The quiet meaning found in repetition
I recently had the pleasure of engaging in a deeply reflective conversation with Michigan native Thomas Meluch—better known as Benoît Pioulard—an artist who, for over two decades, has cultivated a singular voice across the ambient, lo-fi folk, electronic, and shoegaze spheres. His work resembles a kind of sonic calligraphy: handwritten, weathered, and tinged with melancholic warmth—conjuring memory, decay, and the quiet dignity of impermanence—yet always grounded in an unflinching, affirmative presence. From his early vocal records on Kranky to the introspective, long-form meditations of the much-lauded Stanza series, Meluch’s creative practice spans photography, field recordings, prose, and intuitively led musical composition. With the recent release of Stanza IV, he spoke with me about personal thresholds, ecological witnessing, analogue ephemera, and the quiet meaning found in repetition. Over the years, Meluch has shared his work and insights across a wide range of platforms—including KEXP, NTS Radio, the Sound Methods podcast, Fifteen Questions, and The Recoup—and recently contributed a curated mix to the Deep Breakfast Series. Yet his body of work remains resistant to glib trends or algorithmic timestamps, favouring instead a contemplative, handmade ethos that invites presence, patience, and deep listening.
You've talked about your work as a kind of sonic journalling, and you also keep prose journals. How does journal writing and musical composition interact for you? Are they solely parallel reflections of what's inside you at that moment, or do they also play different roles from a creative point of view?
Benoît Pioulard: Oh, that’s a very good question. I feel like I really started diligently keeping journals when I was probably around 13 or 14, which was the late '90s. I’ve got a whole big box of them in the other room—many of which haven’t been opened since they were completed. I used to write every day or every other day. There were periods of glut and dearth, and probably whole phases—like maybe when I was in college—where I’d go for a month at a time without writing. I’d say my first sincere songwriting efforts, the ones that ended up on my early Kranky records from around 2005 to 2008, came largely from that archive of journalling. I’d look back through things and pick out little phrases. Towards the end of high school and into college, I got into writing poetry—heavily influenced by E.E. Cummings and T.S. Eliot, who I’d still say are my two favourite poets. I kind of tried to mimic their style, and some of the phrases I came up with were clunky and stupid—as happens with young poetry—but some of it became the foundation for lyrics. A lot of those early songs were also tied to direct experiences from relationships I was in. My first semi-serious relationship, for example, heavily influenced Précis, my first record for Kranky in 2006. That one’s full of heartbreak and other things—so it's a heavy-ish record. I always liked the idea of putting that kind of thing into the context of pop songwriting. A lot of the vocal-heavy stuff I was listening to at the time had a similar kind of pretty sadness, as it were. At that age—around 20—I was much more of a morbid romantic. Later, probably in my early 30s, that romanticism began to turn inward in new ways. I was going through a period of loss and transition, and a lot of my journalling reflected that. It also affected how much I was writing and what I was writing about. All of it ties in—because the mental, spiritual release I get through making things helps me work those feelings out. It’s a form of meditation.
So yeah, writing is a way to purge thoughts and document what’s going on, but recording is my main tangible outlet—the version of that process I’m willing to share with people. Around eight or ten years ago, I started focusing more on instrumental work. I was also going through some serious issues with my first marriage, which ended a few years later. That phase of sonic meditation and purely instrumental release led to the first Stanza records. Sonnet—one of my last records for Kranky in 2015—kind of led up to that. The idea of a “sonic journal” became important—field recordings as a kind of sonic equivalent of journalling, a way to involve my immediate world in something I’d share with others. That interweaving of threads has continued consistently over the years. A couple of years ago, I put out a vocal record called Eidetic, which I put more time and thoughtfulness into than anything before. It took three years to make, while my earlier vocal records usually took about a year. I think it flew under the radar—by then, people knew me more for the long-form ambient stuff. But vocal music is still a huge part of my heart and something I enjoy. I’ve been writing more songs lately too, inspired by people I find fascinating—like Richard Russell, the guy who stole a plane and crashed it around Seattle eight years ago, or this hermit who lived in the woods of Maine for thirty years. Writing songs about people like that becomes a meditation on your own relationship with isolation and solitude. I’m here to experience, and by default, I interact with other people—I’m fascinated by other folks. I like to consider how others see the world, even though I can only write from my own perspective. But filtering my understanding of other people’s experiences through my work and creating space in the instrumental stuff for listeners to have their own experience—that’s a vital part of the process. It’s a ‘selfish’ thing at first, but with the instrumental work especially, it might be my favourite thing. It feels like almost a braggy thing to admit. I don’t want to sound braggy, but when people write and say a song or a record helped them meditate or led them down some path in life—that's huge for me. It means the world. Like, to have any kind of effect on anybody else's existence is a huge deal for me. I take what I can get, and I feel very lucky that anybody is still listening after all this time, when it comes down to it.
Absolutely, and it doesn’t sound like bragging at all, more like a sincere recognition of the impact your work can have when it resonates with someone else's inner life. Following that arc of sonic journalling and emotional processing, Stanza IV feels like a culmination of a ten-year process of existential meditation—yet it carries a striking sense of weightlessness and presence. Did making this record feel like a personal and/or artistic renewal of sorts?
Benoît Pioulard: Yeah, honestly, that’s a perfectly fine way to put it. The third volume of this series—which, at the time, I considered to be the conclusion (everybody loves a trilogy, right?)—came out in 2016, so it's been a while. In the time since, I’ve made plenty of instrumental records. Each of them, in my mind—whether or not it makes sense to others—has a very particular tenor, inspiration, or environment that it encapsulates. A lot of things went into the culmination of these four pieces. But I think what defines it as part of the Stanza series for me is that it came from a dedicated phase. When I sat down to work on it, the first piece came together in about a day and a half—originally it was twice as long—and I thought, "Maybe I’ll just release this as an EP on its own." But then, as I started recording more, it all unfolded in sequence over about three weeks. That’s unusual for me—usually I’m working on multiple things at once—but this was a pure dedication to the idea of four pieces, each 11 minutes long. The uniform length is kind of a cheeky way of suggesting that these pieces could be any length; they just begin and end wherever. You say something by making a piece two minutes or fifteen minutes long. The consistency in length is part of the Stanza idea too.
This record also came in the wake of my dad passing away a couple of years ago. I felt very numb about it for a long time, and only later did I begin to process it. When he was sick and declining, it coincided with the COVID years, which were incredibly difficult. Not a fun time. In the aftermath—getting back into the right frame of mind, facing my grief, and figuring things out more clearly—I got married last year to my best friend, Molly, who’s in the other room. I also made a career change. While I was getting by just making music in my bedroom and doing side jobs, I’ve now decided to pursue a master’s in special education. I was listening to this podcast that talked about “moral ambition”—this idea that if you have any kind of blessing in life, whether financial, intellectual, or otherwise, you kind of have an obligation to use it for good if you can. That idea stuck with me. So, with turning 40 and getting married, this Stanza record feels like a bookend to a challenging and dynamic chapter of life. I left a long relationship, left Seattle where I’d lived for years, started a new life in New York, got interrupted by COVID, dealt with my dad's decline...a lot.
There’s a kind of harmony between your use of tape-processed sound and Polaroid imagery—both embedded in lo-fi textures and deliberately dreamlike, ghostly visuals. It’s almost as if your mediumship gives three-dimensional life to something akin to a stamped handwritten letter from a distant loved one, or even an old newspaper. Do you think of your work as a kind of archival or memory-keeping practice? What exactly draws you to these decaying, analogue forms as vessels for expression?
Benoît Pioulard: Yeah, for sure. I mean, if we’re talking specifically about Polaroid photography, that’s something I’ve been enamoured with since I was very young. I think my actual dedication to regularly shooting Polaroid film started around 2003 or 2004, when I was getting serious about maybe releasing some of the stuff I was recording in my bedroom—on a four-track at first, then GarageBand. I still use GarageBand, by the way! What struck me pretty early on, when my grandpa was taking Polaroid portraits of the family, was the idea that this physical object—the thing that spits out of the camera with our image emblazoned on it in that exact moment—is the sole document. You can scan it or copy it, sure, but that original is that moment. This moment we’re speaking in is already shifting into the next one, but a Polaroid is like the closest thing to holding a moment in your hand. That probably sounds corny, but it feels relevant to me.
So yeah, documentation—especially of organic processes—is a big part of my photography. We’re lucky, living in Brooklyn, to have a really lush, vibrant backyard. It’s not huge, but it’s beautiful, and we take care of it. We’ve got a big rose bush blooming back there, a bunch of hydrangeas, crocuses, other things... and tiger lilies, man, those things are crazy. I’ve taken tons of photos of all that stuff, and the tiger lilies especially—they bloom for less than a week—but I’ve gotten some of my favourite shots during those few days when the light hits them just right. I’ve got several binders full of those photos from over the years, and it’s helped me form a sense of continuity in things while still acknowledging how ephemeral they are. I also think back to the book I did for my album Sylva that came out six years ago—I wrote a preface to it saying that this was my attempt to document a moment in ecological history. At the time, a lot of the photos were of places like Bryce Canyon—these monumental, seemingly permanent landscapes. You look at Half Dome in Yosemite from a hundred years ago, and it’s the same shape—maybe with a bit more erosion. But now, I think about how even those places are under threat. I don’t want to get political, because that’s a whole different thing, but the truth is: we have people in charge who are more interested in what’s under the ground than in preserving something for its natural wonder or existential significance. That kind of reverence doesn’t seem to enter the conversation much. So no, nothing I do is meant as protest—except maybe in the sense that I just wish people were more thoughtful about posterity, and more reverent of the fact that, if the Earth exploded today, there would be no evidence of any of us or anything we ever did.
There’s an instinctual purity in your compositions—not just in the Stanza series—that reminds me of Schopenhauer’s idea of music being the most direct expression of the will. Almost priestly, ascetic, or Brahmin-like in its dispensation. So I wonder, do you view your work as a kind of essence in itself, perhaps somewhat beyond you, the creator? Is your artistic output bigger than your lived experience, or more a direct reflection of it?
Benoît Pioulard: Yeah, yeah, I guess what comes to mind when you ask that is the idea of keeping something precious until it’s released. Like, I just announced this record two days ago, and up until that point, I got to pick and choose the handful of people I love and trust enough to give me feedback or just to listen to it thoughtfully. It stays really close to me until then. But I also like the idea of letting something go into the world when you consider it finished—letting it have its own life, or not. Some things do better than others in terms of getting attention or responses, and a lot of that’s out of my control. But the level of acceptance that requires is something I’ve worked to develop. It gives me peace to say, “Okay, you go exist now.” I’ve got a pretty substantial discography at this point—like a whole shelf in our record cabinet of just my stuff. And I do have a bit of a moral dilemma about that—how much physical material I’ve generated that can’t really be broken down or recycled. But still, it will always be mine and mean what it means to me.
Speaking of those early vocal records, there was a kind of… I don’t know, riotous energy in some of them. I liked recording things around my home or neighbourhood—sometimes just myself speaking—and burying that so far down in the mix that no one would ever hear it. But I know it’s there. That’s part of the personal aspect. I’m not trying to send subliminal messages or anything, but it’s meaningful to me. And however people receive it—I don’t feel like I’ve ever been overtly misunderstood, at least not that I know of. But I think it’s a wonderful thing to take someone else’s work and make it personal to yourself. There are plenty of records I love dearly that mean certain things to me, or reflect eras of my life that the artist probably never intended or could’ve imagined. That’s the beautiful thing about art—it’s plastic, it can mean many different things to many different people. I don’t think I’ve made anything particularly controversial, which is probably just not in my nature.
You’ve spoken to the intimacy of analogue processes—how both your music and photography preserve fleeting moments with care. In today’s digital and DIY creative climate, where artists often operate across multiple disciplines without institutional mediation, do you find that this kind of solitary practice facilitates a more ephemeral connection with the audience—or does it create something more lasting, a kind of living archive that carries your personal imprint even in your absence?
Benoît Pioulard: I guess I can tie that back into the photograph. One important thing about the idea of a Polaroid photo is that it captures a moment in a physical form. Most of the records I send out from home—when people order from me through Bandcamp—include one of those. Even if it's not the best shot, or it's just something that happened in a moment I wanted to capture, I like to share that with someone else. It’s intended as benevolent. When I was growing up, ordering records online in the late '90s and early 2000s, I remember Warp Records would include an extra bit of promotional material—a sticker, or maybe a radio copy of something unreleased. That felt like a very personal connection. Like someone in the shipping department thought, “Throw this into this kid’s package. It's going to Michigan from the UK.” That direct connection stuck with me. There were also a couple of indie band fan clubs I was in at the time that would send out buttons and stickers—those meant a lot to me. That kind of experience influenced my desire to have a direct connection with people. So it really means the world when someone directly supports what I’m doing. You know, voting with your wallet is a big deal—especially now when you can get literally any piece of music for free, or basically free. So, sending a Polaroid along with the record—yeah, you have this factory-produced object, and I usually sign it. But also, here’s this thing that only you have. It’s a moment of time, something I held in my hand. My fingerprints are probably still on it. That connection is very important to me. And I’d like to believe it becomes a deep experience for the person receiving it, too.
To close, what would you say to emerging artists—whether in music, writing, or visual media—who are trying to find their voice and connect with an audience in such a crowded, often unresponsive digital world?
Benoît Pioulard: Molly and I went to see George Clanton the other week—he's got kind of a brash stage presence and makes really beautiful music, but he's a tough character to get a read on. That’s someone where the art versus the artist is a complicated relationship, and intentionally so. But he said during the set, “I know y’all are here because you like this shit. But I like it too.” And that stuck with me. You should like your own shit. That’s a pretty good way to put it. You know, plenty of people talk down about their work—I won’t do that. I won’t say, “this track I made is amazing,” but I’ll say, “I’m satisfied with this work. I believe it’s good enough for others to listen to.” I think that’s the equivalent of saying I think it’s good. More than that, I think it has value. And if you believe what you’re doing has value, then by all means, share it. Or even if you’re still figuring out what the value is, share it with someone and get feedback.
My wife went to art school, and she jokes about the critique sessions she had to sit through. She's like, “That prepared me for a lot in life—hearing my peers tear my work apart.” So yeah, critique and feedback are hard. But I was also talking to a friend the other day—he’s an aspiring electronic musician—and I think the hardest thing for him is the silence. Just sharing something you really believe in and getting nothing back. That’s something I acknowledge I had the benefit of 20 years ago. Sending demos around back then, there was more room for people to consider new things. My partnership with Kranky came from a demo. I don’t even think they listen to demos anymore—I won’t speak for them—but it was a different world. And I know my experience isn’t what someone in 2025 is going to have trying to get their work heard. Yeah, I don't have anything that profound... just try things until you find what resonates. First and foremost, it should be fun, and you should like it!
Follow Benoît PioulardCover photo by Molly Smith