Melody Prochet talks to The Jakarta Post about her newest album and the colorful history of her career.

“I can’t believe I’m talking with someone from Indonesia,” French musician, Melody Prochet, says during a phone interview with The Jakarta Post on June 3. “I just googled how long it would take for me to get there by walking, and it says I would need 122 days.”

The 35-year-old songstress talked with an evident shyness and amiable giggles. Her personality translates beautifully into the signature voice that’s heard through her various projects, from The Narcoleptic Dancers and My Bee’s Garden to her most successful project, Melody’s Echo Chamber, later on.

Sleepy beginning

“I would love to have this kind of crazy powerful vocal but I always go back to an ethereal kind of breathy [voice],” Prochet says. “I always love [my voice] to be a part of the music, too, or maybe I’m not confident enough.”

Prochet was introduced to music by playing viola, whose role is always to be the supporting act in the orchestra.

“Viola is always the middle part in the orchestra; it’s never been the theme. It’s always the humble part in the orchestra, and I kind of like that.”

Being named Melody indicates music’s role in Prochet’s family. Her father was in an Italian cover band playing at holiday resorts around the Mediterranean before settling down with her mother, who loves choir and classical music. As a child, Melody was pushed to study serious music in a rigid conservatoire.

“Which is good, I don’t regret but it was kind of difficult as a child. Not really fun,” she giggled. “And that’s probably why I, as an adult, chose to play rock music.”

She first experimented with modern music with her sound engineer brother, who encouraged her to find her singing voice. In her late teenage years, she moved to Paris, making advertising music as a living and started The Narcoleptic Dancers, a pop duo that she labeled as "almost anonymous". 

The phrase “narcoleptic dancers” was later infused in the lyrics of “Hunt the Sleeper”, a song in her next Paris-based band My Bee’s Garden. The lo-fi unit produced an album that showcased Melody’s enchanted sleep aesthetic 

“It was just recorded in a room in Paris. You couldn’t make any noise. Recording drums was impossible so I was kind of frustrated with that,” she says. “I thought it had a lot of ideas and I had visions already of what I wanted to make but I couldn't really make it happen.”

In 2010 in Paris, she met Kevin Parker of the popular Australian band Tame Impala who was on a European tour. The two eventually became lovers and Parker took her to his hometown in Perth, where he helped her develop Melody’s Echo Chamber.

For the love of music: Growing up, Melody Prochet was pushed to study serious music in a rigid conservatoire. (Melody's Echo Chamber/Diane Sagnier) (Melody's Echo Chamber/Diane Sagnier)

Fever dream

Melody’s Echo Chamber finally perfectly captures the vision she desperately wanted to translate in her earlier projects. Facilitated with the higher level of music production in Parker’s Perth makeshift studio, plus being exposed to the vast, sun-drenched ocean view of the area poured her with inspiration, she says. 

The fateful collaboration resulted in a critically acclaimed self-titled album, released by United States indie label Fat Possum Records in 2012.

Prochet says her travel to Perth introduced her to many things she didn’t realize before. It was there that she found out that she loved playing the drums.

“I felt like I was swimming in the ocean for an hour! It was just like expressing your whole body vibrating. It is really expressive and powerful,” she says.

It was also in Perth that she first wrote songs in French. Being surrounded by native speakers of English, she felt too seen when singing in English, which is the language of her choice when performing in her hometown. Singing in French, which practically sounds like gobbledygook to her fellow bandmates, brought her a layer of hiding to accommodate her shy demeanor. 

“I can hide a little behind the language. It kind of created distance, somehow,” she says.

The album Melody’s Echo Chamber is when an enchanted sleep meets a fever dream. It features vintage drum samples, heavy synths, and fuzzy guitars. 

In 2018 Melody’s Echo Chamber released Bon Voyage with Fat Possum and Domino Records. The record was created in collaboration with Swedish musicians, Reine Fiske and Fredrik Swahnin, in Stockholm, Sweden. Producing music in Stockholm during winter was "majestic, epic, virgin, beautiful, pure white snow forest kind of landscape. So that was also really inspiring.”

In April 2022, she released Emotional Eternal via Domino Records, an album she produced during the pandemic lockdown in the quiet Alps of High Provence. 

Despite the fact that Prochet produced all her albums in different parts of the world, she claimed that it was not necessarily the postcard-worthy foreign landscape that kept her inspired. 

Instead, it was the absence of noise, which is abundant if living in the hustling city.

“For me I need it to be quiet. I think you can hear a lot of your alterity in silence.”

Motherhood: Melody Prochet says being a mother is the hardest thing in the world, but also “...the deepest, and the purest thing. The source of light.” (Melody's Echo Chamber/Diane Sagnier) (Melody's Echo Chamber/Diane Sagnier)

Pure streams of love

Her third studio album was a “happy accident,” Prochet says. She was not expecting to create any more music, but the song “[...] arises from a long, long period of silence".

Prochet has mentioned in previous interviews that she took a break from music. In 2017, she survived an unspecified but serious accident that left her bedridden for months with a brain aneurysm and broken vertebrae. She had to cancel tours and postpone the release of Bon Voyage, which was originally slated for spring 2017 to June 2018. After healing, she says she wanted to “travel the world” and go on “serious hikes”. She thought she had kissed music goodbye for good.

In 2019, she gave birth to a daughter named Alma. Prochet also swapped the hustle and bustle of city life for a more mindful, quiet lifestyle in the rurals. She got herself a piece of land in the French Alps and renovated a sheep barn surrounded by mountains and flowy lavender fields. 

She also has taken art therapy courses and exposes herself to new outlets to express herself including writing poetry.

“I love everything about living here.”

However, suddenly the music within her had to come out again, triggered by overwhelming stress.

One day she was in distress after having to be separated from her baby for one night, inspiring the song “Alma”.

“It was very intense for me as a young mother. So that’s how [this song] was born. This song is a butterfly, a little poem to life,” she says. “And I feel like this song is kind of special, and I need to share it with my Swedish friends. And it started from there.”

“Making music for me kind of resembles spiritual experience somehow. It has this cathartic quality that turns my emotional overflow into a new creation and purifies my mind, I guess […] Usually when I’m experiencing something disenchanting or even traumatic and sad [making music] is the most familiar way for me.”

She says being a mother is the hardest thing in the world, but also “the deepest and the purest thing. The source of light.”

She eventually reunited with her musical accomplices from Bon Voyage and presented the world with Emotional Eternal.

“I tend to get lost in my daydreaming, and the infinite dreaming, and I love to create another world to escape to but I used to get kind of stuck in there,” Prochet says. 

“But the structure of motherhood forced me to have only one or two hours a week to work and have to be productive, have to be inspired at this moment. That was very challenging but also very beneficial for my psyche structure.”

During the writing process, Prochet traced back the moments that took her into maturity and manifested them into sonic transcendency with childlike wonder. 

Prochet says she was reluctant to go back on promotional knick-knacks, but it seems like she had learned that she might surprise herself by enjoying things she had bid adieu to.

“You never know what life got you but I definitely know that I really want to make a new record. And also [...] I recently got an email for an Asian tour, so who knows. You never know.”