Tender the Spark

No longer wanting to be reduced to a mere fandom factoid, Cecile Believe is decidedly stepping out from the shadows that distinguished her last effort, 2020’s Plucking A Cherry From The Void. There, the artist—best known for her vocal acrobatics on collaborations with SOPHIE and A.G. Cook—emoted as she saw fit across dark electronic timbres, brimming with operatic bravado. Now, the perplexing, esoteric stoicism of her playful pen comes to light as part of the inductive approach behind her newest project, Tender The Spark. A luminescent reintroduction to electronic music, Believe is unquestionably blazing her own ecstatic visual world.

Cecile Believe’s thunderous fantasy, manifested across Tender The Spark’s single and promotional imagery. Shot and creative directed by Richie Talboy. Courtesy of Ambient Tweets. Artwork via IG @cecilebelieve.

First stoked by the fires of the COVID pandemic, or, more suitably, the pause primed by its tepid kindlings, the extended play exacts the might of Believe’s much-levied “did you know?”, “your favourite artist’s favourite artist” capacity, branching out into a new sort of progression in sound for the formerly Montreal-based musician—one more audibly realized in nature. That is not to say that Believe’s dreamy output has by any means ever been lacking in technical proficiency; once operating under the pseudonym Mozart’s Sister (tongue-in-cheek, a poetic twin flame counterpart to the renowned composer), Believe hailed from DIY beginnings, forged in the uprising of a distinctly late-2000s/early-2010s alternative Quebecoise scene that ushered in a young Grimes, Doldrums and Blue Hawaii. It isn’t clear how heavily their fates brushed but, suffusing the label Arbutus Records’ catalogue, the productions were notoriously lo-fi, arranged in bedroom squalor and performed in defunct warehouses.

What separated Cecile Believe from her peers was a thirst for computerized production, making a heel turn to Ableton software from the indie bands that had proliferated this setting of her youth. Self-taught, her solo sect of songwriting, singing, and sonic arrangement eventually led to a fateful chance encounter with SOPHIE in 2013, and from there, Believe really hit the ground running to carve out reverence in the space, following up masterful contributions to SOPHIE’s 2018 OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES with the scant, ethereal stylings of her own mixtape, Made in Heaven. Across her work, she bends her voice as its own harmonic instrument just as easily across crunching overtones, played out theatrically on the Britney Spears-like ‘Bi**h Bites Dog’, as clean, blip-heavy beats (see her feature on A.G. Cook’s ‘Show Me What’; its potent production like an upper you just want more of, solidifying its status as a hyperpop staple).

Cecile Believe holding a plug in position, empowering light. Shot by Julian Buchan for Paper.

Along with an imaginative whimsy that is worn on the exterior of these songs (“Heartbeat, concrete / Real synthetic / Purple, four door / Show me what you're made of / Layer, cake mix / Pink cloud, deep pit / Starlight's bright, yeah / … / Show me what you're made of”), such charmingly off-kilter qualities have made Believe hotly in demand by other artists, booking a stable influx of studio sessions to assist in ideation of their intuitions. The creative work born here too often sees light of day as released material, Believe consistently credited for co-production and writing input, unafraid to experiment with whoever she works with—ever the far-reaching underdog. This speaks to the quality of her material, frequently entering the fray during pivotal shifts in sound for other artists, like the cutesy neo-garage of ‘Firefly’ on Shygirl’s Nymph, the insanity of the ineffable ‘Dang’ on Caroline Polachek’s deluxe Desire, I Want To Turn Into You—a lecture in bafflement, to an equally obtuse Stephen Colbert live performance—and on For Your Consideration by Empress Of, wielding lavish pop with the fellow industry veteran.

You think you understand the gist of a Cecile Believe song, like gibberish at first, and then in comes another layer of meaning, flipping your understanding on its head—unravelling multitudes, like Believe herself. On the postapocalyptic ‘Ponytail’, a slicked-back start to Tender the Spark, what seem like general affectations of a relationship (“Can I be your flyin’ partner? We could go up / I’m not afraid of the darkness, I relish the stuff”) gradually become hyper-specific as the lyrics evolve to display a materialistic capacity (“Can I be your flight attendant / Servin’ it up in the back of a gaudy, souped-up McMansion”). Keep the landmark date 2012 in mind, referenced in-song, and ‘Ponytail’ is time capsuled and slowly running out—less of a Willow Smith-esque whipping of one’s hair out of total carefreeness in feeling, and more a flinging of the middle finger in the air to modern capitalism as we know it (“The world didn’t end, but it feels like it’s gone now / A late-stage self-portrait”). Its central refrain, “Whipping my ponytail out the window of your daddy’s Benz”, charts Believe’s last ride under the dome, chorally sticking it to the paternal stand-in who brought about the end times, responsible for her felt loss of individuality. It is the perfect exemplar of Believe blending promise with reality, likely rattled by the hopelessness of a system whose ineptitude wrought a global pestilence (in which the EP’s foremost ember was fanned).

While ‘Ponytail’ is deeply acerbic, fronting as an outlet for feeling—ratcheting up like a rollercoaster to a non-climactic break, halting the beat for the artist’s empyrean voice to shine before eventually plunging into the satisfaction of a drop—‘Blink Twice’ represents a saccadic switch up. It feels more like a distillation of the lightning strike that inhabits its cover, bottled up in the clubby essence of its sound, as it gets to the point with razor-sharp tact and infectious precision. For these reasons, the song was probably selected as the project’s lead single (and is currently its most streamed), conveying themes of wishful fulfilment and nonverbal communication coyly and with modal immediacy (“If you wanna come with me / I’ll show you how I believe”). It pairs really well with the track ‘Blue Sun’, which is also more on the urgent, upbeat side. Here, however, Believe is the bearer of a balanced contrast; she soliloquizes that she is the night sky’s bringer while her counterpart is all the positivist glass-half-full bent of the moon in its midst—or, rather, a “blue sun” (“I make the nighttime come … You make the darkness fun”).

For a project that I feel casts so much light, the EP remarkably brims with Believe’s manipulation of “shadow play”, which again looms over all the implied “rough and heavy” ordnance of a singular cinnabar slab on ‘Red Brick’. The track plays out like an angelic expression of an intrusive thought, chronicling an internal struggle with all the things we cannot see, but must contend with (“a broken history”). Believe ums and ahs whether to resort to aggression to make a point and “smash the glass between life and dream” through her titular weapon of destruction—minor in the grand scheme of things, yet with a capacity to topple the grasp of her immaterial past. “Do I need violence, or do I need love? / Mommy and daddy, I think I’m in trouble / I’m holding a red brick / And I feel like I might throw it”, ‘Red Brick’ traces a deeply relatable dialogue, put in terms like none other could quite articulate (especially in physical inflection).

Such figurative emotion and insight are refreshing to absorb conceptually, but ‘The Pearl’ is admittedly where Believesheds down to her most raw expression, likening her creative partner SOPHIE in the aftermath of her passing to the rare one-of-a-kind beauty that the trailblazing producer saw in everyone else (harkening back to OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, thought to be a mondegreen for “I love every person’s insides” if pronounced in a certain manner). The tribute was a spur of the moment thing, and it came together very quickly in the space of a session: a sort of revelation for Believe, bowing out of the EP’s digitally sculpted sounds to deliver a poetic, Kate Bush-like exploration of grief and denial (“I am in my rickety vessel / Trying to float on life after” … “I can’t admit that this is it / And I cannot go where you go”), soundtracked only by her stretched melodies and the strums of traditional, acoustic instrumentation. It continues in a vein of other SOPHIE-inspired songs where digital sounds are absent—as if SOPHIE, Mother Electronica herself, inhabits them in another sphere—and the orbiter elucidates their experience of being in her gravity (“I never got to take you to my hometown / Where we could relax and just make sounds / And we’d create the universe on our computers”). Recognizing her electronic bias, and trying something evocative and new, it’s not at all to say that the rest of Tender the Spark is inauthentic—but rather a different invocation of truth.

Cecile Believe, poised under a telescope, like an oracle for otherworldly experience. Shot by Julian Buchan for Vogue.

The project’s final song—and my personal favorite—is an unrelenting ode to life entitled, most literally, ‘I Love Everything’. Listing observations on the human condition, and the opposites we often place in polar zero-sum preference, it rounds out Tender the Spark’s emotional journey as a bulletin of Believe’s ideology: to be all-encompassing, ultimately recognizing that “Humans can hurt me / But they're what I got”.

Born from mulling over a mishearing (“tinder the spark”), Tender The Spark is steeped in rich sonic flavors and musings on life at a time when Cecile Believe had contemplated quitting music entirely to become a nanny. All too used to helping others realize their vision, she forthright casts a spotlight on her own, viewing her act of existence over a decade on in the musical landscape as triumphant resistance. It's what makes Tender The Spark feel so interesting, special, and bold, all at once, as a labour of love to her self-released material. Rather than tear down, rebuild, and try again, it says find the light in everything—or, where impossible, in the face of it—hammer the spark, and feed its flame with nurture.