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BIOGRAPHY

Alessi's Ark is the brainchild of 20-year-old Alessi Laurent-Marke from Hammersmith. She makes dreamy pop with the eccentricity of Kate Bush and the folk delicacy of Laura Marling. Her whimsical rapture is infectious, sometimes simple and sparse, other times sweeping and symphonic, she created luscious layers of harp and voilins, as on Constellations, her ode to...err...freckles.

Much of her inspiration, she says, comes from authors like JD Salinger and Edward Gorey, and films such as 'Harold and Maude', a comical but disturbing tale of a love affair between an old lady and a boy. She describes what she does as "a new take on psychadelic folk music, but still very British, a little like Syd Barrett, who was very childlike in his own way".

Alessi's story is an unusually precocious one, though with inauspicious beginnings - she first got into music when her mother gave her a copy of Graham Nash's 1971 album 'Song for Beginners', and began playing drums at age 11 when her secondary school required students to take up an instrument, Her drum teacher played locally in different bands and through this she began going to see various bands live with her Dad, sometimes going to as many as four shows a week. This led to her starting her own fanzine called Brain Bulletin (which now continues in the form of a blog on her website, or on The Line of Best Fit) in which she wrote about her favourite bands, books and films.

Laurent-Marke has been writing material like The Asteroids Collide - "about:, she explains, "a long-distance love affair using the metaphors of asteroids as bodies" - since she was 15, and her first song Glendora, was written as coursework for her music GCSE.

LINKS

www.alessisark.com

www.myspace.com/alessisark

www.last.fm/music/alessi's+ark

www.bellaunion.com/index.php/site/artists/alessis_ark

LIVE

Alessi’s Ark- The Horse- Live on Bandstand Busking