Features : Multi-faceted artist Odelet delivers a timeless sound for today with new EP, album

A savant singer and composer, the California-based artist Odelet began performing her own music while in college studying visual art at Portland State University. But well before that, she had already developed an eclectic taste in music.

Odelet is a native of Detroit, and one of her fathers was all about the Detroit music scene. Her other dad, meanwhile, was into old school country music. And a young Odelet soaked it all in.

Now an independent artist with a fast growing following, Odelet has followed a similarly diverse musical path with her own releases: she debuted with the avant-garde 19-track album Experiment in 2021, which served as an exercise in minimalism; then she dropped twelve songs on The Angels Album in 2022, which took her into the world of soul and R&B––genres that have been close to her heart since she was a child in the Motor City.

And now Odelet is preparing to release her third album, Pisces Pie, on May 11, which she describes as an ode to classic hip-hop production and siren singers.

“It was right after I got out of high school that I delved more into hip hop and listened to artists like A Tribe Called Quest,” she says. “It’s really evolved over the years because I’ve always been around very different kinds of people and music listeners. I’m always just eating it all up.”

The idea for Pisces Pie was born a few years ago when Odelet was recording Experiment, which served as a compilation of sorts for her body of work as a stripped down and very minimal singer and songwriter. But already she had an idea for something like lo fi hip hop, with beats serving as the backbone of the project.

“I’ve always really loved playing around with presenting writing in a stripped down way, it’s really fun for me creatively,” she says. “With The Angels Album, it felt like I was ready to stretch out into that sort of soulful soundscape, but things are never really planned out for me. Even when I’m in the midst of getting a project done, always in my mind I’m on to the next thing, too and I love feeling expansive in that way. I have an idea, then I have the next idea and it always fits together like each perfect puzzle piece and I just roll with it.”

The 11-song album Pisces Pie isn’t the only new puzzle piece; she’s also released a new EP titled Odelet’s Hufflepuff that’s something of an appetizer for the full project.

“It’s a little grouping of songs that are setting the tone that gets to continue and build to the full project,” she says. “It’s not dissimilar to courses in food; it’s kind of like prepping the palate.”

Songs like “Cinderella,” which feature on the four-song EP, are an amalgamation of sorts of her works: it’s driven by a minimalist beat and instrumentation over which Odelet sings with her soulful voice––it’s even got some jazz in it. The result is a sound both timeless and brand new.

“The sound I am really drawn to is very much rooted in an analog sound,” she says. “It’s the depth of it and I’m super nerdy about it so I love creating a sound that feels sort of like it’s of a bygone era. I’ve always been really into old world things in general.”

“I love how much it can be read in a very literal way or felt in a very literal way,” she says. “It’s a love song, or about this notion of someone talking about themselves. It could be taken in a very literal way but I also love that all the new songs can be interpreted by people in very unique ways to themselves. They are really love letters to myself, and ‘Cinderella,’ especially, is kind of falling in love with yourself.”

Odelet still has her passion from college for visual art, too, and she accompanied The Angels Album with an award-winning experimental music visual which has since been screened in more than 50 film festivals. In 2022 she also co-founded the production company Everlasting Tape, which produced her second project (and first full band effort) and is very connected to her visual art work––more of which is on the way for Pisces Pie.

“I’m very much interested in playing around with a more abstract approach to a visual representation or accompaniment to the music, so where it feels connected but almost in an ineffable way, very dreamlike,” she says. “I was calling it dream-scaping. It’s creating this multidimensional world that you get to feel transported into.”

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