13. Félicia AtkinsonRoman Anglais
Those are two artists that I just absolutely love so much. I discovered Sylvain Chauveau again as a late teenager when I started to really get into some of this classical type of music. He was one of the first ones I discovered who was using instruments like the piano and strings, but releasing records on modern-day independent labels. He put out a record on FatCat, I think, in the early 2000s, and that record is just the most simplistic, spacious piano music maybe that I’ve ever heard. There’s just so few notes. And that really was such a huge inspiration for me in my own composition – a lesson of less can be more. I discovered him first, and then I kind of was following everything he did, and then that record came out. I’ve always been a big fan of spoken word in music, and on that record he does all the music and she is just speaking poetry over the top. It’s just a record that I’ve come back to time and time again.
I’m so glad I found it, because since then, Félicia Atkinson has been one of my favourite artists to follow for many years – she makes some very challenging music. Her own solo music is almost impenetrable sometimes [laughs]. I’ve struggled to describe this to people, but something about what she does has continued to draw me in. There’s a certain, almost childlike quality to it, where I just imagine someone in a room with a bunch of things they’ve never used before, pressing buttons with their eyes wide open in a state of wonder – that’s what I imagine when I hear her music. I don’t know, I just love that. Whether that’s how she approaches it or not, just me imagining that has been such a big inspiration. A lot of her recordings sound to me like they might’ve been recorded with a laptop mic on a computer. Or maybe just recorded in GarageBand or whatever recording programme comes with your computer nowadays. But I’m a true believer that you don’t need expensive tools, state-of-the-art recording equipment to create, and I really admire people who embrace that stuff and do what they do with the tools that they have. She’s just continued to be an inspiration to me. She also puts out some books of poetry and there’s some visual art as well. I get that same feeling from all of her work – that it’s very intuitive and it’s very free. It’s a big inspiration to me.
