|
STREAM: Melody's Echo Chamber at NPR
|
 |
|
Today Melody's Echo Chamber offers up a stream of her
debut self-titled album via NPR's First Listen program -- listen here. The band, which is the project of Paris,
France native Melody Prochet, launches its first ever North American tour
this Friday in Portland, OR. Melody recently sat down with John Norris at the
Ace Hotel in NYC to talk about the record, watch the video here.
Melody also recently premiered her first ever music video for "I Follow You" via Pitchfork TV (directed by Laurie Lassalle) - watch it here. The song is taken from the self-titled album due Sept. 25 on Fat Possum. Pre-order the album here. More about Melody's Echo Chamber:
Melody's Echo Chamber is the name given to the work of
Paris-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Melody Prochet. Possessing a
penchant for wild-eyed psychedelia, homespun motorik rhythm and an effortless
flair for the sort of melodic classicism redolent of chamber song, Prochet is
at once both an aficionado of pop's outer limits and off-kilter to its
expectations.
With her smoky, sensual voice and romantic presence,
Prochet embodies a distinctive kind of elegance and bold sense-of-self long
associated with France's more notable musical exports. But as much as her
national identity runs through the fibre of the eleven tracks that make
up Melody's Echo Chamber, there's worldliness at play too; a
looking beyond the fringes of personal experience to trawl through Europe's
art pop lineage - kraut, space-rock, dream-pop, electronica - in a way that's
as much cinematic in its scope as it is musical.
The likes of Debussy and Spiritualized are seldom quoted
in tandem when it comes to touch-points of an artist's debut album but for
Prochet, a classical music student of some twelve years, this sense of
disparate influences makes a lot of sense. For all its blown-out boom and
electronic wear-and-tear, a song like 'Crystallized' unfolds with a sweeping
grace and poise that is deceptively complex, and the album is peppered with
moments of melodic illumination that feel almost like movements in the way
they frequently elevate the song up and away from the heavy, damaged
break-beats and mesmeric bass loops that typically drive them.
The intriguing combination of more confrontational,
roughshod instrumentation and stirring compositional scope present in
Prochet's work is in part attributable to the album's origins. Predominantly
recorded and mixed with Tame Impala's Kevin Parker in Perth and finished off
solo in France, the collaboration, struck up after the two met on tour when
Prochet was playing in a previous band, proved a perfect chemistry.
"I've been surrounded for many years by the idea of
classicism as I studied viola and it's all about formal and
restrained music, and when I started recording my own songs I was kind of
stifled by that restriction and tended to not be as extreme as I wanted to be
in sound or structure," explains Prochet. "I think at some point I
had a click and I naturally ended up collaborating with someone with a Rock
'n' Roll background such as Kevin. We worked as kind of complementary
opposites - he helped me destroy everything I'd done up to that point and
then put it back together piece by piece, to sculpt it with the right balance
of classicism but also the psychedelia and wildness I wanted."
Inspired by Parker's free-spirited approach and the
unconventional provisions of his home studio ("we had to mic-up on piles
of bricks in the backyard"), Prochet describes her process in Perth as a
childlike, exploratory one; for a record so deeply textured and layered its
genesis was surprisingly less a case of studious knob-twiddling and more of
playful, wide-eyed instinct. "Some Time Alone, Alone' is one of the
songs I wrote in Perth when Kevin was on tour and I was on my own in his
studio. He'd left these notes everywhere to explain how to use the gear but
his room-mate had used it just before me in the morning and messed up all the
instructions, so I was in there and I didn't know how anything worked",
remembers Prochet. "So I basically just plugged into a pre-amp and
played this really saturated guitar on top of my Yamaha drum machine in a way
that felt natural. Of course, it was technically ' totally wrong' but
at the end we kept all of my guitars cause the sound was so special and
uniquely textured that it wasn't worth it try doing it again. So, in general,
there was no real process, more a day-to-day sense of experiment."
Leaving behind Parker and his riotously messy Perth
home-studio, Prochet then travelled back to France, and isolation in her
Grandparents' beach house in the fittingly gorgeous climes of Cavalière, in
order to add the beaming vocals that soar high over the record's heady
landscapes. "I needed the isolation for that part of the
recording", says Melody, "I'm so self-conscious singing in a room
full of people so retreating to such a beautiful, quiet place really helped
coax it out of me."
The result of this process of "complementary
opposites", to use Prochet's own phrase, is exemplified by
"Endless Shore", one of the first tracks from the record made
available, a song that is wistful but totally commanding; cosmic but
muscular, and as strange and singular as it is immediately arresting on a gut
level. Likewise, lead single 'I Follow You', with its loose, laconic guitars
and instantly memorable, resignedly romantic hook swings closest to
out-and-out pop but still manages to retain a friction and vulnerability.
Whether starting with a seemingly straightforward song-structure and then
pushing its edges outwards or going the other way and making something dense
and unlikely completely contagious, Prochet's instinctive feel for inventive
song-craft is relentless.
Fittingly for a record defined by its multiple identities, Melody's
Echo Chamber finds Prochet skipping between her native French and
English with gleeful fluidity and uniformly moving results, such is the
innately emotive quality of her voice. "Those songs were also the first
time I ever sang in French", says Prochet, "I never had wanted to
before, it never felt natural - I've listened to so much English music, and
you are able to sing more ridiculous things in English. I've always been a
fan of French singers but I never really considered myself capable of living
up to them. But when I was in the beach house by myself I just found myself
coming out with these melodies in French almost without thinking. I found a
way to write really simple, poetic, lyrics - almost child-like and it felt
extremely natural. I think I was able to find the right balance."
MELODY'S ECHO CHAMBER
September 21 - Hawthorne Theatre, Portland, OR *
September 22 - Neumo's, Seattle, WA * September 23 - Venue , Vancouver, BC * September 26 - Triple Rock, Minneapolis, MN * September 27 - Lincoln Hall , Chicago, IL * September 28 - The Firebird, St.Louis, MO * September 29 - A&R Bar, Colombus, OH * September 30 - Magic Stick , Detroit, MI * October 02 - Phoenix Concert Theatre, Toronto, ON *
October 04 - Union Transfer, Philadelphia, PA *
October 05 - Webster Hall , New York, NY *
October 06 - Black Cat , Washington DC * October 07 - Paradise Rock Club, Boston, MA * October 08 - El Rey Theatre, Los Angeles, CA * October 11 - Belly Up Tavern , Solana Beach, CA * October 12 - Bimbo's 365 Club , San Francisco, CA *
* = w/ The Raveonettes
Melody's Echo Chamber
Melody's Echo Chamber
(Fat Possum)
Street Date: Sept. 25, 2012
Pre-Order here
1. I Follow You
2. Crystallized 3. You Won't Be Missing That Part of Me 4. Some Time Alone, Alone 5. Bisou Magique 6. Endless Shore 7. Quand Vas Tu Rentrer? 8. Mount Hopeless 9. IsThatWhatYouSaid 10. Snowcapped Andes Crash 11. Be Proud of Your Kids |
No comments:
Post a Comment