Multidisciplinary artist Nicki Wells, live in London with her new album Ellipsis. Tickets https://bit.ly/DMPnickiwells
Multidisciplinary artist Nicki Wells, live in London with her new album Ellipsis.
Tickets https://bit.ly/DMPnickiwells
19:30 // £16 adv. //
Ellipsis, with its intertwining of Indian classical, Celtic folk, eastern European choral and western pop music, can undoubtedly credit its kaleidoscope of influences on Wells' own fascinating heritage.
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https://youtu.be/mspm2DLFETU
nickiwells.com
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A song begins and ends, not with a note, but with silence. A pause, a sustained thought, pure consciousness. For multidisciplinary artist Nicki Wells, those silences are just as fundamental as the music that flows in between. Her astonishing new album Ellipsis – a debut of sorts despite her years of experience – gives its listeners an opportunity for contemplation. A moment of calm amid the chaos.
Ellipsis, with its intertwining of Indian classical, Celtic folk, eastern European choral and western pop music, can undoubtedly credit its kaleidoscope of influences on Wells' own fascinating heritage. Born in south London, she moved to a farm outside of Rome, Italy, when she was three years old, then to Himachal Pradesh, India – in the foothills of the Himalayas – three years later. Attending an international boarding school, Wells was surrounded by jungle and dramatic mountains, absorbing myriad languages and cultures away from the pervasive materialism of western society.
"Without question," she responds, when asked whether her childhood has impacted her creative ethos. "I'm very used to movement and diverse ways of expressing myself. My work is definitely an amalgamation of all my experiences growing up; a combination of nature and nurture… where you live and how that shapes you, and what you take from life as you go through it."
"There was always music around the house," she recalls of her upbringing. Her English father, whose own troubadour nature led to a university friendship with folk icon Nick Drake, would play his favourites – Randy Newman, Bob Dylan – while her Swiss-French mother appreciated the intricate compositions of John Lennon and Kate Bush. Wells first began writing her own songs aged six, then, when the family moved to the Cotswolds when she was 10, got into Singer-Songwriters. "I wanted to be a singer," she admits with a laugh. Aged 16, she was offered a choice between the renowned Brit School or the prestigious McDonald College in Sydney. Choosing Australia, she flew to the other side of the world, staying with family friends, and immersed herself in the city's rich local music scene.
It was around this time that she stumbled upon the music of Nitin Sawhney. The British Asian artist has worked with the likes of Sir Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd, Jeff Beck and Sinead O'Connor, along with scoring the soundtracks to countless acclaimed films and TV series. "His melding of East and West made complete sense to me," Wells says. This artistic appreciation was returned around the time when she studied at the Academy of Contemporary Music, where she was introduced to Sawhney by award-winning producer Pete "Boxsta" Martin. "Nitin came into the studio and I sang an ancient Sanskrit hymn," she recalls. "He asked me to do a gig with him that ended up being 10 years of touring and all kinds of work… that was basically my university."
It was Sawhney who produced Wells' debut album, Ocean, which she released under the name TURYA, a project she began in 2015. "It's derived from a Sanskrit word, turiya, which means the silence one experiences after sound," she explains. "I was really interested in that concept: if you go to a performance and experience the ring of the instrument's final note, the sustained silence in between that and the applause is this thing, turiya, which you feel as a wave." With Ocean, Wells dived into the elements: on the title track, her vocals rise and fall to mesmerising effect over soft ripples of piano. On opener "Rain", electronic beats come into mingle with the more organic sounds: "I've walked for days alone/ And on my way, I found nothing," she sings. "Heat of the sun, it burns/ Like those words, how they haunt me now."
Ellipsis came into being when Wells moved from Greenwich, London to her mother's home in the countryside during the pandemic. "It was actually great for our relationship, I think," Wells, who is now based in Monmouth, Wales, says. "She really gave me the space and time to dive into my creative well. And I don't think I'd have had that opportunity at any other point in my life. I definitely needed it." Lockdown became a sort of "crazy, self-purging, creative period", she recalls. "I wrote around 180 songs. Each day I'd go for a walk, and it'd be like catching these ideas with a net, going home and recording them." Twelve of those songs made it on to Ellipsis, the first body of work Wells feels she has truly "given birth to" single handedly, one that asserts her coming into her
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