Interview: Songe
To me, ambient music is at its core an invitation to slow down, tune in, and really pay attention. . . It engages emotions and calls the audience to really be and feel themselves exist.
Phoebe: Making electronic instruments and sounds sound natural is an idea that’s been interesting to me for a while. I think it originally started even before I met Elle, when I was doing my solo stuff where ‘Warmer, Hotter’ originally came from. I wanted to create this luscious soundscape of birds and have it be slowly corrupted and overtaken by simulacrums of birds created by a bit-crushed e-piano. As the song progresses the natural bird recordings get corrupted too with a harsher tape distortion, reversed sounds and slowed calls. Then before you know it, the whole world to start screaming as everything is enveloped.
This idea of corruption of natural sounds was really exciting to me, and when I showed Elle, Songe just kind of took off from there. The way ‘Eveil’ started was almost an experiment of if I could make a soundtrack to an aquarium, shifting tempo centres replicating the sea, but by no means capturing its raw beauty. Again, I like the word simulacrum because I think it describes really what I want the audience to get from Songe – this sense of wrongness with the electronic components; they should stand out and when juxtaposed with the field recordings and the kind of more natural elements like the piano, the tape and even Elle’s voice, they should stand out and kind of tell a story just by themselves.
Ëlle: When I start writing a piano line or vocals, I always have a very clear vision of what the natural representation of this is. For ‘To Ashes’, it’s fire, ‘Eveil ‘is very much the call of water – think of a siren in a cave trying to lure someone in. That is what’s at the core of all of those songs. I really just try to picture the natural equivalent to the sound when we’re writing them, and I think that’s also how we make it sound so in tune with nature in a way but also, as Phoebe, said ever so slightly “wrong”. We try to keep natural elements embedded and intertwined in rhythms and sounds. The tide, the wind, the waves, the myths.
E&D: You use the label “ambient” to describe your music. It’s a genre, perhaps misused, by many people to purposefully un-engage with, to sleep to, or to aid focus on something else. What does ambient music mean to you?
Ëlle: To me, ambient music is at its core an invitation to slow down, tune in, and really pay attention. When a lot of music genres tend to grab us and comfort us in structure, ambient challenges facility, and as musicians it also gives us freedom – from structure, from expected sounds, from composition and the nature of playing live. It engages emotions and calls the audience to really be and feel themselves exist. We do arguably mix ambient with drone, noise and dark folk – but it’s the beauty of it, its possibility of expansion and experimentalism.
Phoebe: For me personally, I never really like the term ambient for our music – I often prefer to call it neofolk or noise, or any of the above really. Ambient to me is almost something that was put upon us because of our use of reverb and texture – I kind of tend to use it because we are often described as such.
E&D: Your debut LP is called Daughters – is this in relation to your personal identity and being daughters yourselves? If so, how has this personal identity informed your sonic identity?
Phoebe: The word daughter was always important to hear and has a lot of different meanings. Being trans it’s a very affirming word to hear others use about me, as well as a sisterhood that you experience with other women. I definitely want to foster that sort of sisterhood between us and our fans; we are all daughters, all together.
Ëlle: Daughter is such a magical word. It makes me feel held by the universe and resonates with me in a sort of layered way. I am a literal daughter, I do cherish that familial bond but there’s more to it: there’s the sorority aspect I get to share with the women in my life; there’s the feeling I get when I’m walking on a forest path, knowing deep in my core I am a daughter of Nature.
E&D: Your press material describes your first meeting as through “stumbling on a lonely church piano” – can you elaborate?
Ëlle: We met whilst both helping out at a Scowl gig at a church in Brighton. Phoebe was doing sound, and after the gig we had to haul upstairs about 50 to 60 chairs and through the creeping delirium, bonded. We took a break and I started playing ‘She never left’ (by Chve) on the church piano at 2 am; Phoebe sat next to me and we started playing together; the natural reverb of the church made that moment so dreamy and lost in time – it was evidence that we needed to make music together
E&D: You also say that your music “explores what it means to live in a postmodern world that feels rooted in destruction”. How do you go about creating art within this destructive world?
Ëlle: Art is my lifeline, and has been since I could approach and produce it; it is what gives me hope when the world is too sombre, and allows my catharsis when anger is exploding out of me.
Phoebe: As destructive the world is, there are pockets of beauty despite it. I draw my inspirations from the beauty that faces the impending doom that looms over us all; this may very well be the end, but let’s at least write a shimmering epitaph
E&D: Your music is for “the lost souls, the lovers, the wood sprites”. Are there any famous lost souls, lovers, or wood sprites from literature, history, folklore or pop culture that you feel would be particularly drawn to your music, or that you would want to see in a Songe audience?
Ëlle: Ooooh, that’s a tough one. Okay here’s a list in no particular order or category: Lilith, Alice (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), SOPHIE, Emily Dickinson, Mary Shelley, Anne Shirley, Eurydice, and Circe.
Phoebe: Sappho, John Waters, Alan Turing, and Joan of Arc.
Daughters was released on November 28, 2025 via Cruel Nature Records. It is available as a limited edition cassette and a download and can be purchased here on Bandcamp.
