It’s not uncommon for artists to use heartbreak in their work, particularly as a developing theme. A universal feeling that unfortunately touches all of our lives in some ways, perhaps the first shock of adolescent heartbreak informs the first record, painting or collection for many emerging voices.
So, it’s a little unusual for an artist with eight records under their belt (including those with her project DRNKS) to have only begun to address a topic that is so formative to many artists. But then, Cate Le Bon is not like other artists.
I speak to Le Bon from the Welsh countryside from her parents home, with its accompanying problematic Wi-Fi. Ever the dutiful daughter, she is repainting their kitchen ceiling, which may lead to the walls as well, so I’m curious to know if she is the kind of artist that finds creativity in the mundane. “It’s relaxing,” says Le Bon. “When you’re painting, or chopping vegetables, you have that chance to daydream. Phones interrupt everything now, but those little repetitive tasks give you permission to drift.”
One can really drift into the ephemeral world of Michelangelo Dying, her most vulnerable work to date. Le Bon admits she resisted writing an album about heartbreak, yet it insisted on revealing itself through every lyric, every fractured melody.
“I tried not to make a record about heartache,” she confesses, “but it kept veering back there. I surrendered to the process. There’s no linear storyline, it’s more like collage, the fragmented nature of memory and the grieving of a fantasy.” The result is an album that feels both abstract and deeply human. The synths and pads often hover without anchor, as though mirroring the disorientation of loss.
"When you’re painting, or chopping vegetables, you have that chance to daydream. Phones interrupt everything now, but those little repetitive tasks give you permission to drift."
“That felt like the most authentic representation of heartache,” she reflects. “Not tidying it up into declarations, but allowing it to be messy, lonely, disorientating. It’s universal, but when you’re in it, it feels utterly singular.” I’m sure we can all remember feeling that our heartbreak was the most monumental to ever happen to anyone, ever.
Unlike the early, confessional heartbreak albums that litter the canon of popular music, Le Bon’s is a work of maturity. It is textured, porous, and concerned as much with sonic space as with words. “Love is one word used for so many different things,” she says. “We all think we understand it, but it means something different to everyone.”
Collaboration and the support of her players was essential to Le Bon feeling safe enough to surrender in the studio. Long-time engineer, friend and co-producer Samur Khouja was central in holding the frame while Le Bon lost herself inside it. But it was saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood who gave the record its haunting second voice.
“Often what I demanded from the saxophone was the emotion that failed me in words,” she explains. “It functioned as a second voice.” Hinshelwood demonstrated the power of wordless melody in expressing human feeling and added an additional level of meaning.
When making Michelangelo Dying, I’m curious to know what informed and inspired Le Bon, and interestingly drone music became both a sonic and meditational compass. She immersed herself in the works of Eliane Radigue, Ellen Arkbro and Linea Tøpper: all female drone artists.
“When I tell people I love drone, they don’t understand how the pieces can differ,” she laughs. “But when it resonates, it’s so emotional. As long as it’s authentic, it translates.” She describes drone as “porous music” that attaches to your internal environment as much as your external one.”
The essential authenticity in art is also something Le Bon admires in visual art too. She recalls an obsession with Colette Lumière’s installation Real Dream: a woman lying naked beside a mirror in a room draped with pink fabric. “I told Samur I wanted the record to sound like that looked and felt. At first I couldn’t put it into words, but it carried this dream-like quality. A confrontation of self, and then a rest. That was what I was looking for.”
"I tried not to make a record about heartache, but it kept veering back there. I surrendered to the process."
The album’s title, Michelangelo Dying, is layered and open to interpretation. “There are personal reasons,” Le Bon offers, “but also a nod to the timelessness of love experienced through art. And it’s a little tongue-in-cheek. It is grandiose.” Yet for all the fragmentation and abstraction, she knew the record needed to end in lucidity: with the refrain of leaving someone you love. “It doesn’t matter how much you love someone, sometimes you have to leave. After all the disorientation, that clarity felt like the only conclusion.”
As our time concludes I’m keen to know about the “focus track” of the album, but Le Bon is not involved in the language of press releases. Laughing, she confesses, “I don’t even know what that means. I just make albums. Handing them over feels like giving them to wolves, you’ve sculpted this private thing, and suddenly it’s torn apart. But that’s how it works.”
I assure her that the album will be played in full, at least in my household, and enjoyed as a full album, that without a linear story, still has a narrative and sonic arc. Michelangelo Dying is a fractured and collaged memory of heartbreak that through its disintegration in places, greater clarity is found.
Michelangelo Dying is out now on all streaming platforms.
