Child Talk

Ipswich, Suffolk, UK · b. 2006 · FARA Records

Child Talk (Immie Fell, b. 8 January 2006) is an adult artist from Ipswich, Suffolk, who kept the wide-open, wondering voice of childhood on purpose and built an artistic identity out of it — the stage name describes her vocal style, not her age. Where HALFSTEP's voice is the anxious older self, hers is the honest younger one: the kid who says the quiet true thing out loud before the self-consciousness sets in. She works in the small, vulnerable end of vocal performance — the near-whisper, the fragile melody, the line a grown-up wouldn't risk saying.

She found her way into music through voice memos and bedroom recordings, and a knack for the childlike register that most singers train out of themselves. She found her lane as a featured voice — the inner-child, the memory, the fragile counter-melody — rather than as a lead, and BUFFERING… ft Child Talk is the first record built fully around that role. Her influences run the fragile, childlike, close-mic vocal tradition — the wondering near-whisper used as texture and emotion in electronic music — and the featured-vocalist role in atmospheric drum & bass and downtempo, where a small human voice carries the feeling over the breaks.

On stage she's a featured presence rather than a front-person — open, unguarded, quietly disarming, carrying the tender counter-melody and the true asides the older narrator can't quite say. Her favourite moment on the track is the ending, where the child voice and the older self finally say the same thing at the same time. Wondering, honest, gentle.