Adam Kaasa, the brains behind Bliss Carmxn, feels like a creative in the truest sense of the word.
By Graeme Smith
Originally from Edmonton, Canada and now based in London, it was a bout of homesickness that inspired the project. “I turned to Canadian poetry and literature, and one poet who stayed with me was William Bliss Carman. His work is full of rhythm, imagery, and a kind of queerness in its relationship to language and magic. He signed his poems ‘Bliss Carman,’ and the name felt like a thread I could carry forward into my own music.”
Poetic is certainly one word I would use to describe Bliss Carmxn’s latest single, Caffeine Orange, but there’s a lot else to it as well. With it, Kaasa has challenged the rules of convention and found them wanting. It’s nothing short of a reinvention of music, in my opinion.
Inspired by experiences of late nights and early mornings, Kaasa set about trying to communicate the feeling through song. “I was moving between so many states of being — day and night, research and writing, queer community and club culture, Adam Kaasa and Bliss Carmxn. Sometimes I’d be up at 5am writing, sometimes I’d just be getting home.
“That in-betweenness really shaped the song. The phrase ‘caffeine orange’ itself doesn’t exist. Is it a colour, a flavour, a feeling? For me it’s closer to an afterimage: that blurred, surreal impression that lingers in your body when you’re between sleeping and waking, or when a memory flashes up so strongly it feels physical. I wanted the track to hold that sensation — a dreamlike double exposure, a grasping at something you can almost touch but not quite.”
Compositionally, it starts in one place and ends up in quite another, picking up and discarding genres like novelty trinkets. A soft, folktronica opening eventually finds itself moving into house and dance. It shouldn’t work but it does and does it with a natural ease.
“The composition came from giving myself a set of surrealist rules,” Kaasa explains. “After an early morning walk on the Seven Sisters cliffs, I photographed a black-and-white mosaic and rotated the image four ways, turning each pattern into musical notation. The opening synth line you hear in the track — that chiming, bell-like motif — is literally derived from that pattern.”
Kaasa goes on to explain that the lyrics were created from a year of automatic writing. “Every day I wrote a single sentence in a folio calendar, never looking back at the day before. Over time it became this strange, surreal landscape I couldn’t fully remember but could mine for material.”
To bring it all together, Kaasa worked with producer Rookes (Jen Bulcraig), and they created what we hear today.
I simply love it. With the amount of music I’ve listened to for this blog, it’s difficult to surprise me. Caffeine Orange managed it.
Yet, that’s not the most surprising element of this story.
“Yes, my music is literally heading to the Moon, which still amazes me,” Kaasa shares. “Alongside my work as Bliss Carmxn, I’m also an academic at the Royal College of Art, where I co-lead a research group on art and outer space. Through that, I came across a call from the Moon Gallery Foundation in the Netherlands, who were creating the first art book to be sent to the lunar surface. My submission was selected as one of 48 works to go. The book will launch in late 2025 and land on the Moon’s south pole in 2026.”
The project responded to the prompt: How does the Moon see the Earth? In the work When I Was You, Kaasa explores the idea of the Moon breaking away from the Earth and is framed as a duet between the two heavenly bodies.
“But it’s also a duet in another sense: between mother and child,” adds Kaasa. “I’ll be recording the track this autumn with my producer Rookes, and my mother, Terry Kaasa, will be singing it with me. So, when the book travels to the Moon, it will carry both the lyrics and chords of this duet — a love song between planets, but also between a parent and child.”
Back on earth, Caffeine Orange tees up Bliss Carmxn’s new EP, Open Love, set for release in 2026.
“Open Love is the follow-up to Hold My Hand and I’ll Hold Yours, and it expands on that work by being more intimate, more vulnerable, and more narrative-driven. These four tracks lean into folk storytelling — each one tells a story about love, connection, and kinship.”
As a queer artist, the concept of kinship is important to Kaasa. “I wanted to think about it in practice: queer friendship, queer love, chosen family, but also the families we’re born into and the ways they’re ‘queer’ in their own messy, complicated ways.”
If all of that wasn’t enough to convince you that Kaasa deserves the ‘true creative’ label, they’re also working on another piece, When the Clarion Came to Call, a theatre and dance production by Stefan Jovanović Kaasa. It premieres at the Cockpit Theatre in London in October 2025 with a full sound score and nine-song album created by Kaasa.
I suspect this won’t be the last we’re hearing from them, and I look forward to hearing how the Bliss Carmxn project evolves.
Caffeine Orange is out now, and you can listen to it below.
Supported by Musosoup #SustainableCurator
