In conversation with Ange Halliwell

Ange Halliwell’s mind is often veering into otherworldly realms. Fittingly, he plays the instrument most often paired with angels and heaven. But his preoccupation with death and what might come after is darker, more morbid, more occult than white-clad cherubs, glowing and frolicking around. The afterlife entities in their world are shadowy spirits of old farmers, communicating through their make-shift ouija boards.

His love for the harp began at twelve, but high school and queerness don’t always play nice, and there’s nothing more threatening to normativity than a harp resting in a boy’s lap. The instrument was beautiful, maybe too beautiful. But the time wasn’t right, so he left it behind.

Now, the harp is back, and Ange is still refusing the ‘normal’ route. You’d expect him to be in a classical orchestra, or framed by a choir, but instead you’ll find him playing in techno clubs (whether the ravers like it or not), or dragging his harp into rotting farmhouses where horses appear unannounced. His upcoming album, the darkest and most morbid yet, is shaped by a life spent chasing contact with the beyond. It includes an interlude sung with his childhood best friends, a tribute to the afternoons they used to spend summoning spirits in an abandoned family farmhouse after school. He still believes in that kind of magic: that sound can be a bridge to the unseen. The harp becomes a portal, not to God, but to something equally sacred: trance states, and perhaps even realms beyond ours. 

How are you today?
Pretty good! I was quite ill a few days ago but everything is good. 

I hope you’re feeling better and better by the day. I’d love to go back and talk about when you started playing the harp. What was that like?
The first time I discovered the harp, I was 12 years old. At the time, I was already playing the guitar, but I didn’t quite like it. I went to a friend of my parents’ house, and she was playing the harp. The moment I saw it was truly magical. It was like in this really beautiful fairy house in the countryside, cosy and kind of eerie, and she was playing the harp in front of the chimney. I immediately knew I wanted to play it. I can’t forget this memory.

The eeriness is something you can feel in your aesthetic or even your work now all around is – did you start studying the harp formally at 12?
No. Actually, I can’t even read music. But a friend of my parents, Vero, became my teacher and she taught me how to play the harp only by ear. She of course taught me all the techniques of the harp, but she also let me be free with it. She showed me how to compose everything, but also gave me a lot of freedom.

And it sounds like you developed a feeling for it from a very young age, and a creative flow of your own. Because I feel like with harp, most ties are to its classical associations.
At some point, I thought I was not ‘legitimate’ to play the harp as I had not followed a classical education at any conservatory – it was a feeling that arose quite suddenly. So in response to this, I tried to focus more on technical or traditional musical aspects in detail for this album, and so I did. It wasn’t that difficult, and I’ve realised after all that it was useless to put so much pressure on these aspects. The important thing is to feel the melody, try, fail, try again, fail again, pick something up from your failure, and construct melodies around all of this. But the whole process was so fun, and I think I improved just by trying.

It makes perfect sense, you also turn it into something that’s deeply yours, and also very contemporary.
Thank you! With the classical use of the harp, you’re always going to have amazing, transcendental results. For me, I just want to play with this freedom of self-composed music. I don’t care if it’s not a good chord, I’m just playing with emotions and intuition rather than with technical precision with the music.

Within that, how would you describe your style or your approach to playing the harp, but also your music in general?
I don’t know how to define my music. I’m really bad at categorising musical genres. 

You can also describe it outside of genre, in colours, foods, smells or something.
This upcoming album will be darker, more morbid. It smells like frankincense, iron’s blood, old walls rotten by humidity, algae, dusty abandoned mansions, tractor fuel, gunpowder and mud. The three colors are black, white and red.

And what has served as an inspiration to make it darker?
I guess my interest in horror movies, above all the other occult things. I was always fascinated by death. I don’t know why. It was something present in my life. But during high school, I thought it was too weird, so I toned it down. But in the end, I have this interest in life with magical stuff and the occult. I think my work before was really colourful and more fairy-like and eerie. But this time, I wanted to go back to this darkness.

What exactly about death fascinates you?
Ghosts and the life after death. After school, my best friends and I used to go to this house close to where me and my parents lived. It was  an abandoned farm that still belonged to my family. We used to go there almost every day after school to call upon the spirits. I think we did that for one year, maybe. And it was so intense that I can’t explain what happened in detail because it would take so much time, but we were in communication with this specific spirit and so much crazy stuff happened…

What did the spirit say? I can’t just move onto the next question, I need to know.
It knew everything about our lives! We did these experiments sometimes, asking the ghost to guess what we were thinking. We practiced that not with some specific board, but with a glass and letters around. One day we saw the shadow of the spirit on the wall. Also during the end of middle school, we had these really important exams. We hadn’t studied enough, so we called the spirit and asked him what the subject would be, just one hour before the exam. He told us exactly what we have to check and it was exactly the theme of our oral exam.

That’s crazy. Shows how much you need to be on good terms with the spirits.
I think there is a real misconception of calling on any spirit. Of course, it can be dangerous. And of course, there are many stories about bad things happening. But I think if you do it with an open heart and with good intentions and a wish for experimenting, it can work out well. Everyone is really scared due to some religious misconceptions, thinking they’re going to summon demons. But for us, none of the bad stuff happened. And we did it for years…

What did the spirit look like? Was it a specific person?
I don’t know if I should say it. My brother doesn’t want to know the name of the spirit because he lives in the house right now. But he was a man who died close by the farm, 50 years ago or so. He was really nice and funny. I had never seen him in the flesh… It was only through the glass and spelling words with the letter that this spirit was talking to us. But one night, we asked him to show his presence in the room, and suddenly we saw a silhouette cast on the old wall of the house, like a shadow. It wasn’t very scary but very impressive.

Damn. And do you still talk to him? Do you know what he’s up to?
No. After high school, we stopped. And I think also he left and lived his own life after that, in his own world. But sometimes we do it again with some friends of mine. It’s really rare now to call the spirit, but every time it’s a different person. The guy left us for good, I think. 

Yeah, they also have things to do. But when it comes to your music, do you see it as a way of also transcending realms and communicating with some spirits in a way?
Of course. It’s not communicating with spirits, but sometimes I can play the harp, especially when I improvise, and I enter this meditative state. Sometimes I just keep playing, and it’s sunny outside and I think I played for five minutes, but when I snap out of my state I realise it’s dark outside and I’ve actually been playing for three hours, and I get so confused. Music can be a good tool to access other worlds outside of this one.

For sure. And would you say it’s always been your creative process?
It’s not always that I reach this meditative state. But, it’s always about improvising before composing the actual music.

And for the upcoming album, do you have any specific inspiration points?
For once, I finally have a cohesive story to tell. It’s still a bit blurry and not sharp nor concrete though. The introductory track is called Intro – Invocation, I recorded my two friends doing a fake invocation like we did during our seance. It’s like “spirit, spirit, are you here?” in French. The story of the album is about calling a spirit and it going wrong. It’s a discovery along the tracks, the immersion into a spirit arriving. At some point we visit Hell. Then, it’s the interlude, which is a traditional song we sang with my two besties in a very old chapel in my village. The story is about me losing contact with the beyond, and I’m just lost with myself and this world. 

I feel like the harp is quite rare to see in the modern alternative experimental music scene. I’m curious if you’ve had any challenges or any special moments with it.
During high school, I left the harp for a moment because I had to deal first with my queerness, and harp was not very ideal when one wants to fake “normativity”. I remember one day, I was playing for an elementary school in a small village, and a guy (younger than me) came to me with his friends while I was playing, telling to myself that “harp is an instrument for faggots”, and slapped me. Then, one day, after performing a duet with my brother, I remembered just how much I love the harp. After that, I started my solo project as Ange Halliwell and released my first EP. Someone in Paris came across my work, and suggested that I play there. I didn’t expect that the harp could be that interesting for people. I started to play in really unexpected places, like techno clubs. I’m still shocked that people had invited me to play. I think it’s thanks to the impression of the harp itself, as the instrument is aesthetically beautiful, and also this contrast between such a traditional instrument and the places I’ve been invited to perform, be it a techno club or a museum. It’s really funny.

I am really fascinated by this dichotomy of the classical instrument in an alternative, or non-normative setting. Do you have any musical inspirations where the harp is taken out of classical context and mixed with other genres?
There are a lot of them, with the first one that comes to mind being Leya, it’s a duo. One is playing the harp and the other one is singing and playing the violin. There’s also Joanna Newsom, similar to other artists that don’t play harp in a classical way, as well as the French harpist Cécile Corbel. 

And for your own work, do you have a dream collaboration or an experimental project with a harp?
Yeah, of course, I have so many people I would love to collaborate with. Also, my biggest dream is to make music for a horror movie one day; it’s an inspirational pursuit for me. I want to collaborate with so many people, but I’m always a little bit embarrassed to say all of their names. For this album, I was very inspired by Mylène Farmer, and all her musical – and mostly visual – universe. I would also love the work of Ethel Cain. She inspired me in so many ways. I really love the work of Sopor Aeternus, their work is really fascinating.

That’d be a full-circle moment! I also want to know more about you playing in techno clubs. What was that experience like?
I do it sometimes. The first time I played at one was in ParkingStone, and it was quite interesting. It was a famous, long-standing party in Paris a few years ago, lead by Simone Thiebaut – she programmed me to play between two really intense, experimental techno DJ sets. The audience was divided into two: the front row was full of people who were drunk and high. At the back, there were some people shouting at me like, shut up, we want the music back, we want the drums, etc. But still, I didn’t feel bad. I thought about it as if it was part of a game, and of course, there were going to be a bunch of people who wouldn’t like this. But at least I’m sure the people at the front enjoyed it, haha!

I’m sure they did. The reason I asked the question is because in a space like a club, people often want to lose themselves. It’s a transcending experience in a way as well, which connects so well with your work.
Yeah, but I can genuinely understand why people perhaps didn’t like it, or at least didn’t expect it. And I’m always fine with that!

Let’s talk about your visuals. Tell me more about the video for ‘They are coming’. What was the inspiration behind it and the story you wanted to portray?
We didn’t really have a main inspiration for this. A few weeks before recording the video, I went to this “urbex” located close by my village. While I was exploring, a horse literally appeared from nowhere in this room full of chairs. The moment was truly disturbingly beautiful and timeless! I recorded it, put it on my instagram story and also sent it to Lilian. He was in love with it and the idea to record at this place with horses came about.

What was the experience of filming it like? And what was the location? I can definitely feel the rotting smell. This is where I imagine you did the ouija board rituals, ha-ha.
It was really fun! But also really organic. We had to record depending on the horse. His owner was with us, thankfully, but imagine putting a huge horse in a confined space, sometimes walking and slipping on tiles, and with my dog around… Lilian recording with the help of Lucie, with his owner and me playing the harp… It was a lot for her but she absolutely did a great job! These animals are so fascinating. Their glance, their presence are absolutely magical. As I said, the location was an urbex, I love to do urban exploration in my free time. There are so many in my area, these spaces are always deeply beautiful and so inspiring. And no, it wasn’t the space I used to do the ouija board! But it could be a nice spot to make a seance one day…

More broadly, what is your relationship to nature and the animal world? What made you choose to create such an intimate, almost post-human work?
My relationship with nature and animals is very important. I grew up living in the countryside, surrounded by so many animals. When I was younger, I used to adopt birds. Over three years, I had one magpie, Nina, and two crows: Cyrion and Zinda. These birds are so intelligent, it’s crazy. I raised them outdoors so that they could eventually have their freedom, but step-by-step. Unfortunately, I think they were all ended up hunted by these useless fucking hunters in my village – I hate them so much.  I also had a lovebird for many years; he would sleep all night long inside my sheets. We also had two rats, cats, dogs, chickens, a chinchilla, goats… I really have a huge fascination with nature, as the area where I grew up has both the Pyrénées and the Ocean nearby. Living in a city is always a big struggle for me. I think the place where Lilian recorded the video was directly linked with our inner worlds, from post-punk movies we watched and with all the intuitive vision Lilian can have.

How does the video tie in with the upcoming album?
“They are coming” music video is the second track on my album, after the first track “intro – invocation”. It shows that the invocation we made before worked, and the after-life is slowly coming. We pictured it with animals, who symbolise the otherworldly arrival of souls. Who can see ghosts better than an animal? This place and their actors were the best we could find to illustrate this song. But of course, everyone has their own explanations and symbols they might find inside the work. I just want to add that I’m truly grateful to work for so many years with Lilian [the director]. He has a very unique and singular way of filming, and all his universe is truly inspiring.

Nice! I’m super excited to see how this project comes together. Where are you at with the album right now?
I can’t wait for it to be released – I’ve been working on it for almost three years now. There will be new stuff on it… drums, organs – I’m really happy with the result. I think it’s going to be released during autumn, around Halloween, my favourite time of the year…