Artist's Brain: Cody Pepper And Her Never-Ending Creativity
I sat in London with Cody Pepper, a wonderfully talented artist and musician to discuss her fascinating process and her debut album, 'Chemical Oasis' which is out now.
It all started because of a pepper shaker…
Well not really. Cody Pepper may have solidified her stage name because a pepper shaker was in view when she chose the moniker, but for the French-born, London-based singer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, her approach to creativity extends back long before that fateful day.
It goes back to her earliest memories, reaching the deepest depths of her thoughts and feelings, ever-expanding as she breaks barriers and pushes boundaries within her own life.
Her real name is Pauline Janier, but the androgynous quality of “Cody Pepper” lends itself to an absence of restrictions, an absence that characterizes the progressive, alternative, and unhindered nature of her debut solo album, Chemical Oasis, which is out now.
Across its nine tracks, Pepper blends a plethora of different sounds: from operatic vocalizations, to twangy spaghetti western guitar, to various brass harmonizations, to her signature warm and bellowing flute timbre.
Lyrics are only a decoration. Occasionally there is a complete phrase, as on “Make A Wish” which caught airplay on BBC Introducing London and BBC 6 Music. This single for the album flexes Pepper’s talent for the dastardly, using her widespread abilities to paint the picture of escaping reality through an epic night out.
“Make a wish/Get high/Just feel/The night
But overall, full ideas are presented using sounds rather than words, and with the assistance of her good friend and collaborator, Basile LaCroix-Boettcher, Pepper harnesses the limitless nature of sonics into something communicative and intentional—a reflection of what is happening in her own mind.
“My mind, it goes constantly. It’s always been that way. I have ideas all the time. It’s just the way I am. For a while [I didn’t accept it], and so last year I decided to embrace it,” Pepper says as we sit in a cafe in the Fitzrovia neighborhood of London. “I have new passions quite often and for the music, I think it’s the best way to actually express it. I don’t need words because it’s not words that come through my mind. The music is the best way to explain what’s going on.”
This is one reason lyrics aren’t as prominent in Pepper’s solo works. Words aren’t overt in her psyche. If they’re there, they exist more as symbols, taking on different colors and shapes rather than communicating a specific meaning…and the same is true for LaCroix-Boettcher.
Simply put, he is one of the very few people who understands the way Pepper’s mind works.
In fact, the way Chemical Oasis came to be was because he invited her to play flute on one of his tracks, and they ended up making 14 together in one sitting.
“We just get each other. We’re just on the same page. With Basile it flows,” Pepper says.
But Pepper’s flow of passions extends beyond her work with LaCroix-Boettcher and permeates every phase of her life. From day-to-day activities like implementing different colors into her outfits to the multiple facets of her vast career:
Beyond her solo project, she is also leading a five-piece psychedelic band called Zebrah (for which she also creates all the visual art after being inspired by the Texas modern-psych trio, Khruangbin) and she is running her own freelance PR firm after working at Domino Recording Co. on campaigns for artists like Wet Leg, Alex G, and George Fitzgerald.
The creativity of Cody Pepper can’t be contained, and in truth, there was never a point when it could be contained.
“When I was a kid I would really struggle to explain myself because so much was going on,” Pepper says of her amaranthine flow of ideas, a flow her parents would ask her to try and calm down and explain when she was growing up in her hometown of Besançon.
Besançon is a city in eastern France, near the Swiss border, and though it has certain artistic claims to fame like being the birthplace of Les Miserables author Victor Hugo, much of the creativity in the area was limited. (Pepper’s parents wanted her to pursue a career in politics).
Pepper would go to secret techno parties in caves and other obscure underground locations, but there wasn’t much of a market for music on the surface. She herself was exposed to music through the flute starting at age five—learning to read music before she could read French—but her training was strictly classical.
Overall, she is grateful for the immediate traditional study as it endowed her with her warm sound that fills the edges of Zebrah and her solo work.
One track on Chemical Oasis is entitled “The Flute Opening” (though it’s the sixth song on the record), and it begins with a swell of the instrument, providing an encompassing, sonorous foundation before she demonstrates a wide range of pitches through adept interval jumps.
Across the remainder of the tracks, the flute is like an old friend, frequently appearing with quickfire improvisations and sweeping, dreamy washes.
“The flute is almost an extension of your body. The way you move—your posture—makes a difference to the sound. I really learned that in classical [training]. That warm sound is intentional,” Pepper says. “That’s what was cool, but otherwise it was more of a struggle coming from classical.”
Her overcoming that struggle is tied to her continuing quest to expand her creativity. In that regard, it was her move to London six years ago when she found the environment wherein she was able to refine her skills with the flute to support the endless ideas flowing from her psyche.
She never created with the flute before she relocated to the Capital.
“I started to go to a lot of public jams and thanks to that I’ve changed my way of playing and I improved my ear,” Pepper says. “It took me ages to be able to improvise and express myself.”
But now she is not only improvising and expressing herself on the flute, but on the guitar and through her lead vocals with Zebrah (her bandmates are helping her learn new instruments as well).
She’s even expressing herself in ways that go beyond music…
“[Moving to London] changed my way of thinking a lot,” Pepper says. “I opened my mind fully. I feel like here in London people dress so eclectically. The color of their hair—there are so many different colors and there’s no judgements. (At least in the streets. I’m sure there’s layers to that). But compared to France and a smaller city, it feels very easy to just be you.”
The move to London has not been without its challenges, though. In such a big city she finds it harder to maintain close friendships because everyone lives farther away and everyone is so busy working on their own projects (at least when you’re in creative circles like she is), but that doesn’t stop her from breaking through the barriers.
“I love the challenge,” Pepper says of making it as an artist in London, and she engages with that challenge because without creative exploration she gets really bored. “I’m quite eclectic. That’s the way I thrive. If I just stay on one thing I become useless.”
Given the nature of the conversation, it’s clear Cody Pepper feels useless and bored very rarely. We discuss a wide variety of topics including Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, and the philosophical works of Pierre Bourdieu—namely his theory of the habitus:
“We’re all born with a habitus where we are determined by the family we are born in, the economic situation we are in, the environment we grow in, our history,” Pepper says. “Most people, they just stay with that. They don’t really move around. They just do whatever their path has been telling them, but you got some derived habitus where it’s people being conscious of their own situation.”
Cody Pepper is conscious of her situation, and that situation comes with constant, unending creativity.