Melody's Echo Chamber - Bon Voyage

The Quietus

‘So much blood on my hands!’ Melody Prochet gasps, before being overtaken by buzzsaw guitars and surging electronics. Moments later, with what is either a violent, protracted string bend or a human wail of anguish (bloodcurdling in any case) we arrive, panting, at a delightfully unhinged climax.

This is ‘Desert Horse’, a manic, five-minute genre survey and the third track of Prochet’s insistently protean latest, Bon Voyage. The song, a breathless, heady gallop through such disparate environs as Incredible String Band-informed folk, glittering indie, vocoder asides and sudden bursts of trap percussion, is the album’s centrepiece and, in a sense, its microcosm. While a seven-track, 34 minute album might not be the format of choice for dedicated psychonauts, Bon Voyage is anything but insubstantial. It’s a work principally concerned with linearity, experimentation and relentless movement, consisting of a series of concise, obsessively detailed odysseys; corkscrewing songs that come to rest on a phrase or musical idea for what can seem like mere moments at a time before flitting off towards the next.

Such an approach can be demanding for audiences — dense, hyperactive song after dense, hyperactive song reads like a recipe for listening fatigue — but Prochet’s pop instincts, generosity with hooks and ornate production courtesy of Prochet herself, Frederik Swahn and Reine Fiske (two Swedes, members of indie group The Amazing and psych-prog outfit Dungen, respectively) keep the songs rich and busy without allowing them to become overstuffed. There is a joyously self-conscious engagement with, and a subversion of, psychedelic signifiers throughout — Prochet is happy for a song to reek of weed for a few bars so long as the backwards guitars and bird noises are perverted or recontextualised as soon as the listener gets comfortable. The whole experience is charmingly woah-dude in a way that never feels caricatured or insincere. Great pleasure is taken in employing the familiar apparatus and codes of psychedelia and, well, making them psychedelic again.

Closer ‘Shirim’, a sugary disco number with a woozy bassline, is the album’s most straightforward song. That the chaos of the preceding half hour is brought to a close by recognisable pop signatures is almost disorienting in itself, and no concession — this is a record where concessions are stridently refused countenance.

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Across Bon Voyage, Prochet delves into the unfamiliar. She sings in multiple tongues – French, English and Swedish – and on ‘Breathe In, Breathe Out’, plays drums for the first time in a recorded setting. She enlisted the likes of Reine Fiske from Dungen and Fredrik Swahn from The Amazing to experiment on the record, encouraging them to pick up instruments they find foreign. All of this has combined to create for an expansive auditory universe that is mythical and, at times, surreal. Coupled with Prochet’s breathy vocals across all tracks, as well as the unsettling instrumentation – it shifts back and forth between more guitar-oriented spheres but also floaty, ambient and otherworldly psych-rock – creates for a far-reaching sonic environment.

There are seven tracks in total, but each song offers a multitude of aural experiences that have emulated Prochet’s own psyche. Bon Voyage traces back to 2015 when Prochet first met her Swedish musical collaborators, and together crafted a wide-ranging world of music that feels tactile at times. Having referred to Dungen previously as 'soulmates and extreme beings, uncompromisingly intense and sensitive', Bon Voyage is a foray into the world of spiritual healing and rediscovery through a various musical textures and emotions.