Meet Mileece. She's 24 years old, was born in London and now lives in Montreal. Right! That's the easy bit out of the way. The continuation of Mileece's extraordinary life, her debut album Formations, is undoubtedly the star-twinkliest, dewdrop-freshest album of the year.
Mileece grew up in a pioneering recording studio, Free Range, in Covent Garden (it was her bedroom for a while), that her parents ran, surrounded by such 70s luminaries as Sex Pistols, Tim Hardin, Thin Lizzy (!) and Ian Dury. They also started Rockflicks, one of the first music video/film production companies responsible for memorable clips by Kate Bush ('Wuthering Heights'), Queen ('We Will Rock You'), Lene Lovich ('Lucky Number' featuring Mileece at 6 months), Stevie Wonder ('Master Blaster') as well as The Damned, a Ramones live concert and the legendary If It Ain't Stiff, It Ain't Worth A Fuck, tour film of Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric and Ian Dury. Later her father became a TV director for Fraggle Rock, Countdown and the Halley Comet Show, while her mother began her own record label.
Her parents peripatetic life and divorce when she was a young girl saw Mileece live variously in New York, LA, provincial France and London, attending some 18 different schools.
'We lived in a place in LA called the Crystal Garden,' Mileece recalls. 'It's the biggest collection of privately owned Crystals in America and the home of mathematician Jon Gibbon. He was friends with the likes of Timothy Leary, John Lily and Erv Wilson (counterculture writers, philosophers and scientists). He and others such as Charles Lucy (inventor of the Lucytune musical scale), spent their time constructing models of the dodecahedrons and other geometric wonders found in crystals in the garden. There were strange and fascinating microtonal instruments around all over the place. All the walls of the house were covered in shelves of crystals and the draws were full of semi-precious stones. It was a marvellous and pivotal point in my life that taught me about magical number structures in life and music.'
Escaping the frenzy of LA for rural France, Mileece lived in 'a huge house with animals of all sorts' flocks of sheep, goats, donkeys, dogs, cats and my horse. I was in bliss! I learned the mind-expanding qualities of music and the importance of classical music in the formation of healthy thoughts and for brain exercise. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of life and beauty that I have never experienced in the same way in the city.'
Back in San Francisco in her late teens, Mileece took up a course in documentary filmmaking and had her own jazz show on the radio. 'I loved it,' she says. 'It reminded me that my heart was in music.' Over to London where she completed a BA in Sonic Arts and sound engineering, where she specialised in programming generative computer languages. In Mileece's hands, a computer becomes an instrument with 'low level artificial intelligence.'
'Programming allows for structures to generate autonomously, the same as a plant or any other living entity would,' she insists. 'It starts with a set of principles and grows.' Her grandfather programmed the first computer generated song 'Daisy Daisy', introducing the world to synthesized vocals. So you can blame him for the vocoder...
Which just about brings us to living in Montreal, and Formations. Reminiscent of Steve Reich at his most delicate, with album artwork hand-drawn by Norway's design king, Kim Hiorthøy, Mileece's debut is the sound of a garden of eden conversing with the stars.
(Biography Last updated 2 April 2002)
