Melody's Echo Chamber

Under the name Melody's Echo Chamber, French musician Melody Prochet crafts sweet and swirling psych pop that brings in elements of trippy prog and lightly spooky folk. Working in collaborations with musicians from Tame Impala (on 2012's self-titled album) and Dungen (on 2018's Bon Voyage and 2022's Emotional Eternal), she crafts albums that meld her bewitching melodies to music that truly meets the criteria to be deemed psychedelic. Her template proved mutable enough that when she shifted gears on 2025's Sven Wunder-produced Unclouded, the addition of more prominent drums and a small string section only made her sound more beguiling. Prochet worked in various bands before starting Melody's Echo Chamber in 2012 after having a dream that the acoustics of her bedroom projected an infinite delay. No stranger to performance, Prochet had already worked with the twee pop Narcoleptic Dancers and the dreamy My Bee's Garden, a project she was very much central to. When My Bee's Garden supported Australian guitar rockers Tame Impala on a European tour in 2010, Prochet bonded with Kevin Parker, who offered to help with production of her new solo material as Melody's Echo Chamber. The two worked quickly, with some elements of the project's lushly dreamy songs recorded in Parker's makeshift studio and some laid down in her grandmother's seaside home in the South of France. The self-titled album was released on Fat Possum Records in the fall of 2012, and Prochet assembled a live band to fill out her solo songs as plans for tours and live performances started accumulating. She began working on a second album with Parker, but things stalled out and she moved back home to France. She continued work on the album but eventually abandoned the songs, going so far as to delete many of them permanently. Prochet moved to Sweden, and along the way met up with Dungen's Reine Fiske and the Amazing's Fredrik Swahn. The trio, along with Dungen's Gustav Ejstes and Johan Holmegard, crafted a free-flowing mix of prog, psych, and pop that had a much looser and surprising feel than her debut. They finished the album and a song was released in April of 2017, but then Prochet suffered a major injury that halted the record's planned release to allow her time to heal. A little more than a year later, Bon Voyage was issued by Fat Possum. Following the record's release, Prochet stepped away from music entirely, moving to the Alps with her partner and starting a family. Inspired by the only music she heard, the ambient music that played while her partner mediated, her mind gradually turned back to composing and she teamed again with Fiske. The pair began work on new songs by trading files over the internet. Early sessions were halted by the COVID pandemic, then when they began again, the duo were joined by Swahn. The music they created was a less maximalist, more personal take on the sound of Bon Voyage, focused more on healing than on the exorcizing of demons. It also dealt with themes of motherhood and added some Turkish psych to the musical mix. The resulting album, Emotional Eternal, was released by Domino in April of 2022. Late that year, Fat Possum released Unfold, a short archival treasure that gathered up the existing tracks Prochet recorded, and didn't delete, for the second Melody's Echo Chamber album. The songs and production form a bridge between her work with Parker and further albums made in tandem with her Swedish cohorts.As Unfold hit record shelves, Prochet had begun writing songs for her fourth album. She enlisted a new team of collaborators to bring the songs to life, though Fiske remaned on hand to provide guitar solos. Chief partner in crime this time was producer/keyboardist Sven Wunder and he called in some of his favorite musicians to help as well. Malcolm Catto, who had worked with Madlib, Little Barrie and his own band Heliocentrics, helmed the drums, Josefin Runsteen provided strings, and Dina Ögon members guitarist Daniel Ögen and bassist Love Orsen rounded out the cast. Leon Michel of the El Michels Affair also helped on a song, and Jens Jungkurth, who won a Grammy for his work on Norah Jones' 2024 record Visions, did the mixing. Unclouded was released in late 20205 and dialed back the psychedelia of previous releases in favor of a more layered, organic sound that was still quite wistfully trippy, but brought in elements of vintage soul, avant garde 60's pop, and even trip hop, mostly thnaks to Catto's thunderous beats.
© Fred Thomas & Tim Sendra /TiVo