Name: Inès Cherifi
Nationality: French
Occupation: Producer
Current release: Inès Cherifi's Fountains EP is out via Jennifer Cardini & Lou Fauroux’ Færies.
Recommendations: Murcof x Vanessa Wagner - "Gnossienne No. 3"; Mame-Fatou Niang - Universalisme

[Read our Jennifer Cardini interview]

If you enjoyed this Inès Cherifi interview and would like to keep up to date with her music, visit her on Instagram.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

For me, it’s something that arrives in a corporeal sense more than a visual one. When I initially search for melodies, I feel masses moving in my body, tracing movements. I let this process continue until one of the masses forms a tension that seems to unlock something intimate inside of me.

I know I’ve arrived when I am compelled to listen to it on repeat, when the form doesn't tire or evaporate easily. It’s as if the relativity between the notes has come to touch and awaken a sensitive, organic memory in some part of my body.

What were your very first steps in music like and how would you rate the gains made through experience - can one train/learn being an artist?

On the side of my family in Algeria, everyone knows how to play an instrument to some extent, in a self-taught way.

The earliest images that have stuck with me were of everyone coming together to improvise; it was a powerful way for us to connect to one another. Communication would become more linked to the choreography between bodies, glances, sounds and responses — rendering highly sensory and sensitive exchanges, shifting and unpredictable.

To respond in the context of improvisation, you have to enter a particular state, to open yourself to a charged connection. That's my favorite part. I think that I've exchanged much more intimate things with certain people through this medium than through verbal communication. It's a field of expression where you can quickly feel things like tenderness, humor, speed of thought, exhilaration. It's beautiful when someone sends you a note and you can answer, "me too". Improvisation is a very hybrid contact between an instrument, an interface, a medium, even one's own body.

It is also a very immediate and rapid way of translating thoughts and feelings, and with more practice comes more endurance and precision. I have the impression that with more time and application, I'm learning to superimpose thoughts and transformations into sounds of longer durations, with deeper construction over time.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

As a teenager I listened to a lot of different styles of music, but they always carried explosive properties — whether film scores, rap, pop, electro or techno. I think I was looking for a point of body overload, the sensation of peak saturation that would completely overcome me. I was addicted to this sensation of plenitude, and I was constantly searching for it.

At the time, I was training in an alternative program that taught instruments with almost no music theory while also playing in an orchestra, which was one of the most beautiful and intense moments of my adolescence. We played a lot of soundtracks such as “Conquest of Paradise” by Vangelis, or “Palladio” by Karl Jenkins. It was a style of music that appeared in the climactic sequences of blockbuster films.



We also played hyper-expressive operas like Faure's requiem piece “Libera me domine,” which had an enormous impact on me.



Across these experiences I found myself constantly drawn to heavy, epic, overloaded melodies. Today, I appreciate things that are much simpler and more nuanced, and find a certain strength in them, too.

Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

My close circle is filled with sculptors, digital artists and painters, and our exchanges — both personal and professional — have a significant influence on the way I engage my practice. Processing music alongside other art forms allows me to consider sounds as solid matter, allowing me to take a sculptural or choreographic approach to music.

It's particularly refreshing to see how music is received across external perspectives, as music critics tend to analyze music in terms of references and trends rather than in terms of materiality, sensation, fragility, strength, consistency.

How would you describe your own relationship with your instrument, tools or equipment – is it an extension of your self/body, a partner and companion, a creative catalyst, a challenge to be overcome, something else entirely?

It is the key to the portal of my interiority, where notions of time become diluted — it produces a physical absence and represents a return to oneself that can be disturbing for those close to me.

Sometimes I find it's even a state of non-presence that remains several hours or days after playing!

Are you acting out certain roles or parts of your personality in your music which you couldn't or wouldn't in your daily life? If so, which are these? If not, what, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music?

I've always felt a great distance to verbal language, and often listen to melodies without paying attention to the lyrics. The discovery of electronic music via the Internet at the age of 15 was extremely powerful and regenerating.

I felt I regained freedom and access to explore strong compositional desires — to feel, think and create plural orchestral forms with just a computer. It broke through a lot of frustration, and it was during this period and through this medium that I really began to build a world of my own — a place of care and resistance where I could express narratives without worrying about the consequences of verbal language.

Music is a language, but like any language, it can lead to misunderstandings. In which way has your own work – or the work of artists you like or admire - been misunderstood? How do you deal with this?

I'm not very aware of who understands what! If I see music as a language, I am more interested in the ways that melodies overlap to construct a story — the metaphors it can represent or the transmutable character it reveals.

I am rather fascinated by the juxtaposition of elements which seem to oppose each other and which ultimately create perceptible harmony together.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness as things become more professionalised and how do you still draw surprises from equipment, instruments, approaches and formats you may be very familiar with?

For each live performance, I produce something new. I've never done the same show twice. I need to feel connected to my emotions in the moment, to respond to the public context and the site. I like to be physically implicated in the present moment of performance, to foster a kind of alertness and attention that isn’t eroded by repetition.

I often engage in collaborative projects, and I have produced a lot of sound pieces for video, theater and sculpture artists. It is exciting and challenging to enter someone else's world and find ways to reconcile it with my own.

It is under the conditions of unfamiliar territory that I am able to arrive at mutant forms that I wouldn't necessarily have found on my own.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

I would say I have a stronger bond with the non-verbal than with the non-human! The rhythm of a voice and the subtext it carries can be very touching. I once attended a poetry reading where I could hardly discern the words being read, but the charge of the voice, its timbre, its tremors, its silences and the immense force exuded by these collective fragile elements completely took me over.

Growing up in a multi-cultural family, I was often exposed to Kabyle, Arabic, German and Spanish without understanding what was being said. This developed a strong sensitivity in me towards the musicality of the voice — to its expressiveness, to its cadence and to a person's presence.

When you don't have verbal tools, you find ways to understand a person through other means. These other means will almost always reveal that which is more secret, intimate, or even which has never been verbalized. Music inhabits these verbal communication gaps, where we have the possibility to more intensely articulate the other aspects of our being.

There seems to be an increasing trend to capture music in numbers, from waveforms via recommendation algorithms up to deciphering the code of hit songs. What aspects of music do you feel can be captured through numbers, and which can not?

My compositional process consists of adding several layers of music as one would add different materials, which can vary greatly in their consistencies. These associations are held together by their subjectivities and metamorphosize in ways that I don’t view as reducible to mechanical repetition or linear pattern.

That's the idea I have in "Forever", the first track on Fountains.



The first notes sound a little false and fragile, stumbling and forming discontinuous lines that stabilize as the piece progresses. The central violin loop thickens. Elements join in, and the vulnerability of each part starts to rely on the others to form a stronger whole — deep, harmonic and immersive.

Progressively tracing the contours of a physical place, each note marks a point of depth in space, suggesting the way time might flow there — the way its physicality might deform or mutate.

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

There is an embodied psychological reflection in music; I find it often acts as a mirror or a parallel. It has always been a place of reparation or transformation for me, and can also be quite intense and physically demanding depending on what resurfaces. I find it to be a dimension that allows us to seek out incarnations that are invisible to the external gaze, that can even surprise ourselves.

There have been times when I've released certain musical forms and been really surprised by what it revealed about myself or a state I was in.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold? What role do headphones play for you in this regard?

Up until this point in my practice, I feel closer to overload than to silence.

For me, the absence of a voice, a melody or a continuous sound represents the opportunity for a sonic dialogue or an orchestral form rather than silence for its own sake.

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

I definitely think music transcends the mundane; great music can be a portal to a parallel world that allows us to escape the prosaic. Immersing in sonic materials — their physicality, their resistance, their fragility, their tremors — reveals a lot to me about the ways we can repair things, the ways we can repair ourselves.

The performances that have touched me the most were the ones where I was left with the impression that the artist or musician would end their performance saying "This is how I heal myself", "This is how I resist".

Most recently, I experienced this at FUJI||||||||||TA’s concert at the Bourse du Commerce last year.



Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values which don't appear to have any emotional connotation. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a seemingly counterintuitive way – and what, do you think, is happening here?

I have always had a fairly wide range of musical influences and nothing was hierarchical, so I don’t know if I can identify what seems counterintuitive in that sense.

During my formative years in the early 2010s it was very common that classical music was sampled in rap tracks, or mixed into rock, pop, hardcore — for example, French rapper Diam’s on Faure's "Pavane".

The crossing of genres or expressions feels close to the way I have always experienced music, so I think I can easily find connections in what otherwise might be categorized as dissonant or apart.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

I'd like to see stronger ambiguity — a more pluralized language and strength of expression.

Hearing the voices beneath the smooth ones, or empty voices when necessary. More vulnerability in matter and form, even in the way of showing strength and self-assertion.