Mifarma exists in the quiet aftermath — the place where experiences haven’t resolved into neat narratives and healing hasn’t yet taken shape. Created by Danielle Alma Ravitzki in collaboration with producer Carmen Rizzo, the album lives between electronic and acoustic worlds, using restraint, intimacy, and silence as deliberate tools rather than aesthetic choices. Instead of offering a redemptive arc, Mifarma documents trauma processing in real time, grounding its emotional weight in physical sensation, fragmented memory, and unresolved stillness. In this conversation, Ravitzki speaks candidly about vulnerability, minimalism, and resisting catharsis, unpacking how Mifarma became less a story about recovery and more an honest record of survival as it unfolds.
The album sits in this space between electronic and acoustic elements—how did you and Carmen Rizzo approach finding that balance, and were there moments where you had to pull back from either side?
Finding the balance between electronic and acoustic elements was really an intuitive process for both Carmen and me. We were committed to creating a sound world that felt alive — something that breathed, even in its electronic moments, and something that pulsed, even in its most acoustic textures. Carmen has this incredible ability to build electronic landscapes that are textured and emotionally charged rather than cold or mechanical. At the same time, I come from a background where the voice and organic instruments carry the emotional weight.
So the balance really emerged from our conversations about storytelling: what does the song want? What emotional temperature should it have? There were absolutely moments when we had to pull back from both sides. Sometimes the electronic layers felt too heavy and risked overwhelming the vulnerability of the vocal. Other times the acoustic parts felt too safe or too clean, and we pushed them into a more fragmented, processed space to match the psychological terrain of the song. We kept stripping things back until every element was serving the emotional core. In the end, that tension between the synthetic and the organic became part of the narrative of the album itself — mirroring themes of trauma, memory, dissociation, and embodiment.
Your vocals feel incredibly intimate, almost uncomfortably close. What was the recording process like, and did you have to work to achieve that stripped-down vulnerability or did it come naturally?
The intimacy of the vocals was very intentional, but it also came from a very real place. Carmen and I worked with extremely close-mic’d setups — you can hear the breath, the cracks, even moments where the voice feels like it’s about to disappear. We wanted the listener to feel like they were in the room with me, or even inside my internal monologue.
The vulnerability wasn’t something I had to perform. If anything, I had to learn not to hide. Many of the songs deal with sexual trauma, silence, dissociation, and private parts of the self. My instinct at first was to control the voice, to polish it. My mentor, Shara Nova, encouraged me to let the imperfections stay — the trembling, the uneven breath, the whispers. Those became the emotional architecture of the album. Singing that close felt confrontational at times, but the songs needed that level of honesty. The stripped-down quality isn’t an effect we added; it’s a space we allowed to exist.
The album doesn’t follow typical narrative arcs of recovery or redemption. Was that a conscious decision from the start, or did the songs reveal that structure as you were creating them?
That was a conscious decision, but it was also something the songs insisted on. Traditional recovery narratives often feel dishonest to me. Real recovery isn’t linear — it loops, stalls, contradicts itself. From the beginning, I didn’t want to impose a redemptive storyline on experiences that never unfolded that way in my life.
Each song became its own psychological moment — a fragment of memory, an aftershock, a dissociated whisper. Together, they form a map of survival rather than a story of triumph. The album lives in the space after the event, in the silence where you’re still trying to understand what happened. The absence of redemption honors the complexity of trauma instead of forcing it into a tidy arc.
You use very concrete, physical imagery rather than abstract metaphors. Can you talk about why grounding the album in tangible details felt important?
Trauma lives in the body, not in abstraction. I remember sensations, textures, sounds — how something touched my skin — more clearly than metaphor. Concrete imagery holds emotional truth more honestly.
Abstract metaphors can create distance and make difficult experiences more palatable. I didn’t want that. Using tangible details was my way of speaking bluntly, of refusing to soften what happened. The body remembers in literal terms, and I wanted the album to honor that kind of memory — unfiltered and real.
Several tracks have a circular quality, like they’re revisiting the same emotional territory from different angles. How did you approach sequencing to make that repetition purposeful rather than redundant?
That circular feeling is very intentional. Trauma processing is cyclical — you revisit the same emotional territory again and again, sometimes unchanged, sometimes from a new angle.
In sequencing the album, the goal wasn’t repetition but evolution, or sometimes refusal to evolve. Each return shifts slightly — maybe the voice is more distant, the production more fractured, or there’s a new layer of clarity or numbness. The repetition reflects psychological loops. It’s recognition, not redundancy.
The restraint throughout the album is striking—there are no big cathartic moments or dramatic releases. Was it difficult to resist those impulses, or was holding back always part of the vision?
Holding back was always part of the emotional architecture. Most trauma narratives center on catharsis, but the truth is that most survival happens quietly — in held breath, in pauses, in what goes unsaid.
There were moments when I felt pulled toward dramatic release, because that’s what we expect as listeners. But it would have felt dishonest. This album lives in suspended emotion, where everything is charged but unresolved. The restraint isn’t absence — it’s truth.
What role did silence and space play in your creative process? Were there moments where you had to fight to keep things minimal?
Silence and space functioned as instruments. Much of the emotional world I’m writing from exists in pauses, dissociation, and stillness. I wanted that to be audible.
There were moments where we had to protect that minimalism. It’s tempting to add layers for fullness, but every time we did, it pulled the songs away from their truth. Carmen understands how to let tension come from what’s missing rather than what’s present. The quiet is where the vulnerability lives.
The album documents trauma processing in real time rather than retrospectively. How did you navigate the vulnerability of releasing something so unresolved?
Releasing something unresolved was one of the hardest parts, but also the point. Most trauma stories are told in hindsight, once clarity arrives — but often there is no clarity. You’re inside the fog.
I wasn’t offering lessons or closure. I was documenting confusion, looping thoughts, silence, dissociation in real time. Sharing from that place is uncomfortable because you’re exposed before you feel finished. But it felt necessary. The album doesn’t offer closure because I didn’t have closure, and I didn’t want to perform one.
Were there any songs or moments that felt too raw to include, where you had to draw a line between honesty and overexposure?
Nothing on this record felt too exposed to include. I believe deeply in naming things directly and refusing to hide behind metaphor. For me, honesty is therapeutic.
People connect to work that hasn’t been sanitized. Mutual honesty creates space — I tell the truth of my experience, and it allows others to face their own. I’m also working on my next record with Shara Nova, and the lyrics go even deeper. This album was the beginning, not the limit.
Now that the album is out in the world, how does it feel to have people living with these deeply personal songs? Has the experience of sharing Mifarma changed your relationship to the material?
It’s strange and beautiful knowing these songs are living in other people’s lives. They started as something deeply private, almost like journal entries, and now they’ve become shared.
That hasn’t felt frightening — it’s felt grounding. Honesty creates connection. Hearing people recognize themselves in the songs makes the vulnerability worthwhile. The album no longer feels like a wound; it feels like a conversation. Releasing Mifarma made me braver. People don’t retreat from honesty — they move toward it.
