It's rare for an artist to bring their own voice recorder to an interview, but these days, Chairlift's Caroline Polachek is playing by her own rules. "I want to keep records of everything," she says as she places her recorder on the table between us, adjacent to my own device. We're drowning in deep leather chairs in the busy drawing room of Manhattan's Nomad Hotel; Polachek sips lavender tea throughout our hour-long conversation, bedecked in a slightly oversized black blazer and a necklace adorned with bells that intermittently jingle as she gesticulates.

Her debut solo LP under the name Ramona Lisa, Arcadia, due out in April, is indicative of Polachek's recent diaristic streak. She describes the album as "a document of being alone," and the experience of making a record apart from her main act was enriching enough that, at one point, she considered keeping the results to herself. "I uncovered a lot of things that I didn't want to face and found different ways of expressing them," she says. "That's something you can't do as fluidly if you're in a room with three dudes eating pizza."

As for the new moniker, Ramona Lisa is a name Polachek has used in private since 2005, and in the past year she's performed Arcadia's beguiling tunes under that alias and others (including Kimsin Kreft and Theora Vorbis) around New York City. "It's not about possessing multiple personalities," Polachek clarifies. "It's about reenacting dreams in different ways and finding connections. I'm often bored by what my real life is—there's nothing about it that I want to show people. It doesn't feel worthy of the subject of art. My emotions are my own, but it's much more exciting for me to abstract them into the most extreme version possible."

The project was conceived during an artistic residency in Rome's Villa Medici complex ("There's gardens there that people have been killed in, and the Rolling Stones took acid there"), when she started messing around with home recording software on her laptop in a studio previously occupied by late French painter Balthus. "I gave myself permission to make really bad electronic music on my computer because I thought that was the only way to get my feet wet," Polachek excitedly explains. "But the worse I'd allow myself to make things sound, the better they'd turn out."

A hushed, idiosyncratic lo-fi album that's reminiscent of Julia Holter's art-pop fantasias and inspired by British singer/songwriter Virginia Astley's work with experimental composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, the entirety of Arcadia was written and recorded in hotel room closets and airport terminals during Chairlift's extensive touring schedule last year, with Polachek singing straight into her laptop microphone to provide the album's sleepy, ethereal vocal presence.

One song that didn't make the cut for Arcadia, ironically, was "No Angel", which Polachek gave to Beyoncé. "It got scrapped because once I started getting a picture of what the album was, I removed the songs that sounded anything like R&B," says the singer. While prepping the song for Bey, Polachek wrote the lyrics in the style of "a kind of sexiness that I don't think I could pull off on stage as a performer," but was surprised at how much of her original instrumental made the final cut: "I was sure that the toy-like quality was going to get replaced by something slicker, but they kept it."

As Polachek plans for a smattering of live performances as Ramona Lisa, she's also currently hard at work on the next Chairlift album alongside multi-instrumentalist and producer Patrick Wimberly, and they hope to release it later this year. The duo are self-producing the album in a Bed-Stuy studio they've outfitted themselves, a change from the London studio sessions with producer Dan Carey (Franz Ferdinand, Bat for Lashes) that birthed 2012's Something. "There was a party I went to back in the fall that totally changed my life," says Polachek. "Afterwards, I went back to the studio and was like, 'I need that kind of warmth and humanity to get into these grooves.' It's not about technology, it's not about technophilia, it's not about what's new. It's about what the most vivid way of expressing the best feelings we're capable of is. This will be our most human record."

Pitchfork: The video for "Arcadia" features cicadas hatching out of their shells, which is pretty disgusting. 

Caroline Polachek: Aw, I love bugs! I used to work for the Department of Environmental Protection when I was a teenager—I was collecting, sorting, and labeling insects. I was also an entomologist's assistant in high school for a while, cataloging bees. I stopped seeing them as disgusting a long time ago. I'm totally fascinated by them. Cicadas are my favorite bug because they're underground for seven years, and when they come out, they're only out for the tiniest amount of time. They're such romantic creatures.

Pitchfork: Do you think that Arcadia is a more explicitly feminine album than your work with Chairlift?

CP: Definitely. Patrick's like my brother, and it's hard to be romantic or sensual if you're standing next to your brother—it's really easy to throw a party or wreck stuff or do something that is groovy, but in order to really open up about sensuality it requires either being alone or being with the person you're sensual with.

Pitchfork: A lot of the songs on Arcadia are pretty out-there, but the closing song "I Love Our World" is especially abstract, almost like a field recording.

CP: That track is supposed to represent a series of eight thoughts I had while lying on a roof in the sun. It was one of those very first tastes of spring, the first hot day when you fully feel the sun, and I wanted to capture the way the sun can feel. There's actually some field recordings of the birds from that roof that I stuck on there, too, but there's no vocals—I wasn't speaking in that moment. I was just trying to document how I felt.

Pitchfork: Was it hard to make an entire album on a computer?

CP: I mean, Skrillex makes all his records on his laptop, but we don't think twice about it because his music couldn't have been made any other way. When I was looking out the window in Rome, I wanted this type of electronic music to feel as organic as what I was seeing. I don't think any of the tools that I'm using are particularly new—a lot of the MIDI instruments have been around for 15 years—but the compositions make them sound less electronic, more mysterious.

Making this record definitely felt freeing. It was so portable and I felt zero responsibility—no deadlines, no one to answer to, no one to compromise with. But at the same time, you do think you're going crazy, and your relationship with your work is constantly changing. One day you'll think, "This is tits on toast!" and then the next day you'll be like, "This is really stupid and no one should ever hear this. 

Pitchfork: Some artists claim that it's impossible for them to create on tour. 

CP: I've always said that to myself too, but I stopped caring what anyone around me thought. I stopped caring if someone could read the lyrics on my screen or hear me singing into my computer in the airplane bathroom. That loss of shame and prioritizing my inner world over the exterior world was huge. All of a sudden, I felt like I could do stuff anywhere. That kept me going on the road, too, because it gave me something to do. Instead of sleeping all day, I'd get up and have three cups of really shitty gas-station coffee because I was really excited to get back into this organ part. Working on this record really made my life amazing.