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 But then in 2015, he played a festival in the Philippines that changed everything There he met June, who performs as ((( O )))) and who he’d remixed a track for Eventually they got married and moved in together on an island off the country’s south coast, where they have created a tropical studio idyll that looks out onto lush rainforest
musicfestivalsworld.com 2024
