Inside job for Alessi
Words Lauren Strain / Image(s) Rebecca Miller
Press play, close your eyes, conjure pictures. A penny farthing. A quill pen. An old oak chest, brimming with coloured wool and half-made scarves. You might see all these things if you listen to the songs of Alessi Laurent-Marke, a girl in a tapestried dress with curtains of chestnut hair and whose debut is brewing as we speak. She wanted an album, she says, “that sounded like how music sounds inside our bodies, so my friend and I recorded a cello part out of a bucket filled with water. We then sampled the heartbeat of his unborn baby daughter and his own breathing, by placing a tiny mic down his throat.”
Intrigued?
For a girl who grew up in Hammersmith, her tales are bucolic and lonesome, infused with fading fires, snatched birdsong and the (slightly too twee) clinks of china teacups.
“When I’m anywhere that moves at a slightly slower pace than a city, my thoughts are clearer and it feels as though there’s much more space in my brain,” she considers, and so her favourite places are: “Maison Bertaux, my favourite place for tea and cakes; Natureland, a seal sanctuary in Skegness that I went to regularly when I was little, and my favourite river walk is from Hammersmith Bridge to Barnes Bridge on the Chiswick side.”
But her bedroom, where her first EP was recorded, remains her treasured place to write stories that shiver with the wise sea breeze and huddle up in familiarity. Notes on the glockenspiel are like threads of spider-spun silk. But, just as you’re penning this 17-year-old as another cutesy sprite, her lyrics darken above the sequinned autoharp of ‘Let’s Race’: “I plan on running to the sea,” she whispers, “leaving every trace, taste of me.”
“My favourite kind of music welcomes the listener and lets them stay in the artist’s imagination for as long as they’d like,” she says. “I think my songs and their illustrations are the most informative logs I’ve kept so far; some are true, some imaginary, some belonging to the lives of others. I think of them as a bit like potions.”
And what kind of magic do you believe in, Alessi? “Love. And doing few things and doing them well.”
