Iva Renn

Battersea, South London · FARA Records

Iva Renn is one of two equal members of CONSENSUS, the South London duo she leads alongside Marcus Ellery. Born on 27 November 2002 and based in Battersea, she grew up between one parent working in software and one parent who distrusted technology — an argument from both sides that shaped her before music ever entered it. That split household left her without a simple pro-tech or anti-tech position; she inherited suspicion of easy stories from both directions instead. Software could be elegant and harmful. Refusal could be principled and ridiculous. Convenience could be liberation or dependency depending on what it removed.

She began making cold, low-end-first electronic tracks on a cracked DAW with borrowed monitors, and started singing on them almost by accident — recording a placeholder melody because nobody else was available. The take came out lower, drier and less obviously 'sung' than she expected, and the track immediately became more threatening. Instead of replacing the vocal with a bigger singer, she stripped it back further. That discovery became permanent: her voice is most powerful when the system around it is huge and the person at the centre sounds almost conversational. A whisper on a big enough system, she'll tell you, is louder than a shout.

Inside CONSENSUS, Iva carries the drops and the drive — restrained alto/contralto hooks surrounded by warehouse pressure, harmonic layers and bass weight, dry and dark-vowelled, deliberately behind the beat. She and Marcus Ellery met at a warehouse night arguing the same question from opposite sides — he says the phrase 'the algorithm decided' hides people and incentives; she says pretending the tool has intention is equally lazy. The argument never resolved into agreement. It became a working relationship instead, and remains one: Iva attacks unnecessary scale, Marcus attacks unnecessary ambiguity, and neither signs off a release as a courtesy.

Cool, defiant and contained, Iva is comfortable alone in a room and impatient with forced mingling, with a sense of humour that's very dry, fast and sometimes deliberately literal. She holds her position on stage and lets the room move around her — chin level, shoulders loose, hands mostly quiet, no belting, no gospel runs, no stadium lift. Her recurring subject is agency: the human choice hiding inside apparently automatic systems. She isn't anti-technology so much as pro-accountability — if a system reflects choices, pretending nobody chose anything is the first lie she wants removed.