Even at seven years old, you knew that. 

ISABELLA: My relationship with music really changed when I started playing viola. There was another music teacher at the school, and she asked if I wanted to play because I have really long arms, and that's useful for playing the viola. When I started, it felt like its own world. Violin has its own vibe—it's sort of rigorous and intense and perfectionist, but viola is really about creating the soft carpet for everyone to land on, like the glue for the harmony, the middle voices, the singing voices. 

CAROLINE: When did you start writing songs? 

ISABELLA: In high school I started learning how to play guitar because in my head, I was like, well, if I want to write music, I have to play the guitar. I can't write on the viola. So I started covering songs which at the time were a lot of Cranberries and a lot of Beatles, and I started stealing their chords and building from there. One of the oldest songs that I wrote, which was about ten years ago, is on the album I released in November, Faux Ghost. 

CAROLINE: Which one? 

ISABELLA: “Waiting.” Old, old song. 

CAROLINE: When I saw you perform the other week, at the very beginning you said something about this composer Bartok, and how he was stealing melodies from other composers that inspired him. I’m wondering if there's anyone you steal from. 

ISABELLA: Oh, totally. I can trace all my songs back to what I was covering at the time. So in “Waiting,” there's this great C chord that came right out of Linger, and the title track Faux Ghost has this repeating F/G chord bit in the beginning, and that was from Fleetwood Mac's Dreams. I love stealing. It's important because it shows how we're connected, and that, I think, is a much richer world to live in than one where everything is completely unique.  

CAROLINE: And I think it's important, too, that people will steal from you in the future, you know? Everything is intertextual. So tell me more about Faux Ghost. Tell me about how you wrote those songs.

ISABELLA: As in classic, first album spirit, it's everything in the kitchen sink that I had sort of been working on up to ten years back, so there are some songs in there that are really old, and then some songs I ended up writing recently in order to tie the whole thing together. The whole thing is lightly themed around guilt and reflection, and time traveling. I think the act of writing and playing music is a way of getting to meet yourself again at the version of you that got stuck in amber when you were writing it. So to be able to meet myself at sixteen through “Waiting,” or to meet myself at nineteen in “Bits,” was the ethos of the whole project. Before I started recording I thought about structuring an album around time as a spiral. You have a thing that happens, this big consequential act, and if it's in the middle of the spiral and you roll it back up again, maybe you hear the consequence of the event early in the album, and then maybe the prelude to this consequence is at the end.

CAROLINE: The form as a whole seems really important in telling the story that you're trying to tell. I was thinking a lot about dreams as I listened to Faux Ghost, are any of the songs based on dreams?

ISABELLA: Definitely. The big dream song is the third track, “The End.” In this dream I’m in Joshua Tree with my band and we're watching the sunset, sitting on a big picnic blanket and waiting for the stars to come out. Once the sun went down light started to appear again behind the mountains, so it looked like it was starting to rise again, but we realized that we weren't seeing the sun rise, we were seeing a massive explosion over Los Angeles—that a nuclear bomb had been dropped, and that what we were looking at was our imminent death. We were about to become eviscerated by this massive blast that was making its way towards us, so we thought, what are we gonna do? There's no stopping it, but we have each other and we have this blanket, so we all got underneath the blanket and just talked about how much we loved each other. That was it. That's all we had, was just sharing how grateful we were. “I love you, I love everyone, and I love everything.” When I woke up from that dream, I felt so, so changed and at peace with that optimist nihilist perspective. It all could vanish, so what are you gonna do with that? 

CAROLINE: Do you often have vivid dreams? 

ISABELLA: I used to have them a lot but they've kind of stopped. They usually show up when I'm in a relationship, romantic or otherwise, and something is going on that I don't want to engage with. 

CAROLINE: I feel like everybody has a kind of different theory about dreams. How do you process yours? 

ISABELLA: They used to be completely based on a narrative that was tangential to my life and I'd write it down if it was vivid enough to stick with me and then pick through it later. When I was in college, I was making a lot of art about imagery from my dreams. I kept drawing that Joshua Tree dream over and over again. Recently I've gotten a little convinced that when I speak to people in my dreams, I might be talking to that actual person. I've had weird dreams about people coming to me asking for information or wanting to have a certain conversation, and the next morning I'll wake up to a massive text from them being like, we need to talk. There's something about communication and truth that I think is especially prominent in my dreams right now, and I've been thinking through that alongside recording Faux Ghost, too.

CAROLINE: I'm also really interested in how you make sense of religion and God. Were you raised religious? 

ISABELLA: No. My father grew up Catholic and was definitely an atheist when I was a child, but my mom was convinced that I needed some kind of, not necessarily religious, but structured space that thinks about morality, so she started taking me to the Unitarian Church in Santa Monica. I did their religious education program in middle school, which was going and visiting other faiths, like going for your Sunday to the Sikh temple or to the Hindu temple. We went to Hare Krishna Center in Culver City, so we were learning that even though God or whatever this bigger entity is, has all these different definitions, the community felt the same. In eighth grade in the Unitarian Church you go through a coming of age ritual. After your two years of going to all of these different religious centers, churches, and temples, you spend the whole year thinking about what you believe in, and then at the end of the year you run a sermon with your other eighth graders for the church where you state what you believe in front of the congregation. Most of the kids said they were atheists in some sort of flavor, but I ended up writing about believing in myself. That’s what “Sermon Song” is about.

CAROLINE: I'm taking a literature class right now about dystopian novels. Have you heard of Brave New World? 

ISABELLA: I haven't read it but I'm familiar with the plot. It's where you take the drugs, right? 

CAROLINE: Yeah, you take the drugs, people are grown in labs, from birth everyone is conditioned to be perfectly suited for the kind of work they’re assigned. There's this complete absence of negative feeling and hardship in the world, and one of the central issues is that they’ve completely eliminated religion on the belief that science and religion are incompatible because science requires that you abandon some of these dogmatic moral structures that religion requires. I know you also studied physics in college, so I'm wondering what you think about that. 

ISABELLA: I felt like studying physics was a spiritual and religious practice. Completely. It was so much about investigating or wanting to get closer to truth, which, in my conception of religion, is a reason to pursue it. One thing about physics that I really loved was that it's a framework for holding unknowns as truths. There was a lot in physics that had to do with faith, because I think physics is more similar to philosophy than a lot of other sciences are. How it was presented to me is that, when you pursue physics further, you either become a theorist and you spend your life doing math, studying concepts, thinking about what hasn't been answered yet and developing some kind of language for realizing that, or you become an experimentalist and work with the theorists to create real-world tangible experiments to either prove or disprove theories. Most of the time these experimentalists will never prove what the theorists are thinking about, sometimes because it's not true, but most of the time because we just don't have the capability to prove it. But because it works in the math space, because it works within this totally theoretical truth that is math as a language, it is true, and we're gonna hold it to be true. And that relationship, I found fascinating. I worked as a researcher for two years in a more theoretical lab with this particle physicist. He started thinking about neuroscience, and he was trying to apply concepts of relativity to how the brain works, but he wasn’t going forward with the neuroscience in a way that an observational scientist, a biologist, or a neuroscientist would. He was like, “I hold this to be true, my math is correct. If our experiments don’t agree, that’s fine for right now.” It was so fascinating—the fact that that could exist in a lab at a big research institution, this conflict between what we know and what we don't know. It was holding space for the unknown that felt so faith-based. I guess to summarize all of it, there's a validated, quantifiable way to make the theoretical and the imaginary tangible, and it's through the language of math. Then in the recording process, it's in the sonic quality that you produce through manipulating sound, or letting it be as it was in the space that we recorded. 

CAROLINE: Tell me more about that. Tell me more about how you manipulate sound. 

ISABELLA: When I started recording the album, it was in my mom's office because she had GarageBand on her computer. That was exciting because I was recording in this very specific space, but then like inside of the DAW, you can totally manipulate how the sound works. I ended up working with some other people throughout the process, too. I ended up working with another producer and engineer, named Andrew Geroch, who's in LA. He's amazing, and he worked on the more rock, full-band oriented tunes. It was great to see a more legitimate recording situation for that, but I still worked with both. 

CAROLINE: In Faux Ghost you have all of these unintelligible whisper things going on. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. Are the voices you? Did you source them?

ISABELLA: I wanted to give the presence of other bodies or voices, but make it unintelligible enough that you're not really being asked to pay attention to the words. There are a lot of voice memos in there. I love recording voice memos and thoughts. When I was in college, I was going through my phone which I'd gotten from my mother. She used to audio record all of my violin lessons and then would forget to press stop on the audio recorder so she had hours and hours of us in the car, after these lessons, just talking. When I was in college, I went through a lot of them and pulled out these really interesting conversations or moments and I used a lot of those in my artwork and in the album. There are also recordings of me and my friend singing on his balcony in high school, or voice memos from being really drunk and mad at someone or sad, rereading poetry I had written. There was one audio recording, inside of “The End” from the night when I got home from a party where this kind of weird social thing happened between me and someone I used to be really close friends with. It was apparent to me that this person was pulling away and I felt really displaced both from that relationship and from L.A. as a whole, and then on my way home, I watched someone who was being chased by the cops purposefully run into the big wall next to the 10 freeway, and the cops that were chasing them didn't realize that that was the car they were chasing and kept going, because—

CAROLINE: Wait, they crashed their car?

ISABELLA: Yeah, they crashed their car into a wall underneath the freeway. It was so fast and I guess they were far enough away from the cop that it seemed like the car just joined the rest of the detritus that was underneath the freeway, so they kept going. It was me and two other cars on the road who saw this happen, at a red light. It was both devastating to see and also felt foreboding for the whole context of what I was already struggling with that day. I had to get out of Los Angeles. I had just come back from a week of being in New York and trying it on for size and I felt really welcomed here, and then I was driving in LA, which I hate, and I saw someone potentially off themselves to avoid consequence or repercussion. It was crazy. So I got home and turned on the recorder and talked about what I had seen the whole day, and that recording is in that song. 

CAROLINE: I am floored. I think that would change me, if I saw that. I don't know how I would make sense of it. And that's still so with you. 

ISABELLA: Yeah, that's never gonna leave. That whole day was wild. There was the party, and then earlier that day I was picking up my bass from a repair guy and I saw this person that I had stopped talking to in their car, a few cars down the road from me. I could see them in their rearview mirror and I happened to be playing a CD that they had given to me in my car. I just burst into tears upon realizing they were right there, not far away. 

CAROLINE: But you also had such a small glimpse of them, just in the mirror, not even their full body or anything. 

ISABELLA: But in LA, you know your car is an extension of you. So I was noticing the car, and the back door where it had been crushed in by a pole, and the license plate that our mutual friend gave him. I just turned up the CD to kind of drown out the feeling, but I was also wondering, is he looking for me out there?

CAROLINE: Really spiral of time. 

ISABELLA: Completely. You meet yourself at all these different points. 

CAROLINE: What do you make of all of this? I don’t know, it doesn't feel or sound like coincidence, but I don't know what to attribute days like that to other than coincidence or like process or time.

ISABELLA: It's meant. I think everything in the past is fate, and everything in the future is possible. And that's the framework we have to make sense of it. I love tarot. As an ex-physicist, I love tarot because it's an external framework to think about your life. If you're seeing and experiencing a day where you realize it’s all related and there's a narrative there, I think that's so meaningful. It's a way to make sense of what is just entropy.

CAROLINE: Have you had any other days like that? 

ISABELLA:  Probably. Especially days where I feel like I'm being haunted by things. I work with a lot of children now, so I feel like I'm being revisited sometimes by people in my life through watching a child be a child. We're all still that old, and we're all still ancient. There's a whole spectrum of time that you're always existing within a nebulous, moving, changing way. 

CAROLINE: What do you do for work now? What do you do with the kids? 

ISABELLA: I do lots of different kinds of art education work. I'm mostly a freelance educator at different art institutions. I work with the musical instrument department at the Met, putting on programming inside of the museum and playing and performing as a part of a lesson that I'm teaching to a class. I also do some in-school teaching, so I'll be the weird music teacher that comes to your kindergarten class once a week. We're learning songs, technique, learning to be confident with our bodies and our voices as performers. My boss told me that 80% of the job is that you show up and you're a totally different person than anyone they’ve ever met. You're a working artist, and you show the kids that that's a thing you can do with your life. You show them a relationship with art that they can have. It's a relationship you can have forever, with your art, your music. Your writing, your reading practice, these making practices are your friends for the rest of your life, even if you're not actively pursuing them. They frame everything that you do. 

CAROLINE: So, you're a musician, you're a writer, and you're a visual artist. How do those build on each other?

ISABELLA: I came into UCLA as a fine art major only, and from the fine art practice came this love of documentation and the archive and thinking about how to create your own language for describing an event or a place or a time. The way you do that gives it its meaning and creates the way that other people are gonna be able to understand this embodiment of the truth. Developing that language had a lot to do with the recording process and thinking about how to make recorded music, so those feel related pretty strongly. I'm going back now a little bit more to visual art. I didn't have space here when I first moved, but I just made some more space in my room. 

CAROLINE: What’s your medium? 

ISABELLA: I went into school as a painter and then ended up really enjoying doing video and sound work. I still really love drawing mediums, like charcoal, mark making. I think about mark making a lot, in terms of the whole recording process. This thing, the sound I'm making, it's not perfect, it's not exactly what's written, but the fact that it's alive and is the way that it sounded in the recorded moment is why it's meant to be in the final product. That’s where I ended up landing with all of the stuff I had recorded by myself for the last album. 

CAROLINE: I watched your music video for “Yellow.” Can you tell me a little about that? Did you do those animations?

ISABELLA: I had this idea for the end, I wanted it to be this big, overwhelming image. A big overwhelming emotion. I had some shots in mind and I realized I was gonna need someone else to hold the camera for a few of them, so I reached out to my friend from high school who lives here in the city and studied film at NYU. I was really heartened that they were like, “Yes, yes, like a million times, yes.” So we met a couple times and talked through the idea. They really liked the music, which I was so grateful for, and we just sort of started building this video out of one shoot that we did in Central Park. It was very collage-based. They would start editing things together, and then I would start adding some illustrations. I was doing a lot of illustrations inspired by some objects, like the map that I was researching to work with school groups when I was doing all these medieval art tours.

CAROLINE: Did you say medieval art tours? 

ISABELLA: Yeah, yeah.

CAROLINE: That’s so funny. Archer and I were talking with someone about how you were coming in to do this, and when she asked how we would describe your sound, we both said medieval. And she was like, “What does medieval mean?” And we just said medieval, not really sure how else to put it. 

ISABELLA: That's the thing that I've been thinking about a lot too, this medievalism, all these moments in history where people were looking at the Middle Ages and re-aestheticizing it and trying to figure out what it means for the present time. Like the 60s and 70s having their medieval revival period, moments in the 1800s where people were doing medieval revivalism, and it being used as a way to play, to tell sillier whimsical stories that still have a moral or emotional weight. You think of the medieval period as being a very religious and kind of stoic time with defined rules, especially in medieval Europe, where you have knights, chivalry, and all this business, but there's always an air of silliness. I was doing research into ren faires, and the person who started ren faires did it kind of out of a sense of counterculture, but also as a way to talk about radical thought in a time where radical thought was not allowed, in the middle of McCarthy era censorship, anti-Communist, anti-left leaning thought. She was really fascinated with where texts from the Renaissance or late medieval period like Shakespeare and all that business, can be used to tell moral stories, or tell radical stories, but with play. I've been really obsessed with medieval revival and aesthetics for that, and it's something you can pinpoint sonically. It has a sort of sound to it, even if it's hard to describe. It creates a kind of open-ended, austere, non-tethered, sometimes even non-serious context to think about a piece of art through. 

CAROLINE: Can you tell me about one or two particularly affirming moments in your career?

ISABELLA: 2022 was a huge year for me. It was the end of my college period, and I was supposed to graduate the spring of that year, but had started touring. In March I went to South by Southwest with Sloppy Jane, and then we went on this big support act tour, and then did a headlining tour at the end of fall. Luckily, it was sort of timing out well with my school schedule. I had my last final and then I got on a plane to Austin. When I was at South by Southwest, I felt a very explicit illustration of what the industry is like. There are three audiences in my assessment. First there are regular people who want to experience the festival, and see acts. They’re so happy to be there, they clock artists, they want to chat with them. Then, there are the industry people, some managers, external PR, venue management, all that business. They're usually drunk. I met a lot of drunk industry people or maybe those were the ones who stood out to me. I'm certain not everybody was intoxicated, but they were either having a great time, or they seemed really stressed out. And then the last group are the musicians, and they look tired as hell. They're looking for a place to smoke a cig, and get some water, and sit in the shade, because a lot of people are playing multiple shows a day, every day for the whole week or two-week period. I ended up meeting so many sweet people, just looking for water and shade. I remember sitting down and then my friend introduced me to this guy named Grant. So we were chatting and we realized we were both skipping college to be there. Becoming friends with Grant ended up being partly why I moved to New York, because he moved out here too and we were keeping in touch. I met a lot of other people that day that were just so kind and giving, and so passionate about what they do, and I realized I really like musicians. I really do. Oh my god, I was staying in the scariest motel that trip. I came into the motel and I was like, there's something on my pillow, is it a little chocolate? So I touched the blanket, and it skittered away. So slept in my clothes that night, heard people fighting or fucking next door.

CAROLINE: Hey, formative.

ISABELLA: You gotta be scared sometimes, right? Somehow there's tile on the floor and it smells like a carpet where a million cigarettes had been rubbed in. How? So even with all of that, everyone's tired, everyone's grumpy, and everyone really wants to be together. At South by Southwest, I was going and seeing other acts that I was becoming friends with, and wondering, what are they putting in the water in New York City? These people are amazing. I've played huge venues with acts that I was in. I've played a basement to two other people, a full spectrum of that, but to just do the thing, to still be playing, to say that I play every day—which is crazy, I would have never imagined that—that feels like success. It makes it all worthwhile. And I love musicians, being with other musicians. To make music is inherently a generous act because it's ephemeral, and you have to do it with other people. So you're all giving this thing for just a moment before it goes away.