Alain Chamois

Alain Chamois is one of that rare breed of music writers who ended up making music themselves. After publishing his own fanzines in the 1990s from his Hebden Bridge bedroom, titles which included ‘Toner Burst’ and ‘Cindy Has Discovered Lo-Fi’, Chamois spent a number of years writing his still unfinished book on seventeenth century non-conformist and Ranter songs and hymns. After graduating from a course in music composition at Anglia Polytechnic University in 2004, Chamois wrote and directed his Robert Ashley influenced choral opera Cri Moon, about the history of the Criterion Pub in Cambridge (watering hole of Nick Drake amongst others). Since then Chamois has developed a style of contemporary musical composition that is writing focussed and based around his own texts about pop music stories and myths, often related to particular places. Let Me Take You There is an audio guide to a West Yorkshire field that is also hosted on the geolocated sound walk app Echoes. It is a meditation on the Calderdale landscape, Joy Division, poetry, Russ Abbot and (UK band) Rooney, and is a brilliant example of his unique sited-literary-musical approach.