A voice reaches through the time-worn crackle of a tape spool, an echo from decades past: "Amy?", the voice encourages, "Are you going to sing us a song?" amy michelle is now a stranger to the child whose cherubic face was lit by the glow of birthday candles; the little girl who leaned into the camera with a gap-toothed grin, tearing at wrapping paper with inquisitive confidence. But still the 22-year-old Irish singer-songwriter and producer dedicates her debut EP, is that all there is? to that phantom flickering on the screen: "It's a homage to my younger self," she says. The project was born from the emotional turbulence of the pandemic, a world and a life upended. Like many of us, amy michelle soothed herself by receding into the comforting embrace of nostalgia, slotting neglected memories of her childhood into a VHS player. It's these tapes that she cut together for the visuals for "the bottom of the well", a demo she released on YouTube without ceremony in that first, suffocating month of lockdown. Over a distant, almost hymnal guitar, her voice floats above, like a disembodied whisper in an empty room. These videos of warmth and innocence are sharply contrasted with nightmarish vignettes of being stuck in a church, teeth falling out, a scream that falls on deaf ears.
