Uneasy on the Ear: An Interview with Lola De La Mata

Multi-disciplinary artist Lola De La Mata speaks to Patrick Clarke about how her experience with severe tinnitus and vertigo, groundbreaking work in the field of audiology, and stigma around hearing loss in the musical community fed into her new album Oceans On Azimuth

“At least I had some good sake,” jokes Lola De La Mata. “The rest is quite unfortunate.” The English-born, French-Spanish multi-disciplinary artist is recalling a dinner in 2019 that would change her life and her artistic practice forever. As she recalls, a staff member plugged in the restaurant’s electric piano without checking that the master fader was at 0, which resulted in a deafening noise. De La Mata had already been experiencing low-level tinnitus for years prior – she blames the heavy metal shows that her parents took her to growing up – but the feedback in the restaurant was so severe that it would leave her dealing with catastrophic consequences. “It was a rupture,” she explains. “Afterwards my hearing in my left ear kept going through notches, I’d completely lose my hearing, or low floating tones would cover [other people’s] speech. Sometimes I’d wake up because I was hearing all this thunder, a cracking sound.”

The thunder, she was later informed by audiologists, was a good thing – the sound of her ear trying to repair itself. This was of scant solace, given that as well as extreme tinnitus, De La Mata developed vertigo. “I do have a chronic health condition, which made it difficult to pinpoint if it was that that was suddenly getting worse, or whether it was [the damage to the ear] that was causing neurological changes, but I literally couldn’t walk straight; I was having what looked like strokes where I would collapse.” A violinist, she was told by doctors to give up playing. When the COVID pandemic arrived a few months in, she was forced to shield because of ultimately false suspicions that she had MS. “I got really frustrated,” De La Mata says. “I wasn’t getting any of the answers I wanted. It was, ‘Your hearing is fine, you’re young, you’re healthy,’ and it’s like, well clearly I’m not if I can’t walk and people are feeding me.” 

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