A shift came after a guitar lesson that ended in tears. Her boyfriend at the time showed her how to sample and rebuild sound from fragments. “Once I learned how to do that,” she says, “I just really leaned into it.” Logic, then Ableton followed. By 2019, she was asking a different question entirely: how to bring something so solitary into a live space.

They aren’t opposites so much as a progression.

Freed resists separating them too cleanly. “Sometimes I wish I could be Tricky FM all the time,” she says. But Tricky FM, she adds, is less a mask than an allowance, the part of her that carries shame, volatility, and volume without flinching from it. “She’s allowed to be. She’s allowed to live in that space.”

That space began quietly: not on stage, but in a bedroom, on Audacity, under a name borrowed from an old Hawthorne Heights song she liked in eighth grade. At the time, Freed wanted to be in a guitar band, but collaboration felt out of reach. She was shy and more comfortable building sound alone, early, textured sketches influenced by artists like Grouper, uploaded to SoundCloud with almost no audience.

Her first performance was at an open electronic night in Austin. She kept going, eventually settling back in the Bay Area, where repetition became its own kind of education, learning how to fail in public without letting it collapse the work.

“It’s kind of an unsexy answer,” she says of her confidence, “but it really takes practice.” What’s changed isn’t fear, but recovery time. She describes it as building “bravery antibodies,” each showing a small exposure to discomfort that makes the next one survivable.

Her music, which she describes as “experimental pop, computer core,” is built almost entirely alone in Ableton: beats, samples, vocals, structure. The songs begin less like productions than diary entries. Freed has kept a journal since she was twelve, and new material, set to appear on an upcoming album this fall via Oakland’s Cherub Dream Records, still starts the same way: writing until something breaks open emotionally. “If there’s no emotional core thesis,” she says, “it can feel contrived over time.”

That emotional logic extends to how she presents herself on stage as Tricky FM, where she performs in mini skirts, heels, and a recurring sparkly blue eyeshadow. “I started to lean into femininity as a costume,” she says. Heels, especially, are not practical for performing. That’s the point: tension between control and collapse, polish and volatility.

What anchors her is less fearlessness than connection. Her sister sends childhood photos before shows, and at Sled Island, Nick joined her on drums, transforming what has long been a solitary project into a shared performance for the first time.

That willingness to sit inside discomfort, hers and the audience’s, is intentional. “It would be so cool to create an experience that is so unique to just tonight,” she says. “Even if it made you feel uncomfortable, you’ll walk away, and you won’t forget me.”

She’s careful not to romanticize control over reception. “If what I’m experiencing is uncomfortable for you, then it was once uncomfortable for me too,” she says. “So at least we felt something together.”

That idea carries into her upcoming set at Dickens. Sled Island Music & Arts Festival places her in a lineup defined by collision and experimentation, but Freed is less interested in fitting into a context than in breaking one open.

“Of course, I want the songs to sound great. I want to have a blast,” she says. Then she pauses. “But I’d love to create something that happened once for all of us. Something you can walk away from, and you’ll remember me, and I’ll remember you.”

Tricky FM will be dropping a new album this fall via Cherub Dream Records.