Melissa Weikart dates her second album Contact for 23 October

Melissa Weikart releases her second album, Contact, on 23 October through Midnight Special Records, and has put out the single L'amour se construit ahead of it with a surrealist video directed by Ruby Cicero.

The record is largely her own work in the literal sense. The Paris-based, Boston-raised artist wrote, arranged and produced the majority of it herself, which is unusual enough at this level that it explains a lot about how the twelve tracks sound. Her conservatory training in piano and voice sits underneath the electronic music she has been working in more recently, and Contact is the point where the two meet.

The people she did bring in are worth naming. It was recorded with Marius Duflot at Studio Nocturnes, mixed by Chris Cohen at his home studio in Richmond, California, and mastered by Mike Nolte, of Montreal, at Transition Mastering. That is a chain running from Paris to northern California and back, on a record made by an artist with two EPs and one album behind her.

The single's title translates roughly as love is built, and Weikart frames the song as an argument for accepting the mess rather than tidying it away. She says that by welcoming the contradictions that come with feelings about love, "perhaps we can find solace in embracing imperfection", which is a fair description of the track's own refusal to resolve neatly.

Her catalogue is larger than a second album suggests. Alongside the two EPs and an album under her own name, she has released an EP and an album with the Parisian artist Beatrice M. under the name Beatrice Melissa, which is a parallel career rather than a side project.

The jazz world got to her first. Weikart won the emerging artist award at Nancy Jazz Pulsations in 2022 and took the instrumentalist prize at the 2023 La Defense National Jazz Competition, two French prizes that go some way to explaining why her name turns up on festival bills more often than on album release lists.

The touring around Contact is dense and almost entirely European. After a summer run that included a sold-out Paris date at Jazz a la Villette, she returns to Nancy Jazz Pulsations on 14 October, plays Festival Off Off Off in Troyes on 20 October, then Le Ciel in Grenoble on 22 November, Les Femmes S'en Melent in Montreuil on 27 November with Momoko Gill, Sowieso in Berlin on 9 December and Pile07 in Annonay on 16 December.

Contact runs twelve tracks: Crash, Mesurer le vent, Contact, The Intersection, Appetit.e, Expectations, L'amour se construit, L'amour pt. 2, Not right, New angles with Manu Delta, Catching up and Bicycle. The two-part treatment of L'amour is the shape of the record in miniature, one idea given room to change its mind.

Our earlier note recorded that no label and no tracklist had been published. Both are on The Line of Best Fit's page. Confirmed dates are tracked on the release calendar, and more from this corner of the map sits on the pop hub.