For her fourth album as Melody’s Echo Chamber, Melody Prochet linked up with co-producer Sven Wunder, the Swedish musician known for his lounge-jazz soundscapes. Together, inspired by Prochet’s love of spiritual jazz and the films of Hayao Miyazaki, they created a warm, colorful tapestry of dreamy psychedelic rock, a kind of phantasmagorical canvas that lets the listener interact with its world in a meditative way. With Unclouded, Prochet challenges the listener to participate in creating the record’s meaning, in doing so finding a part of themselves in her work.
Prochet may be a world-famous singer and musician, but she’s also moonlighted as an art therapist and social worker for the past decade. This multitasking is one of many reasons for her hiatus between albums. “I’ve been doing other things, other projects, that widened my horizons for the music,” she tells me. “I feel like you need to live some life, read books, and listen to music to be inspired, as well.” Prochet is reserved, contemplative, and careful with her words, her near-perfect English filtered through a French accent. She tells me that art therapy has changed her approach to her songwriting. Whereas on past albums she would take a more personal, introspective approach, now she tries to keep the art neutral, creating a safe space where both the singer and the listener can interact communally. “I’m still making music, first of all, for myself, and it’s my own therapeutic space. There is a little bit of that, but in art therapy, I think the most important thing is the encounter with the alternative.”
She successfully does just that with Unclouded, which is very much its own world. The jazz-infused drumming and warm chord progressions create a mellifluous alternative space, with Prochet’s voice bringing it into existence. Co-producer Wunder was integral to her vision, with Prochet being drawn to his vast knowledge of jazz drumming and production techniques. She liked how his projects were cohesive, their own little contained worlds that you could get lost in. Her mission was to create an immersive experience driven by drums, and she saw Wunder as a good way to achieve that. “I can just float on top, and there’s the right tension for me to jump in the flow,” she says. “Sven is very much a big library nerd, a music nerd, and a spiritual jazz and hip-hop nerd, as well, so there’s lots of contradictions. He’s very much a maestro. He’s into Mancini, Morricone, and all these arrangements—very luxurious and elegant, which I was attracted to.”
“I’ve been doing other things, other projects, that widened my horizons for the music. I feel like you need to live some life, read books, and listen to music to be inspired, as well.”
When discussing her creative process, Prochet gets esoteric and spiritual. To her, creativity is about alchemizing the bad into something good—in her words, “turning shit into gold.” Like a powerful sorceress, she sees it as a divine process. She even considers creativity a goddess, much like Sophia of the Gnostics or Athena of the Greeks, as she references Dreams Unlimited’s Arise installation for Burning Man, a sculpture representing the mother of transformation and creation. Creativity and self-expression are crucial because they help her process hard moments and emotions, even if they’re difficult to articulate. “My song ‘Into Shadows’ was pretty bad—I tried to put words to it, and they would never come,” she explains. “So I used ‘La-la-la,’ and I thought, ‘It’s OK to not be able to name things that are really hard.’ It’s another way to express it.”
To help herself get into a creative mindset, Prochet goes for walks, creates vision boards, and finds new ways to make music. She gets particularly excited when talking about using reference drums from artists as diverse as My Bloody Valentine and Little Simz, re-contextualizing them into something completely different as a jumping-off point. To her, creativity is everything—a reason for being. “It makes me love living, and I have so much tenderness now for the living experience,” she shares. “There’s the same sort of magic in creating anything—it’s not just music or art, it’s definitely finding a solution to anything, to any problem.”
“There’s the same sort of magic in creating anything—it’s not just music or art, it’s definitely finding a solution to anything, to any problem.”
Although she loves art, Prochet acknowledges that it’s a privilege to make a living off of it. The world is bigger and more complicated when you factor in the real people and real consequences that lie beyond the creative world. She points out that what’s going on in American politics is terrifying, but she has hope for what’s to come. “That’s what I mean by ‘unclouding’: taking that responsibility to exist and uncloud your own mind so you can resist. Your mind can resist all those things in your own way, every day. But that’s definitely something on my mind,” she explains, referring to the harm done by the Trump Administration.
Prochet also hints at what’s next. Although they only worked on the new album’s track “Daisy” together, she and producer Leon Michels have been thinking of co-producing a full-length album in the near future. Michels—a founding member of El Michels Affair and Lee Fields’ backing band The Expressions, and known for working with artists like Clairo, Kali Uchis, and The Black Keys—has a classic-soul touch to his psychedelic production work, which she gravitates to. “Leon sent me a very classical French-sounding song that I didn’t finish, but it was quite sweet. But I think I would not want to go there. I think I would probably want us to create something new together.” FL
