French Kiwi Juice, or FKJ for short, is the moniker of Vincent Fenton, a nod to his Gallic mother and New Zealander father. He grew up in a small French village outside of Tours, isolated from his friends, and so he turned to music for company. He got hooked on his parents’ records by Pink Floyd, Billie Holliday, Nina Simone and Queen, and took up guitar; then, aged seven, the saxophone. “I would play with whatever toys were around, and that helped develop my imagination, and then that evolved into making instruments – I found whatever I could and started putting it together,” he said of his rudimentary one-man bands. That one-man-band mentality has persisted, collecting instruments as he goes, though he’s never been formally trained; instead developing his own ear.
Prestigious music colleges were too expensive and so he eventually moved to Paris to study the sound and film, which helped give him grounding in cinematic arrangements. He fell into the city’s nightlife scene, playing live instruments in clubs in Paris, and became known as a Soundcloud producer who blended house and jazz, as on his vibey 2013 Time For A Change EP.
The 31-year-old French musician grew up listening to the guitar legend’s music and during the making of his new album, V I N C E N T, he wrote Santana a letter thanking him for his inspiration. Much of V I N C E N T is willfully romantic, sometimes super sexy, and often with its head in the clouds, as on tracks like ‘Us’, a dreamy ode to his wife June, or ‘IHM’, which has a 90s hip-hop flavour slowed right down to lights-out tempo. Not entirely a solo record, ((( O )))) appears on ‘Brass Necklace’ – which has the soft power of The Internet and Stevie Wonder’s keys.
It’s no wonder that lead single ‘A Moment of Mystery’, featuring Toro Y Moi, has a spacey vibe: while recording in San Francisco together, FKJ, Toro and his keyboard player Tony took some of what Tony called “holy water” – “we shared this bottle and took a bit of a trip,” laughs FKJ. The result is a gentle electronic ode to long-term love that could rival Tame Impala for melodic progginess. V I N C E N T is a marvel – and testament to the magic that can happen when you dig deep. “This was a challenging record,” he says. “I’m a perfectionist and it’s hard to shake that off. But once I did, and I let the music take over, I felt totally free.”
