Hi Ben, I’ll just assume that it’s you there. I’m a 29 years old guy from France, I live in a small village in what is called « petite montagne », to the east of the country, in Jura. It’s 6 am now and foggy here. I write to you not with any hope, just from pure necessity, the kind of necessity which is not burdensome. I discovered your music around 2010 I think, and I immediately, profoundly connected with it. It was not really a happy time for me, I was living next to myself and your music was probably one of the few places where I could meet myself. Then you released I Forget Where We Were and Noonday Dream. For this time and so long it durated, without so much effusion, I lost my connection with you, like two friends who grow quietly apart. I still listened to your old stuff from time to time, with great pleasure, but you had nonetheless become somewhat of a memory for me.

And last year Collections From The Whiteout popped out. I listened to the few songs you released beforehand (I think it was What A Day and maybe Crowhurst’s Meme), dubious, with the careless attention you pay to an artist you once loved. And I listened to them again, and when it was possible, to the whole album, still with circonspection somehow, but something about Follies Fixture was different, it hit me in a way I was having trouble figuring out. And without I made any « jump » into loving it, now I listen to this last album like I never ceased to love what you do. Maybe actually I did not and I didn’t know. Now I realise you’re kind of a big brother to me – ages would easily make it possible (I don’t have one, only two little sisters), which you love at first, then you don’t, then after having taken a step back within the frame of which you understood some more things, you do again. These things I understood are not the least, and I think they are similar to the ones you, with a lead of two or three years, did understand too, which are so difficult and unnecessary (given, in this case, the existence of music) to put into words.

It reminds me of telling you that I write too, only not for music, and that I like to express that same « quality » of, lets say for the record, warmly remote complexity (or the other way around), dreamy matter, heavy, consistent abstraction, with a dislike of sentimentalism (which is far more upon us than we understand) and a weakness for subtlety. It’s simple, you’re as close to me as, in their own ways and for different reasons not at all of the same orders, (I don’t know if you’ll know of them, but it’s in order to give you another clue through a kind of constellation, like seeing a saucepan in the sky makes you reflect anew upon what a star is) Krishnamurti (the total influence), Baudelaire (the longstanding and naturally although curiously not denied one) and Marcel Proust (the stylistic and plenitude-in-alonenesswise one).

I’m sorry, maybe I start sounding a little bit chatty. It’s 8 am now, the daylight's beginning to rise and I’m listening on repeat to the Kingston version of Follies Fixture. What you did with that song completely mindblew me. Those three versions, the way they vary from each other and from a same elusive point… I’m particularly sensitive to the variation from the Tiny Desk one to the Kingston one. I’m not a musician (or I’m a drummer but I know nothing about non-rythmic music theory) but I can totally spot what ‘seed’ in the Tiny Desk version you discovered and made grow, that tone you turned into a widely dominant one in the Kingston version, resonating for me with a funny sense which is the sense of being sentenced to success, I mean like, independently from the phenomenon of recognition, without any question of arrogance.

Anyway, I should stop there. I’m really amazed by your evolution in about, what, twelve, thirteen years since Every Kingdom ? to the point that I have trouble believing it. To me it sounds like you found a place to be, and maybe the reason why in the same time I can’t believe it and I love your music so much is because I’m coming accross this place too.

Lets end this letter with a quote from Meister Eckhart : « I love you because I don’t need you ».

I wish you the best,

Camille.