Melody’s Echo Chamber the project of French musician Melody Prochet, announces Unfold the lost follow-up album to her self-titled debut Melody’s Echo Chamber, which includes seven rare and unreleased tracks. The album will be released alongside the 10th-anniversary edition of Melody’s Echo Chamber, both albums to be released on September 30th via Fat Possum Records. It’s a hypnotic and sometimes hypnagogic adventure of the senses, full of summery, shimmery songs that still sound as dreamy and vivid as they did a decade ago.

On the lead single of the album, “Unfold” Melody says “To me this song captures the emotional ambivalence of a crossroad, like a child finding a special seashell hidden in the sand but the ocean’s creature still lives inside,i guess it’s the sound releasing of the beloved.”

Recorded and co-produced with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker in Perth, Australia, and finished in the South of France, it became a cornerstone of the new wave of psychedelia on its release in 2012, with melodic singles like ”I Follow You” and “Crystallized” balanced elegantly with the more experimental ‘Quand vas tu rentrer’ and “Snowcapped Andes Crash.”

The album commenced in Western Australia in 2011 and was finished at Prochet’s family beach house in Cavalière on the French Riviera, a destination that held a very different energy to the enclosed spaces and noise of Paris, where Prochet was living at the time: “I recorded all of my vocals at my grandparents’ house. A place where you could wander, daydreaming, floating in the air.”

Prochet and Parker started work on what was supposed to be the second album in 2013 in Perth once again, and Melody embraced “ Australia’s vibrant, colorful landscapes, epic ocean horizons and wilderness, where everything seemed possible and beautifully wild. There I found a piece of my true self.” The recording of drums and violin were undertaken closer to home, in the basement of the Norfolk hotel in Perth, in the downtime between “the touring spiral” – as Melody puts it – that both she and Parker were obligated to see through: “ I wrote bits of the songs around the world while swirling with the clouds around the globe, moving too fast,” she says. “I remember trying to blow those bubbles of creation for us into very uncertain windows of space and time.”

Unfold is finally being released in L.P. form, a splurge of righteous creation cut off at an inopportune moment and preserved like the ruins of Pompeii. Indeed, the groove-laden ‘Ocean Road’ is truncated at the 2.40 mark, leaving the listener in a brief state of bewilderment, followed by a moment of grief for what could have been. Thankfully, the mesmeric ‘Norfolk Hotel’, a song cast in the classic mold of LP1 with a magnificent waltzy chorus augmented by spidery drum rolls, comes quickly to rescue us.

Unfold has an unspoiled, edenic quality, that is rudely and abruptly interrupted by the vicissitudes of living. “The album was fifty percent completed, and then the relationship just didn’t make it through the process,” says Melody. “And then I tried to work on it on my own for a couple years, until I realized that I was just really hurting myself doing that.” In a moment of frustration, Melody deleted some of the music from those sessions which is now gone forever, but all is not lost. Seven tracks from that period are available for the first time on vinyl with this tenth anniversary edition.

Photo Courtesy: Matt Sav