On her debut album ‘In Nomine Corpus’, Cindy Pooch creates a dynamic soundscape where layers of storytelling come together to form a mirror of her inner world. While written in French, the feelings imbued within the album eclipse all language barriers as Pooch reaches straight for the heart of her listeners. The Cameroonian-born musician and composer spent her formative years in Lyon performing a repertoire of nu soul hits at gigs alongside a number of bands. It wasn’t long until she began to experiment with her midi keyboard and effervescent vocals to create her own intimate compositions. These bloomed in collaboration with producer Seb Martel, making ‘In Nomine Corpus’ a gleaming opener for the rising musician. Our conversation dives into the journey she’s been on to fully materialise her ideas.

Nataal also premieres Pooch’s second visual from the album for the track ‘Nyanga’. Its driving rhythms set the scene for her ruminations on imposed beauty standards and her desire to live beyond external expectations. And in her exclusive playlist for Nataal, she offers up seven tracks around the theme of ‘renewal’ as she gives us an insight into how she ritualises these moments of renewal before moving into new seasons in her life.

How have your musical influences evolved since childhood?

My mum listened to classic Cameroonian music and I used to sing in church so there was gospel. Meanwhile I was listening to a lot of pop and mainstream music. When I arrived in Lyon, I met jazz musicians so I started to go to jam sessions and focused on jazz, blues and nu soul. At 18 I discovered Erykah Badu and Jill Scott and began performing soul standards and Afro-American music. I moved slowly to traditional music, specifically a genre from La Reunion called maloya, which is percussion and voices only, and to music from the Pacific of Colombia with polyphonic singing.

How did singing in church influence the ways you express yourself?

It trained my ears with voices and percussion but it’s funny because in church it was really joyful music and now I struggle to do light harmonies. It's all a little bit heavy all the time but I feel like it has shaped the fact that I sing using my body. I need it to be vibrating in my body, I need it to mean something sensitively. Church was sharing with people and singing together but on my album I did all the voices by myself.

How did you start to express yourself through sound and composition?

When I started doing music for a living I was singing covers then moved into composition groups. At a certain point I felt like it wasn’t enough. And I was also thinking about language because when I was a child I wrote a lot of poems in French but in Lyon I would sing only in English, Spanish and Creole. I wanted to know what would come out if I let my personal music express itself and I needed to say it in French. When covid came, I had time. So, I just took my computer and a midi keyboard. It wasn’t about doing an album or doing a project, it was about really letting things out and putting them in front of me and informing myself about what I was made of, not technically but emotionally. That was the first step. Composition came from this need to express something authentic.

What did the creative process for your album ‘In Nomine Corpus’ reveal to you about the things you were carrying?

Often I would be on the street and I would feel something in my body and need to write. Some words came out and then the melodies and textures. Now that the album is out, I have discovered some songs again. I listen to one every day. For example, the song ‘Le goût de ça’, which means ‘The taste of that’, reminds me of a book I was reading by Calixthe Beyala describing a lot of things in Cameroon that I really felt and that I couldn’t describe. For me the album is where I find the most Cameroonian things inside but at the same time it sounds a little bit weird and strange. It's a really beautiful mirror of my place of hybridisation. It shows me a precise point in my identity.

Could you talk about the story of ‘Issemou’?

I was with my mother in Cameroon when I wrote it and Cameroon had just won the African Cup. That night we went out and wanted to get into the victory vibe. They cut the electricity in the neighbourhood so it was really dark and kind of creepy outside. I took my phone and started to record ‘Issemou’ and at the same time she was talking to me saying, ‘I try to do my best to figure out who I am, what I want to do’. There were a few guys who came running in front of us with torches. It was literally light in the darkness of the street, all this light mingled. When I came back to Lyon, I recorded the song and used that audio.

How did the visuals enhance that story?

I had friends working with Nyege Nyege festival so we decided to go there to shoot the video. I had never been to Uganda before but knew that there were going to be a lot of artists that I could collaborate with. We wrote some ideas down before but we were like, this has to be about who we meet and the energies along the way. It was really a spiritual journey. We filmed mostly at night and I started to work with the French photographer Anne-Laure Etienne, who took pictures that had a sensitivity and a focus on movement.

You studied literature, how has that enhanced your song-writing?

It’s really intuitive, I don’t have a method to write. I just say words as I feel them. Some songs for me are related to paintings, some other songs are a little ball from the body. Some songs are like a good cream for your scars and some songs have textures that are like water. My songs also don’t have a lot of lyrics.

How did the sound come together with Seb Martel?

I had my songs on my computer and then contacted different beat-makers for specific sounds and sometimes Seb would suggest nstrumentation to replace different sounds and we pieced everything together. Our main intention was to have a subtle and nice harmony between electronic elements and the organic core. Seb was really careful not to touch the essence of the music and would just propose a few things to make it sublime. I’m really grateful for that.

What has this collaboration taught you about the importance of detachment?

It was a co-creation. He’s an excellent musician and open to non-academic ways of thinking. It taught me humility, curiosity and professionalism. It taught me that of course you create your art but we are not alone and this album wouldn’t exist if I just did my songs in my room. It taught me how to say ‘no’ when I didn’t like something and I think that we define ourselves by all the nos that we say.

What do you hope listeners will receive from this offering?

When I play, sometimes people come up with me in tears. It happened last week with a song called ‘Le feu’. A girl told me that her, it was about someone who had died. But for me, it was about desire. I think it’s beautiful because I write to express something about myself and then hope people receive it. I’m not attached to the first impulse because it doesn’t belong to me anymore. I’ve created the medicine that someone can use for another problem and it's perfect. As long as it contributes to some healing process then it’s good.

Can you speak about the visual for the song ‘Nyanga’.

Two years ago, I shaved my eyebrows. A lot of women around me thought it was beautiful and empowering. But lot of the men thought it was weird, which annoyed me so I wrote this song. ‘Nyanga’ means something nice but in a mainstream way. The first line is ‘Je ne veux pas etrê nyanga’ (‘I don’t want to be pretty’). I struggled to love this song at first because it’s about a systematic problem. And it was difficult to find what I wanted to do with the video as it’s a complicated thing to express. I don’t want to be nyanga but I don’t want to say people who wear make-up are not good. It’s a subtle balance when it comes to beauty standards.

How does the idea of renewal shape your daily rituals?

I love to ritualise the cycles of birth and death. I ritualise the death phase more because for me, it’s precisely at that place that everything is fertilised for the new cycle of renewal. In my music, it’s about this idea of movement and opening doors and changing skin. It’s about honouring the last cycle and even sometimes calling for the death of what needs to be over in order to have the energy to do that renewal again and again. It’s like my cycles are more and more short now because I jump on any occasion of renewal. It’s a theme that talks to me a lot.