In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Odette followed a more conventional route into education, eventually attending a polytechnic to study social policy. Creativity took a back seat during this time, though she remained immersed in the cultural life of gigs, books, and exhibitions. The technology to experiment with sound was still out of reach—either too expensive, inaccessible, or closed off to women in a male-dominated scene.
It wasn’t until the late 1990s that Odette’s creative life began to take shape in a more focused way. With the support and encouragement of her husband, Kit, she began writing and recording at home. A Yamaha PSR keyboard—with its basic sound synthesis features—was the gateway to her fascination with electronic sound. Inspired by everything from 1950s sci-fi to the synth boom of the 1980s, Odette eventually acquired her first proper synthesiser in her 40s, a Korg N5, which opened up new possibilities for exploration. She later moved on to a Triton workstation, tools that became central to the formation of her distinctive sonic identity.
Odette’s method was intuitive, experimental, and self-developed. Without formal theory or conventional notation, she crafted music through instinct, drawing on a deeply personal visual and auditory language. Her early work was captured on basic home equipment—cassette tapes, four-track recorders, and gear salvaged from clearance sales at Radio Shack. Over time, her setup expanded to include a 16-track Akai recorder and software that allowed her to layer, manipulate, and refine her compositions.
Soundician’s first release came out in 2000 and was quickly sent to independent radio shows and reviewers across the US and Europe. Entirely self-produced, the music and artwork were created in-house. At a time before digital platforms and distribution, the physical CDRs featured minimalist white covers with no imagery—an aesthetic born from necessity due to high printing costs. The artwork, limited to the inside CD insert, marked a stark contrast to other releases within the ambient and experimental genres. This minimalism became a signature; the blank covers made Soundician stand out, and the mystery of the presentation intrigued listeners. As digital distribution evolved, Soundician was able to expand on this visual language, incorporating more colour and complexity into the accompanying digital artwork. Despite limited resources and a DIY approach, the music gained international attention. Each release was a labour of love, created in the margins of daily life—between childcare, caring responsibilities, and everything else.
Odette was part of the first wave of independent, home-based music creators—before Bandcamp, before social media, before streaming platforms changed the industry. While many were slow to embrace digital distribution, Odette saw its potential early on, experimenting with emerging platforms like Liquid Audio and Mp3.com. But as a woman in her 40s working from home, with no access to the traditional music scene, a "career" in sound was never a realistic prospect. Soundician remained a serious and sustained practice, grounded in authenticity, curiosity, and resilience.
Although Odette quickly recognised that she was unlikely to earn a living through music, she continued to create soundworks out of love, persistence, and the simple joy of making. Under the name Soundician, she released 16 albums between 2000 and 2018, each project a self-directed and self-funded endeavour. There were significant highlights during this period: Seven Sisters (2004) won Best Electronic Album in the New Age Reporter Awards in the United States, and its successor Memorophilia was nominated the following year. Yet even with critical appreciation, her work often felt out of sync with the mainstream—a case of “wrong place, wrong time.” Life circumstances, including long-term caring responsibilities and ongoing health issues for both Odette and her husband Kit, eventually led to the final release, Evensong, in 2018.
By that point, sound and art had become inseparable from her everyday life. The enormous technological developments she had witnessed over the previous two decades—affordable laptops, digital software, mobile recording, Wi-Fi, and online distribution—meant it was now possible for isolated artists to connect, share, and reach new audiences without formal industry support. This shift opened the door for her next evolution: Museleon, a solo project that embraced more experimental, computer-based work and pushed her practice into new conceptual and sonic territory.
The catalyst for Museleon came via an open call from the Tyneside Sounds Society, inviting artists to respond to recordings of King George VI’s speech. Odette's resulting piece, Surface, was built from a single sample—deconstructed, reassembled, and transformed. This method of working—using field recordings or found sound as the sole source material—became a signature of her Museleon output. In these works, ordinary sounds were reshaped into surreal or poetic forms: mud volcanoes reimagined as Japanese yōkai (Haradashi), Newcastle’s Civic Centre bells transformed into a glass of tonic water (Tonic), and a toilet flush recorded in Athens becoming crashing waves in Mondrian Seas. Odette’s approach was minimal in processing but maximal in imagination, turning overlooked or mundane noises into textured, audio-based visual stories.
In this phase, her compositions have explored how small sounds—imperfections, glitches, and audio accidents—can evoke unexpected emotional or aesthetic resonance. Whether transforming Polish bell towers into fluttering moths (Futility), train whistles into dragons (Journeys III), or industrial compressors into metallic wyrms (Wyrm), Odette’s practice is grounded in close listening and the idea that beauty can be uncovered in the strange, the broken, and the incidental.
Despite the progress in digital accessibility and the proliferation of platforms for independent creators, Odette's work has continued to operate outside traditional frameworks. She remains largely self-commissioned, producing work in response to open calls or as personal explorations. Recognition comes in the form of artistic validation rather than financial compensation. Her CV is deliberately unstructured, reflecting a nonlinear, non-institutional path—a fact that may partly explain why her work remains relatively under the radar.
Still, Odette’s commitment has never wavered. Her website, museleon.com, chronicles a wide range of personal milestones, collaborations, and featured works. Online platforms such as Cities and Memory, Radiophrenia, World Listening Day, The Dark Outside, Lone Women, Radio Spiral, and Music Weeklies have become integral spaces for Odette to share her work. These projects offer not just opportunities to be heard but deadlines and prompts that sharpen her focus.
Among her personal highlights are contributions to Voices from Eris, a global compilation celebrating female experimental and electronic artists, where her piece Pitchers used glass sculptures as both graphic score and inspiration. Her work Little Crosses explored the sensory history of World War I and was broadcast on Radiophrenia in 2019, followed in 2022 by Life Mask, a sonic reflection on her experiences of the Covid pandemic. She was interviewed by As If Radio during the COP26 climate conference, discussing her environmentally engaged project unQUIET. And in 2022, her piece A Daisy Through the Asphalt Sees the Sky was selected for the Cities and Memory project Well-Being Cities, played at the C40 Cities Summit in Buenos Aires.
The interplay between sound and image remains central to her practice. Many of her works are rooted in visual art, whether responding to exhibitions, using photographs as graphic scores, or pairing her compositions with her own painting and digital artwork. Projects such as Artists Talk and Cantata for Nightingales, Building, Furnaces and Electronics illustrate her sensitivity to place, texture, and environment. Her aesthetic is drawn from memory, poetry, the coastal landscape of the North Sea, and a fascination with natural forms—glass, rock pools, plants, water, and their intricate micro-worlds.
In recent years, her work has increasingly engaged with environmental themes and the lived realities of care. A long-term project documents her husband Kit’s journey through vascular dementia (Eidolon), offering a deeply personal lens through which to explore sound, memory, and loss.
After more than two decades of creative output, Odette remains a passionate and prolific sound artist. Her process continues to evolve, guided by intuition, resilience, and a refusal to give up. What began as an act of self-discovery has become a sustained artistic practice—technical, emotional, and profoundly imaginative.
Examples of work please explore all Odette's work at -
Soundician
Museleon
