Interview with Anatole Muster: Carving out a niche between Insta-fame and the Royal Academy

The Swiss 22-year-old producing electronic music with joy, collaboration and a classical jazz accordion.

When 22-year-old Anatole Muster started posting Instagram videos during the Covid-19 lockdown he quickly went viral with genre-blurring reels, merging classical accordion with electronic music. Since moving to London from his native Switzerland in 2021, Anatole’s videos have racked up millions of views, he’s been featured on Jamie Cullum’s BBC radio 2 show, and collaborated with a dizzying array of multi-instrumentalists including Louis Cole, Kiefer, Medasin, Hadrien Feraud, Tennyson, and M Field. Yet sitting in a café in East London, the musician still gets excited as comedian Tom Walker (better known by his character name Jonathan Pie) walks past. For Anatole, fame remains a curious construct.

When it comes to his own success, despite playing at Troxy, the Rio Montreux Jazz Festival, and two sold-out performances at London’s famous Ronnie Scott’s, the young musician says he still gets anxious about “whether the audience will turn up. But” he pauses as if he’s settling himself on stage, “when I’m actually playing with others­ – away from the publicity stuff – then there is no anxiety. It’s just joyous.” The  sentiment explains why so many of Anatole’s musical projects lean into collaboration, which, teasingly, he says he mostly uses to get new music out of artists he loves.

He's aware though, that not everyone feels as comfortable with musical hybridising. For some, the fact that he writes using software, in a DAW, rather than on sheet or instrument, sets him apart from “real jazz musicians”. Yet Anatole believes firmly in the value of blending jazz with contemporary music. Following teenage years listening to the likes of Tennyson, Bill Wurtz, Louis Cole, Thundercat, Allan Holdsworth, and George Duke, his resulting music is a challenge to purists to push beyond stagnant frontiers, be it into ‘Jazztronica’, ‘Metabop’, or, as in one of his recent reels, ‘Midwestern Accordion Emo’.

Q: For most people the idea of blending the accordion with electronic music sounds pretty novel – how did you find your sound?

“I was 16 when I decided to quit classical music. I just wanted to get out of that neat, contained classical setting, that feeling that you have to be perfect all the time. It was so wrong for me and it was such an anxious state. So I quit. I started doing more producing, which I had been doing on GarageBand for fun but after that I started taking it seriously. I wanted to pick up the piano so I could add synths to the stuff I was working on when I was like, wait, I can play accordion, I'll just use that. So accordion entered my production and I knew that was it.”

Q: Recently you’ve been getting over 1M views on your Instagram videos. What has the experience of blowing up on Insta been like for you?

“I love music, but there was a phase where I did it for the wrong reasons. I wanted to feel respected I guess and I started recording solos over other artists’ tracks online. Jacob Collier was one of the first people to follow me and he put one of my videos in his story. That’s when I realised the accordion is kind of amazing clickbait. If there's an accordion people say ‘nah, no way this can be good’ and then they click on it and they realise, ‘oh, actually this guy takes it seriously.’

But after a while I got super caught up with Instagram. Numbers wise, I had made it to some degree. I was like, damn, I have 40k followers and the official page of Instagram reposted one of my videos. But I started identifying myself way too much with the numbers and I wasn't in the real world much. It came really quickly and with all the pressure I was putting on myself, being creative became really difficult. I thought, I'm going to quit accordion. I'm going to quit music. I hit this rock bottom and I stopped composing for a year-and-a-half.”

Q) What made you start making music again?

“From that low point I really had to go about building my whole personality and identity up from zero again. I feel like I think about myself in a such a different way now. I became really open to different styles of music, and stopped putting pressure on myself to get ‘my sound’ right. I wasn’t limited anymore by a specific genre that I thought my listeners were demanding and that’s how the creativity came back. Re-combining that with my native jazz background was really how the new album came about. ‘Wonderful Now’ was finding joy in music again.

Q: How would you describe your relationship with fame now?

“I don't care so much about trying to grow on socials anymore and my productivity has gone through the roof. I mean, I still care about other people but it’s the people I see in real life that matter most. Now I get so inspired by friends that are doing really well. Now, fame means doing something meaningful. Where what you do means something for other people. There are so many artists that are not ‘famous’ but for me, I can’t take my eyes off what they are doing. That's it. Fame is when you have this extreme potential of attraction, where everyone wants to see what you're doing and be part of it. I want to be part of a movement like that, where that type of scene is happening.”

Q) Are there any scenes that give you that sense of ‘happening’ today?

“Look at L.A. and there's a this group just making waves, every one of them is doing something really revolutionary. Thundercat, Louis Cole, Genevieve Artadi, and all the guys signed with Mac DeMarco's record label like Pedro Martins and Daryl Johns. I mean, the fact that Mac DeMarco is even crossing over with these jazz artists is amazing, and all the instrumentalists in these bands have their own projects that are super renowned. They're all just hanging out playing small gigs, large gigs, and anyone can be part of it. Feels like nothing has been corrupted.”

Q: How would you describe the tensions between your traditional training and own work?

“When I first arrived at the Academy, part of me really relied on being Instagram ‘famous’ but deep down I was insecure and needed something to cling to. I didn't feel good enough for the school. It was also complicated because, I mean, the composition classes are amazing, the rhythm classes are amazing, I’m learning so many really valuable things but I feel like the image of what an artist is supposed to be is very different from where I want to go and the image of what music one should make or what is ‘respectable’ is just a very clear thing. I think it’s just about keeping the balance between this strong institution of jazz and not being afraid to also try your own thing.”

Q: Tell us about the creative process behind your debut album…

“I don't know if you've dreamed of music or writing music, but yeah, I’ve dreamt about it –where it sounds so good, so much better than anything in the real world and sometimes it feels like that's what I’m trying to achieve. I don't know, I've never spoken about this, so this is the first time I’ve actually thought about it, but I guess that’s part of why I write music, and in this album, on one of the tracks, there’s this B section that hits and it's pretty much exactly what I want it to sound like. It’s just a melody in the right register ­and it just – it hits.

That's where people that know well me can hear it – that's me exactly. That's my personality in music. It’s a kind of feeling. Some artists might be like, that’s not very artistic because you just try and convey one emotion, no long complex lyric stories, but I think it’s a good focus – you’know, joy.”

Anatole’s debut album “Wonderful Now” comes out on April 19th.