140: ALA.NI

When ALA.NI was growing up in West London, she wanted to be a ballerina. Eventually she realized that there were almost no black ballerinas and the message that was sent to her quietly but consistently was that there would be no easy place for her in the world of ballet.

She started to sing. She loved musicals, especially The Sound Of Music, & Grease. Again and again, she was told that she didn’t sound “black enough” because she was so influenced by Julie Andrews and Judy Garland.

Too black to dance, not black enough to sing, she started to feel like there was no way forward for her in London.

Her father was a bass player, her great uncle had been a famous musician and singer from Grenada, Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson – one of the first musical success stories to emerge from the West Indies in post war England. She remembers spending her childhood tagging along with her father to pot-smoke filled rehearsal rooms and hearing the bands play.

Despite her family’s creative background, she says, “I love my family but I’m very much the black sheep.” So ALA.NI decided to leave London and follow the well worn path of black artists who have felt more at home with self imposed creative expatriation in Paris than in their home countries. “I feel free here as an artist here,” she explains. “I feel seen.”

Her haunting, elegant and somewhat otherworldly singing style has established her firmly as one of the most intriguing new musical artists in Paris today, and she has also started to work in America, (she has performed at Lincoln Center & on NPR’s Tiny Desk). While she remains a bit of a mystery, she is in many ways an open book. “The things that I can’t get away with socially, I can do on stage,” she says, adding, “If people want the truth, they know where to come to get it.”

ALA.NI’s upcoming sophomore album ACCA will be released on January 24th. So far the album has been celebrated by NPR Music, The FADER, and Vibe, who praised the first single, “Van P” for its “sparse, spacious soundbed that leaves space for ALA.NI's breathy vocals to shine.” She initially envisioned this album as a completely a capella project, and indeed ACCA is made up almost entirely of human voices (beatboxing serves as percussion, and she lowered her own vocals with an octavizer on several tracks to create the illusion of bass). Along with Lakeith Stanfield, Iggy Pop makes an appearance on the album, but ACCA is primarily solo ALA.NI. She wrote, produced, and arranged each song herself, layering up hundreds of vocal tracks in order to create an immersive, hypnotic world that blurs the lines between vibrating vocal cords, bowed strings, and blown reeds.

We got together recently in Paris to talk about the job of the artist (“to see the world through a different lens and then share that experience”), the nature of Grenadians (“uppity”), improvised circle singing (“When we enter back into the child and the imagination, there’s no rules!”) and the genetic memory of violence in the black experience. In other words, all of it.

This is one of those fly-on-the-wall conversations in which the microphone disappears into the furniture almost immediately and two people who have never met before slowly reveal themselves to one another.

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