“I was part of a clique of rebellious kids at [an elite] music school”, Meredi smirks. “We practiced diligently, but we’d also hang around Berlin’s Alexanderplatz and get into trouble.”
Growing up in Berlin as the daughter of a German woman who loved classical music and a Persian-Armenian father who often played old folk songs to his child, she had started playing the piano at an early age. But with her green-dyed hair and piercings, she didn’t quite fit into the conservative world of classical music.
In her youth, she started looking for links between the atonal avant-garde she studied at school and the musical structures she discovered at rock, metal and hardcore concerts.
Studying composition at the city’s renowned Hanns Eisler music school, she knew what teachers expected from her. “It was forbidden to write melodies”, she laughs. “I secretly worked on melodic compositions. But I knew that for competitions, I needed to write atonal music. At one point, I sat in a concert, hearing my composition being played, not really feeling it was mine.”
To be ‘allowed’ to compose melodically, she switched from studying classical composition to film composition, and has since composed for theater, ballet and film. In 2020, she got her first record deal as a solo artist and released three neoclassical albums on the Modern Recordings label – her debut Stardust and the sophomore record Trance, with a full solo piano reimagining (“Some Other Place”) following up the original version.
Now signed to Deutsche Grammophon, Meredi released her EP Flourish in 2024. “This is the most personal music I’ve ever released”, she says.
It all started with an indefinite wanderlust. Feeling confused and lost in Berlin in 2022, Meredi traveled to Armenia, the country of her ancestors. She had already been there multiple times since childhood and now visited to play her first ever concert there, then again with a war reporter during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and once more to work on music and play two more concerts.
“I realized that I had romanticized that country. I was sort of an alien there as well”, she explains. “I guess I was just looking for that sense of belonging, the feeling of arriving home.”
At one point, the conflicting emotions became too painful to bear. Meredi jumped on a flight to New York. After some weeks, she traveled on to Los Angeles, and from there, quite spontaneously, to Mexico.
“I was dancing with a friend at a festival at 6am on New Year’s Day”, she remembers. “The sun rose behind us, and it reflected in her dark brown eyes. At that moment I understood what I had been searching for all the time. That fertile soil where I can blossom wasn’t a physical place, but a community of people.”
Coming home to Berlin from a few months of relentless traveling, Meredi did what a composer does and turned those emotions and revelations into music.
“Every song is dedicated to a place or a person that I’ve encountered during my journey”, the composer confirms.
The resulting EP Flourish is not about Armenia. It’s the universal chronicle of a highly personal search. A woman torn between two countries gets rid of her illusions and projections, her false idols and ideals. That shedding process makes her see clearer – but to find clarity, she needs to move through the pain first.
There’s much depth to be found here – a history of diaspora, transgenerational trauma, the experience of flight, a deep feeling of being torn away from the place of your origin. Many Armenian folk songs deal with these issues.
The music also transports that special loneliness that only someone traveling on their own can feel.
“I want to evolve constantly”, Meredi says. “Standing still means death.”
The EP’s core piece Double Sky features lyrics that Meredi wrote, which then were translated by her father to Armenian – but in his Persian-Armenian dialect –, and then sung by Meredi in her German accent. A monologue inspired by Byzantine orthodox chants, it’s channeling disappointment, longing and pain. An utterly gorgeous piece, Double Sky returns as a piano-led reprise by the end of the EP.
While an end of her journey is not in sight, Meredi since divides her time between Berlin and Los Angeles.
“In the States, most people have a history of migration”, she says. “I feel at home in both cities now, L.A. and Berlin. But to be honest, I’d love to live on a plane, or more generally speaking, a moving object. I’d actually want to live in space. Gravity is my enemy.”
