Benoît Pioulard

As Benoît Pioulard, Thomas Meluch—who works as a singer/songwriter, writer, and photographer—merges found sounds, electronics, and bittersweet pop into dreamy songs alongside contemplative ambient works. Structured compositions take center stage on certain releases, including the 2006 debut Précis and 2010’s Lasted, whereas atmospheric sculpting comes to the fore on others such as 2013’s Hymnal and 2015’s Sonnet. To mark the project’s tenth anniversary, Meluch issued 2016’s The Benoît Pioulard Listening Matter, an album that united both facets of his output and underscored his distinctive ability to fuse them seamlessly. Toward the end of the decade he emphasized the ambient dimension to striking effect on the shipwreck-themed 2019 release Avocationals, yet 2023’s Eidetic drew on his voice and lyrics to sharpen the nostalgic reflections with greater clarity and detail.

Early on, Meluch belonged to the loose-knit Rattling Wall Collective in Dutch, a circle of kindred musicians, and he also took part in a multimedia piece created for the University of Michigan’s 2003 Film and Video Studies Association Lightworks Festival. In the local scene he performed with roughly half a dozen bands, among them his own experimental rock quartet Esmae, which drew inspiration from Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Explosions in the Sky.

Following Esmae’s 2005 breakup, Meluch devoted himself to Benoît Pioulard. He launched a run of handmade, limited-edition CD-Rs, and Moodgadget put out the Enge EP late that year; selections from it later surfaced on compilations from Astrolab and Ghostly. Kranky issued the debut full-length Précis—a shimmering blend of laptop pop and shoegaze—in fall 2006. That winter he contributed a track to Ghostly International’s digital EP New Faces, and the Fir single appeared in early 2007. While preparing his second Benoît Pioulard album, Meluch supplied lyrics and vocals for the song “Death as a Man” with his friend Praveen Sharma, added a piece to the Moodgadget compilation Expanse at Low Levels, and kept producing his Polaroid photographs. A digital reissue of Enge arrived in 2008, together with the six-track collaboration Songs Spun Simla between Sharma and Meluch. Temper followed that autumn, revealing a more tightly structured approach than earlier Pioulard efforts, and the 7-inch singles Lee and Flocks came out in 2008 and 2009, respectively.

Meluch further honed his songcraft on the third Kranky album, 2010’s Lasted. Around this period he joined forces with the Sight Below’s Rafael Anton Irisarri to form Orcas, whose self-titled debut appeared in 2012. A year afterward, Pioulard’s aptly titled Hymnal mirrored the religious iconography Meluch encountered in cathedrals while recording across England and mainland Europe. After further work with Orcas—which yielded the 2014 follow-up Yearling—Meluch returned with 2015’s Sonnet, his fifth Benoît Pioulard album and the first constructed exclusively from analog tape and effects. A fractured radial bone in his right wrist prompted the 2016 pay-what-you-want release Radial, issued to offset medical expenses. Several months later The Benoît Pioulard Listening Matter emerged on the tenth anniversary of Précis and echoed that record’s homespun ambient pop. Beacon Sound gave the originally tour-only CD-R Lignin Poise a vinyl edition in September 2017 after its February debut, and the Ant’lrd collaboration Deck Amber surfaced in 2018. In March 2019, Pioulard and longtime friend Sean Curtis Patrick released Avocationals, a set of ambient pieces inspired by Great Lakes shipwrecks; that October, Pioulard made his Morr Music debut with Sylva, an album recorded over nine months across Montana, Hawaii, and his native Michigan and accompanied by a book of his nature photography.

After moving from Seattle to Brooklyn, Meluch used the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns to create November 2021’s Bloodless, an instrumental collection for Disques d’Honoré that layers kalimba, dulcimer, melodica, electronics, and field recordings into misty textures. He also channeled the emotional weight of his cross-country relocation into the next Morr album, March 2023’s Eidetic. Titled after the capacity to recall images in vivid detail, the record’s structured, reflective pop songs—largely captured in a Maine cabin—evoke cherished memories of family and friends while contemplating the promise of new beginnings.