Inventing A Language For The Heart : A Conversation With Alice Simard
Alice Simard is an archetype of a certain type of musician that seems to only exist on the internet. The solo bedroom musician.
You probably don’t know her, but you know or you've just joked about the idea of someone like this. But they exist. She exists and she's great at creating unlikely, off-the-beaten-path extreme music. Outsider art that doesn't conform to the shackles of style and trends. Pure self-expression. Alice has twenty-five running projects. Some of them with friends she met on the internet, but most of them she does on her own.
"I'm working on more than twenty-five projects", she claims via Google Meet. Alice has given me access to her voice, but not to her image. A cute anime character pulses against a pink background whenever she's talking. "The ones you know are the ones I've made public."
If you're not already impressed with her boundless creativity, you might be upon learning that Alice Simard is twenty-two years old. She's been releasing music for almost seven years. She’s been running her slam project Onchocerciasis Esophagogastroduodenoscopy — which I've discovered her work with — since 2019 with an American friend named Jesse Agiomamitis and an enigmatic German only know as Popu (who joined later). She was fifteen then. Her creativity has been exploding into an endless fractal ever since.
Onchocerciasis Esophagogastroduodenoscopy, Coffret de Bijoux, Vitrified Entity, Luminesce, Turpitude, Lunam Niveis, Crasse Intraveineuse, Chiliasm and then some. It's all her. Black metal, slamming brutal death metal, technical death metal, neoclassical, she does them all. "The only other person who writes and releases music the way I do is Damián from the band Sadness, who's one of my favorite musicians. Why I do what I do is an alignment of circomstances, really."
YouTube, Discord and Far Beyond Driven
The first memory Alice has of extreme music islistening to Pantera's iconic record Far Beyond Driven in her father's car.
"I distinctively remember the song Good Friends and a Bottle of Pills. I thought it was the coolest thing. Everything went quickly after that. I started exploring on YouTube and found Rob Scallon's banjo cover of Spawn of Possession. He made it as a joke, but I thought it was fascinating. So, I guess my first extreme band was Spawn of Possession. I love everything about extreme music right away. I must've helped my creative development that I’ve started so young", she explains.
She's a self-taught musician. What Alice could teach herself, she did through trial-and-error and what she didn’t know how to do, she turned to Discord to meet people who could help her. That's where she met Jesse, Popu, Eetu and all the others. None she's met in real life yet, but invaluable friendships and collaborations nonetheless. "We send each other files. We find aways to make it work. Honestly, making music on the internet can be quite simple".
If she hasn’t met any of her collaborators yet, it’s because Alice does have some traits of the archetypal recluse tortured genius figure in metal meme culture. "When you can’t really work, you’re autistic, you don’t have a very active social life and you have an obsessive passion for music, it’s what you end up doing all the time. It’s what you naturally drift towards. I’m somewhat of a recluse even if I try to meet new people. So, I disappear into my music to explore all the ideas I have.
Onchocerciasis Esophagogastroduodenoscopy was her first project. At first, it was meant to be gorenoise. "I was experimenting with it. I was trying to record music without knowing how to mix. I had released a split that’s not even available on internet anymore. I recorded it with my dad’s amp, with the microphone way too close. I used a cheap drum plug-in. It came out sounding way too loud" reminisces Alice.
But her single-minded dedication and finding the right collaborators has not only super charged this project, it ignited Alice's creativity and enabled music to become a language she could express herself with.
All The Roads Lead To Coffret de Bijoux
Alice's most interesting project is, in my opinion, is her one-woman black metal hybrid project Coffret de Bijoux, which she’s been almost superhumanly productive with. She's released no less than nineteen album, including eleven full lengths in a little over two years. In 2026 alone, Alice has put our two full lengths and two EPs of Coffret de Bijoux. Sometimes atmospheric, sometimes influenced by DSBM or other, unrelated music genres, it’s one of the most unique and striking music out there.
There are also clear inspirations drawn from video games, another activity Alice immerges herself in. It keeps brutality, pain, grace and naiveté in an unlikely balance.
Although she invests a lot of time in Coffret de Bijoux, she wouldn't necessarily call it her main project. "I don’t think about music this way. But it’s the one I've worked on the most and one of the most popular along with Vitrified Entity, so I guess you could say it’s my main project. I wanted to explore textures, atmospheres and ideas I hadn’t explored through black metal yet, so I dropped my first release on January 1st 2024 and I haven’t looked back since then."
Once of the characteristics of this project that makes it even more singular is that the great majority of her songs are written in a language she invented. "I can have a difficult time expressing myself through existing languages, so it was a way for me to be more precise about what I’ve felt. I created a language with colors that resonate with my brain. My lyrics are also quite personal, so it’s a way for me to say what I have to say while protecting myself. There’s unfortunately a lot of transphobia online when Coffret de Bijoux is discussed."
Alice Simard doesn't care about being an online mystery, but she's still a little mysterious anyway. She stays away from social media and lets her music do all the talking she feels is necessary. She has (among other things), a new Onchocerciasis Esophagogastroduodenoscopy record out that sounds as unique and vicious as anything the band has ever recorded. It’s not that solo bedroom musicians are hiding from us. It’s that they communicate only what’s essential.
They have invented a language for the heart to deciper and appreciate.
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