Pillars of Influence: Five essentials that inspire Erin LeCount
With the release of I Am Digital, I Am Divine earlier this year, artist Erin LeCount unleashed a creative world too visceral, too luscious and too interesting to ignore. All her own and made only in her own image – it was an utterly self-made one. Now, that world is building.
“To me, everything’s like a diary entry, or a stamp in time, or an experience that’s made into something tangible,” LeCount told Far Out as she talked us through that self-written and self-produced EP, made mostly in a shed at the bottom of her garden. In an attempt to protect her vision, she taught herself to produce to ensure that it could come to fruition down to the most minute details.
She wanted it to sound like her, even adding her own heartbeat into the mixes. And the result was something magical.
But no artist is an island. Even as LeCount resolved to follow her own mind only, that mind is still populated by a world of influences and inspirations that she’s encountered during her life and that have left an indelible mark on her artistry.
As she now unveils the next chapter with ‘808 Hymn’, another step up in the maturity and clarity of that vision, she shared with us five key pillars that prop her up. Five essential things that shape and hold her own creative mind, there is no Erin LeCount without these vital artefacts, places and pieces of artistry.
Erin LeCount’s five pillars of influence:
Sampha – ‘Process’
“A really pivotal album for me. I wouldn’t produce the music I do, or perhaps at all if it wasn’t for this album,” LeCount said, which is no small praise. Granting Sampha credit for her whole drive to make her own music, his Mercury Prize-winning 2017 album made it all happen.
“Lyrically and sonically it exists in its own world to me and I love it to this day,” she expanded, “Hearing ‘Plastic 100’ for the first time was an out of body experience.”
It encapsulates too much for her. In Sampha’s own self-production, and his own resolve to apply his feelings to each and every decision with no compromises, she hears a world of emotion, stating, “Grief, beauty, meditative without ever losing momentum – strings, piano, modular synths, genre-bending.”
Years on, its impact never fades as she gushes, “Genius, I could talk about it forever.”
Angela Davis – ‘Women, Race and Class’
Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. For those artistically inclined, their intrigues almost always stretch outwards into the neighbouring worlds of film, literature and visual artists. For LeCount, they stretch into the world of non-fiction and philosophy as she picks out Angela Davis’ work as an essential.
“I feel I could’ve answered with a fiction book here, but truthfully, I read this book during my sociology studies, and it’s probably the book that’s most impacted my worldview, so it felt right to put it here,” she said.
There is no separating art from the context of the world it’s made in, and so rightfully, politics plays a role in LeCount’s mind as she said gives a shout to Davis’ groundbreaking 1981 book, stating, “A collection of essays about US history, the abolition of slavery and women’s liberation, critical intersectional feminist analysis. Very relevant and important work.”
Kenneth Anger – ‘Rabbit’s Moon’ (1950 / 1971)
“I am digital, I am divine,” LeCount declared on her last EP, tying together two things that typically would have felt worlds apart. Really, that was the ethos of Kenneth Anger’s entire career, so her intrigue in him makes total sense to me.
On Rabbit’s Moon, he continued what he’d begun with Scorpio Rising, essentially originating the music video by putting together visuals and sounds that feel conflicting but work in weirdly perfect harmony. Here, the visuals are of a Pierrot clown in a mystical Ballet-like space, while the sounds are early rock and roll.
“Hypnotic, fantastical, avant-garde, theatrical, low-budget, strange, which is everything I love,” LeCount said about this pick, adding that it’s a reference she pulls from a lot for her own visuals.
“Nearly took 20 years to complete. It’s borderline unsettling but beautiful. A clown longing for the moon. Shot in Paris, they were rushed out the studio before they could even finish filming,” she explained further.
It’s partially the slow and stunted process that endears her to it, as she added, “ I think I feel so fondly about it because of the blatant DIY-ness of it, the hand-painted leaves, etc. It’s like child’s play, it’s working with what you’ve got for visuals, and I enjoy that in my own work.”
Her garden shed
As we said, music exists in its context, and in a more literal sense, Erin LeCount’s immediate context is a shed at the bottom of her garden. That’s the true world of her artistry.
“I make everything in my shed in my garden at home, all my music comes from here, and it’s my favourite place,” she said. When talking to us earlier in the year about her EP, this shed was the making of that music as the place where she slowly but surely honed her skills.
Explaining further now, she said, “I am quite an insular person and not as extroverted as I think people assume I am. I like to make things quietly in my own company in a place that feels really grounded with not too many toys or equipment; otherwise, I get distracted or nervous.”
So, for LeCount, this is the dream space to make music and one that, without it, her music perhaps wouldn’t exist. “It’s not quite a studio and not quite a rickety tools shed, it’s somewhere between. It’s just my den, and I struggle to make music elsewhere. You can hear the rain when you’re recording, you can hear the neighbours, they can hear me. But it’s perfect.”
Tarot cards
For her fifth and final foundational influence, LeCount turns to the spirits.
“There’s something I love so much about tarot. I think it’s how universal it is, how far it goes back, it’s slightly like music in that sense that there’s so many different forms of it in so many different cultures dating back years,” she said.
Connecting the ritual and practice of communing with the universe with the ritual and practice of being creative, the two exist side by side to her.
“I love the illustrations, the interpretations,” she added. “I love the feeling of receiving a card at the perfect moment. I love sharing it with other people. I also think it’s a really good reminder that you already have lots of the answers you’re going looking for in things like cards, readers, psychics,” she said.
Just as she turned towards trusting herself in her own music, tarot reminders her of that need to listen to her intuition, adding, “When you find yourself wanting to receive a certain message, that tells you more about yourself than the card actually does anyway.”
