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Vagabon: Weird Science

Vagabon masters the art of self-discovery on debut LP Infinite Worlds

Lætitia Tamko didn’t come to New York to pursue her creative ambitions, as so many others do. She spent her teenage years a short train ride away from Brooklyn but wasn’t aware of its fertile music community.

The songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and driving force behind Vagabon spent her childhood in Cameroon and moved to New York with her family when she was 14. She learned to play guitar in high school but put it to the side to study engineering at the City College of New York. By 2013, she was juggling math and physics courses, science labs, circuits—and it felt heavy.

“Engineering is a really demanding subject,” says Tamko. “I was focusing a lot of my energy on it. I had no creative outlet, and I started really wanting one. I had a lot going on personally and decided I should just write songs; why not, you know? I felt like I had a lot of things to say.”

Vagabon’s Persian Gardens project collected contemplative acoustic musings with touches of banjo and violin; its six songs are the first Tamko ever wrote, and she kept everything quick and unfussy, trying not to overthink. The EP, posted to Bandcamp in 2014, caught the ear of players in the scene surrounding Bushwick’s Silent Barn, and it was Tamko’s entrée into another world.

She started getting invited to play shows, collaborate in studio sessions and go on tour. Now, Vagabon’s Infinite Worlds is out on Father/Daughter Records, and it’s a breathtaking progression; dynamic electric guitar and drums mix with Tamko’s emotive vocals, which can be as playful as they are gripping. The album is a meditation on place, companionship and self-discovery. But she doesn’t take the community that amplified it for granted; “I wish I’d known about things like Girls Rock Camp when I was in New York at 14,” she says.

From within, the scene seems all-encompassing—especially when the media and industry narrative points so heavily to Brooklyn. However, the world is a big place, and Tamko says it’s important to never lose sight of that.

“A lot of weird kids who are outsiders, who are not interested in what their peers are interested in, would find so much comfort in knowing there is this community of people who are also weird, who are also cast to the side, who are kind of crushing it,” she says. “It could save them.”

—John Vettese