French songstress Camille is on a break in between tours, resting and recuperating in the south of France – it’s beautiful, it’s sunny, she trills. “It’s raining in Australia, isn’t it?”. Ah, so this is what they mean when they talk about classic Gallic humour – it’s just plain ol’ mean spiritedness! “Tee hee hee,” she laughs.

With her sophomore album Le Fil recently released in Australia, it’s been over a year and a half since it made its appearance in France. “I’m really happy every time it’s released in a foreign country – I’m amazed,” she exclaims.

It’s quite amazing how universally successful the likes of “Ta douleur” have been in bringing this French chanteuse to greater recognition, with her French songs working brilliantly all around the world. Camille herself is stumped as to why it’s been so successful, save for that it was made deliberately with a certain sound in mind, as the thread of sound that weaves its way through the recording, ending in a drone at the end of album closer “Quand je marche”.

“I think the sound means something,” she says of Le Fil, “and I think sound is a very universal medium and very often we forget that music is about sound and vibration before being about words, or sexiness, or efficiency like making you dance. My album is about sound most of all, and every element has a meaning in sound.”

She feels that the thread is a sound that’s meaningful in that it’s very, very simple, and it’s a held sound the whole way through the album. “It’s a constant force that goes through the album, and you can interpret it any way you like. It’s quite subliminal.”

As such, some have labelled Le Fil a concept album, and Camille is unsure how she’s going to follow it up. “I think every album is a different moment and I don’t want to make the same each time,” she explains. “I’m not sure every album has to be conceptual or be conceptualised, so it was just reflect the moment. I’ll see.”

Regardless that her singing is almost entirely in French on the record, Le Fil has resonated in so many non-French speaking countries, not least of all Australia. Again, Camille is of the belief that it comes back to the sounds, and the textures that the sound of her multi-tracked vocals have. “The voice tells a lot, so the texture itself tells the story,” she confirms. “Working with a minimalist guy on production helps me focus more on the sounds, because I had a listener who didn’t get a word of French, so he was focussing on making it sound what it meant.”

When it came to the production of Le Fil, Camille worked with noted English producer Majicka. Part of the reason for this, she explains, is that as a producer he’s very much about the artist’s vision and entering their world, and not making the artist kowtow to any restrictions he likes to place on his production technique.

“If you take someone like a very famous producer, like someone like Timbaland,” Camille says, “they will agree to be in his world. I wanted to work on my album with Majicka because he’s very much a listener and he helped me complete my ideas – it was my world that he helped to express, and gave me what he felt, not making my ideas fit into his world. I didn’t want a guy telling me ‘it has to sound this way, it has to sound that way’, but I wanted a guy who really was a listener and there when he really has to be there.”

Majicka helped with the arrangements, adding his classically trained approach to the conceptual basis of Le Fil. “I could really communicate and talk, but he wasn’t like vampire sucking the blood and making it his own, but he’s more into generosity and listening.”

The sound of Le Fil is deceptively simplistic, focussing primarily on the range of Camille’s voice and the different ways that it can be melded together. For the most part, her vocals are only joined by limited clipped beats and bass pulses without full instrumentation appearing on the tracks. “I felt I had to explore my instrument, which is my voice,” she says. “I felt I had started to do it, and I still have more to go of course, but I wanted to see how I could use it as instrumentation, and I use it as an interpretation of words and telling stories, but then I wanted to use it as an instrument and try different textures that didn’t sound like words, and something that was a background. As I don’t write music and have arrangement ideas, I thought it was a very simple way of expressing the way I feel about rhythms, harmonies, and doing it directly with my voice as an impulse.”

Given that this record was based around vocals and the way that voice was used, she goes on to say that representing it live has been a long process with many challenges of taking an introspective sound and fleshing it out so that it doesn’t simply sound bare when performed on stage. “I represent the thread on stage,” she says, “and I use a loop that allows me to digitally layer my voice. I work with two musicians, so it’s quite minimal but we each explore our possibilities as far as we can.”

It’s a far cry from the concept of Nouvelle Vague, on which Camille also appears. “It is very different because the music is a chemical experiment, and when it comes to my solo album I conduct it, and when it comes to Nouvelle Vague someone else conducts it, so I’m just part of the element that is brought to it,” she says. “I bring my element to it, and my interpretation, but I don’t mix it and I don’t arrange it, and I’m the character, the actor, but when I do my album I’m creating my world and giving the message, and conducting it. It’s nice to be part of an experiment that you don’t control because it’s lighter.”

For now, though, Camille is very much the conductor on the world stage, as Le Fil infiltrates new territories on a seemingly daily basis.

Le Fil is out now, with Camille likely to tour Australia in late 2006.