The most promising Brussels music release of the spring comes from a 19-year-old civil engineering student whose spectrum sounds anything but tame or civil.
© Stig De Block
Eye-catcher: MEYY
In view of the casual look and the sober flair with which Charlotte Meyntjens speaks to us in a café in Brussels, you can hardly imagine that she has an alter ego, MEYY, who uninhibitedly sings about her desires in sultry, loungy freestyles which she then stylizes in sensual music videos. Check out “Angelic Lies” and the very sultry “Common Love”, and then listen to how she slowly cooks up contemporary R&B on her debut EP Spectrum with subdued and simmering electronica. You should also know that the lo-fi vibe was spiced by Wouter Van Belle, who lost no time in signing this omni-talent to his new Sanseveria label. We write omni-talent because if she had not suffered from an annoying injury when she was 16, she would have had a professional dance career. She now combines her music with studying engineering at the Technical University in Delft. We sat down with her one day after her Probability Theory exam. Can she calculate the probable popularity of her debut? “No, we would have to take too many factors into account.” (Laughs)
She says that she finds it somewhat embarrassing that she still records her lyrics with GarageBand. But hey, she's 19. “I get the beats from various producers, but primarily from L'étreinte, who accompanies me onstage as a DJ.” She met him when she moved from a Jesuit school to the Maria-Boodschaplyceum near Dansaert in the fifth year of secondary school. “I had always sung and played the guitar and piano, but that is where my interest in contemporary music really burgeoned. Suddenly, I no longer had to worry about what I was wearing, said, or did. The open-minded taste and no-nonsense attitude of my new friends in Brussels stimulated me to push my boundaries. I feel as though we have been very tame in Belgium for a long time. A new generation is making short work of that now. I like to titillate with provocative language. I enjoy going to the very edge. I don't want to make music that everyone likes.”
© Stig De Block
Heartsickness helps to get inspired
Before she was even 20, this resulted in an international EP, which is universal because it is personal. Spectrum touches on a range of emotions that are connected to the development of her own romantic life: from desire to lust and heartbreak. “All my tracks are addressed to an (ex-)lover. I used to send the recordings directly to the person in question, or I would share them via Instagram. I had never expected that my friends or SoundCloud followers who were wrestling with the same feelings would be so enthusiastic.” She is happy that the tracks are finally being released because some of them are two years old already, an eternity in the life of a teenager. Now it's time to solve another problem. “Last year, when my studies were going very well and I was in a stable relationship, I suddenly had nothing to write about anymore! Heartsickness helps to get inspired, logarithms do not.”
MEYY
30/1, 21.00, Archiduc (release party)
26/3, 22.00, Beursschouwburg (triple bill met Chibi Ichigo en IKRAAAN)
Read more about: Muziek
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