When the London jazz festival ran online only in 2020, an enthralling livestreamed performance by Swiss harpist Julie Campiche's avant-jazz ensemble was a startling highlight, introducing UK audiences to a virtuoso instrumentalist and composer who was already turning heads in Europe. Campiche plucked guitar, zither and east Asian-style sounds from the harp, mingled with vocal loops, classical music, Nordic ambient jazz and more. You might call her soundscape magical or otherworldly if it didn't coexist with a campaigner's political urgency on environmental and social issues.
She constructed "Early Earth," the setting of two of her graphic novels, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth (2013) and The One Hundred Nights of Hero (2016). The former is a collection of creation myths for Early Earth, while the other is modeled on One Thousand and One Nights and its frame story of a woman delaying a man's predation by distracting him with storytelling.