Interview & words by Rachael Mackenzie

Music was definitely around when I was growing up. My mum belting out UB40 and Shaggy was, mortifyingly, the soundtrack to my childhood. My dad plays in an orchestra and composes for fun, handwriting scores at the dining table as if this is a totally normal activity. Vacays chez Nana were basically theory and harmony courses with the occasional choc ice.

But never did the miniature me, the girl whose purple sparkly violin bow gave her the EDGE at Saturday Morning Music School and who worked hard to master ‘Moonlight Sonata’ to play in assembly, imagine that she would compose for Abbey Road Studios or get noticed by Elton John. I assumed I’d give up and do something cooler.

Until a classmate introduced me to ‘Songs in A Minor’ by Alicia Keys, and my whole perception of music changed. I found Keys’s music so freeing to play yet utterly captivating to hear and I loved the instrument that she made the piano become.

ALYSS was still many, many moons away, but something big had been ignited. I went off score, stopped working toward grades and started to experiment with my own songwriting.

I joined MySpace Music and started writing toplines for instrumentals downloaded from Limewire, which probably sounded as terrible as they were illegal, but I felt like a boss. I started writing, writing, writing, and gigging at local pubs and any other venue that would have me. Lugging my keyboard around in my Fiat Cinquecento, I experienced my first taste of success through complimentary pints and drunk people telling me they loved my sound. I took every performance, no matter how small, seriously. I prepared my set. I dressed up. I warmed up. I accessorised the Cinquecento with rims and fluffy dice to look professional. I kept smiling.

Aged 19, after supporting Ellie Goulding at the back of a Cambridge pub, I knew it was time to take the plunge and I moved to Brighton to study songwriting at BIMM. It was certainly an ego death to come from a small town where I was lowkey famous, to being an unknown in a tribe of other eager artists. But every week brought new faces, new music and new inspiration, and a few months after arriving I released my first EP – ‘Awakenings’, under the moniker Alice Amelia. The album art featured a butterfly to show my transformation. I had CDs made and gave them out at Christmas. I had arrived.

Various drinking establishments introduced me to music like SBTRKT, Hiatus Kaiyote and early James Blake, which piqued my interest in electronic music production. I formed a live band of musicians collected from various house parties and took them with me as I performed at the London Olympics and Paralympics on the Emerging Icons stage, and Glastonbury. Life was exciting. My name was printed in places. I was high from those first hits on Spotify. I couldn’t believe I was even on Spotify.

After my course finished, I joined an agency and began performing covers at weddings and hotels while working on my own projects in the background. I could officially introduce myself as a singer-songwriter, eat a lot of free food, and belt tunes out in fancy places. But after three years of little progress my enthusiasm started to wane. And I quit, everything.

The following year was a painful but necessary transition that would be key to the alchemical change occurring within myself and by extension my artistic expression. Hermitting in a tiny attic studio by the ocean with a skylight used as a social club by seagulls, I was figuring out how to produce beats while searching for a deeper meaning to the nature of reality. I spent hours listening to spiritual and esoteric teachings, reading up on the paranormal and questioning the systems that govern our world while trying out new technology and software to redefine my sound. It was as if myself and my music had been transported to a new dimension, far from where we started but nowhere near the end.

Alice Amelia could be no more. She was from a different time in my life and I was exhausted from trying to make her work. I bid her adieu and deactivated her social media accounts, recycled her business cards, and asked my family to stop buying me butterfly-themed gifts.

Then, I did what any twenty-something musician at the tailend of a combined existential and identity crisis would do, and launched an art business. I began to channel intricate, sacred geometric patterns and esoteric symbols into black and gold drawings. This new creative outlet became a meditative break between writing songs, but at the same time also inspired them. My art and music started to become intertwined on both a visual and etheric level, and ALYSS was born. Hit by a fresh wave of motivation, I started self-producing.

ALYSS became unstoppable. I was soon receiving emails from A&R representatives from major record labels inviting me to meetings in South Kensington. The song ‘Way We Are’, co-written with the Polish producer Chloe Martini, reached the ears of Jessie Ware and a few months later I had management, a lawyer, a publishing deal with Universal and a record deal with PMR Records (Disclosure, Jessie Ware, SG Lewis). My music was being awarded #1 spots on national and international radio shows by the likes of Annie Mac, Jamz Supernova and Zane Low. Even garage legend MJ Cole asked me to feature on a track.

But despite sipping tea at Soho House and having iCal entries like Support Sampha at the Jazz Cafe, I realised I’d gone in too deep too quickly, before I had solid direction, and I was out of my depth. The industry saw ALYSS as something that I knew she wasn’t and my drive to remain integral to my art outweighed my drive to make a name for myself doing things that didn’t feel right. Some days I wanted to make emo piano music and others I wanted to make abstract electronic noises, but this way of songwriting was of no interest to businesses who need consistency from an artist’s catalogue.

Cue the second multi-faceted personal crisis. After spending some time writing and relationshipping in LA and playing gigs in Paris and Zurich, I was broke and alone, working from a damp shed in my dad’s garden. I’d play what I was working on, and he’d tell me what it made him envision – usually an epic historical scene or an outer space landscape. This may not be the kind of advice one would expect from a world-class musician, but it was helpful in finding the right vibe for ALYSS.

Soon after my oddly inspiring shed era, I released my fourth EP, ‘3EARTH’. Not only did Elton John handpick the single ‘MisKayani’ to feature on his radio show Rocket Hour, but the EP caught the attention of Abbey Road Studios. They invited me to compose a series of tracks that would be recorded by the London Contemporary Orchestra in the same room frequented by Pink Floyd and The Beatles and countless others. Standing in the same room as so many greats, covered in studio biscuit crumbs and overseeing an orchestra perform my midi compositions created on my battered Yamaha, was a beautiful moment.

When the world shut down in 2020, I was finally ready to release my first ever full-length album ‘PLÜTONIÅ’. It was the grand finale to an intense few years and my musical reservoir had well and truly dried up. I needed a break. My focus shifted to my successful side-hustle of creating bespoke drawings based on people’s astrology charts. As England moved in and out of lockdowns I grew comfortable hiding behind my pens, spending my days drawing in silence. The global restrictions rolled on and commissions rolled in. I wondered if ALYSS was over.

But the universe had no time for my self doubt. At the start of 2022, a song I had released five years prior named ‘Pyramid’ went viral on TikTok and my inbox immediately flooded with emails from interested record labels. After signing ‘Pyramid’ for a re-release with Columbia Records and a remix by The Blessed Madonna, I had no choice but to get back to it. For the first time in months I was making music every day, resulting in another EP and a second album, planned for release later this year.

The journey from Alicia Keys fangirl, to Alice Amelia, to ALYSS has been a transformative, theatrical and mystical trek. I’m a music producer, singer and visual artist, somehow managing to weave together electronic beats, ethereal soul, esoterica, sacred geometry, astrology and alchemical symbolism into one giant, flamboyant ecosystem. I’m never quite sure what branch will grow next, but with my new venture into web3 and the world of music NFTs, I’m here for it. ALYSS 2.0 coming soon.