Tuesday, July 15, 2025 at 8:00 PM EDT

Marie Ann Hedonia

Marie-Ann Hedonia is a Baltimore, Maryland-based synthesist and composer who works in the spheres of techno, synth pop, dark ambient, jazz, and more.

The co-owner and operator of the label Paul and Marie’s Country Kitchen with her husband, Paul M’Olive, Hedonia’s work encompasses four studio albums and numerous collaborative efforts across the spectrum of atmospheric, electronic sounds.

Born and raised in Charm City, Hedonia’s exposure to the keyboard began with piano lessons in the fourth grade. “I remember trying to change the sound of my digital upright piano as a kid,” she later recalled to the site Atmospheres and Experiments. “I would pitch up the sound to bend the notes or try to alter the sound in some way. What I didn’t know, though, was that I was playing the wrong instrument for that application; what I really needed was a synth.”

Thereby having, in her words, “broken the seal,” Hedonia soon made a beeline for a used microKORG at a local music shop. As her zest to make music grew, sequencing came next, via Native Instruments’ Maschine software.

Hedonia’s stable of hardware swelled, too, with the Moog Sub Phatty and Prophet ‘08. “Then, when we moved into our house,” she says of herself and M’Olive, “we just kept growing and growing and growing with stuff that we had.” Which led to a breakthrough, when Hedonia began experimenting with modular synthesis — glomming onto it far more than guitar enthusiast M’Olive.

“You take off the outer layer, and you get to rebuild the skeleton of the sound. And it’s up to you. There are no presets. There are no built-in sequences. You have to make it all,” Hedonia explained to JazzTimes. “That’s when I started to get interested in actually making music.”

A natural tinkerer, Hedonia began making patches, and creating sounds and sequences; the Plonk module, from Intellijel, was a particular gamechanger. As her Eurorack setup continued to expand — “It looked like a spaceship!” — Hedonia quips — she developed what she characterizes as “a hard, weird, industrial sound.”

During her so-called “Eurorack era,” Hedonia performed in New York City and Washington, DC, including those put on by the Luminous Abstract collective.. She stayed busy during the lockdown, performing on Flying Lotus’ show, “The Hit.”

In 2021, Hedonia not only released her debut album, The Inevitable Collapse, but collaborated with electronic audiovisual artist and composer and Luminous Abstract co-founder Grant Bouvier on the ambient synthwave album Kenopsia. 2022’s Marie Ann Hedonia Presents Marie Ann Hedonia represented a leap forward in songwriting and production quality; she followed it up with 2023’s Temporal Dysmorphia.

In 2023, she opted to pivot to more of a classic sound via the Buchla 200-E system  — which she would utilize to great success on Pelt’s Woven. She recorded her 2025 EP Quiet Time with that musical tool, as well as a Moog Model 10 and the Polyend Tracker.

In 2025, Hedonia branched into jazz via her collaboration with trumpeter and composer Jeremy Pelt, on his album Woven. The Guardian called the eclectic album “a classy outing,” noting the band’s “evident comfort,” and praising Hedonia’s “shadowy presence”; according to JazzTimes, she left “one of the deepest impressions” on Woven.

Hedonia’ will release her latest offering, Eclipse, later in 2025 via Paul and Marie’s Country Kitchen. Her most fleshed-out and rangey work to date, the album features collaborations with vocalists Delia Liederschuh, Casey Desmond (featured on the first season of The Voice),, and Black Kite’s Vicki Lynn Tippit.

“We had a wonderful group of female vocalists that collaborated with us,” Hedonia reflects. “I really love how it all turned out.”

The Maze kicks off with the relentlessly catchy and upbeat dance track “Fuck Your Feelings,” featuring Desmond on the mic. “She was inspired by a friend breakup,” Hedonia muses. “A very nice title.” Channeling Björk and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor in equal measure, The Maze’s lead single, “Eve Had the Metallic Shine of Summer” will be released in mid-May along with a music video.

The harsh, enveloping, pulsating track features the vocal talents of Tippit: “I’ll never not love you / I will never be free of your spell,” she intones at the top. “You were a forest / I was a flower / Folded under the power of your will.” “She was able to provide a wonderful narrative to the music,” Hedonia says. “It turned out really nice.”

Liederschuh elevates the shattered, abstracted third single, “CUNT$MASHEß.” “She’s over in Germany, so it was a cool connection,” Hedonia says. “Her vocals are kind of sexy and scary; she’s got that whole vibe going on, and that turned it into a track that’s almost like a revenge fantasy.”

Elsewhere, The Maze features hardcore industrial tracks like “Self Care” and “Family Trauma,” where Hedonia assumes vocal duties; rock if you love Kim Gordon’s last solo album, 2024’s The Collective. The former is, in Hedonia’s words, a “hardcore electronica memoir”; the latter is “an ironic kind of take on how we have to deal with things during this time period.”

“Free Delivery” is a similarly ironic ode to soul-sucking convenience culture; the closing track, “TITLE TBD,” is sprawling, cinematic, and ambient. Recorded in Los Angeles, Massachusetts, and Germany with visionary women contributing from all directions, The Maze is a defining work by a visionary synth practitioner who’s, in many ways, just getting started.

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