Ward, Jenny Wilson, Bonnie Prince Billy, Electrelane, Anna Ternheim, Gal Costa, Michaela Melián, Monica Zetterlund and Swedish left-wing music from the 1970s. Sufjan Stevens, Bettie Serveert, Kaki King, Little Wings, Element of Crime, M. Helping poor people in developing countries. What could you imagine doing if you didn’t do what you do? Also, I used to do karate, and my teacher let me graduate, despite my rubbish technique, because of my so-called ‘fighting spirit’. The low percentage of artists having plastic surgery. Obviously women at art schools are a waste of taxpayers’ money. Also, I would like to see more big solo shows by women before they’re dead, and 90 percent less admission for women to art schools, as I am sick of teaching them while knowing they probably won’t have their work displayed in any big museums or bought for major collections. The ongoing resistance of art museums to buying art made by women. More art history and when to shut up in sensitive situations – for example, when my work might be sold. I normally don’t like swear words, but this made me laugh: Fuck the Bauhaus: New Buildings for New York (2000) by Isa Genzken. What is your favourite title of an art work? I have it already: Cecilia Wendt’s untitled screen prints from 1993 of her mother bowing in white underwear in her bedroom. If you could live with only one piece of art what would it be? Since then I like art that deals with history and time perspectives. When I was in my early 20s I visited Helsinki, and they were just about to open the crates and reveal her work. It was really a kind of performance: the fact that Hilma af Klint hid her pictures for 40 years. What was the first piece of art that really mattered to you?
ANNA TERNHEIM CIRKUS FREE
You can stream it free from Echoes affiliate stations or catch it on demand with Echoes On-Line.What images keep you company in the space where you work?Ī newspaper clipping of a massive circus elephant with pink feathers on its head. Hear Agnes Obel playing live on Echoes Friday 10/07/11. We’ll be featuring Agnes Obel’s Philharmonicson Echoes Monday, January 3 and the following weekend. But Echoes CD of the Month Club members will be receiving some of the few physical CD copies in the country. Right now, Philharmonicsis only available on iTunesin the US. It’s only January, but Agnes Obel’s Philharmonicsis already simply the most beautiful album of the year. Philharmonicstakes a symphonic name, and it sits comfortably among a new generation of ambient chamber musicians like Ludovico Einaudi, Tim Story and Nico Muhly, not to mention Steve Reich and Michael Nyman. That theme continues into “Avenue” a song about wrong choices we make, even when we know they are wrong.
Philharmonicsis peppered with a handful of instrumentals like “Louretta” with a circus electronic keyboard sound that could fit in a John Carpenter Halloween score until Obel brings in piano and makes it haunting rather than frightening. That’s the case with “Close Watch,” a cover of John Cale’s “I Keep A Close Watch.” Over what sounds like a prepared piano or muted guitar, Obel builds this poignant work from yearning to heroic with the contrapuntal choirs of her voice.
One sign of a true artist is when they can take someone else’s song and make it wholly their own. Obel’s lyrics are ambiguously oblique, approaching her subjects from odd angles like the coy “Beast,” a song of pursuit and abandon that will have you hitting repeat to glimpse its curious and addictive chorus. Obel plays keyboards and guitar, deploying them in zen minimalist canons across slow moving cellos.
Her songs have a stark simplicity with almost childlike accompaniment, but like Yann Tiersen’s Amélie score, there is depth and portent between those spare, melancholy notes. Now living in Germany, Agnes Obel has that ethereal, mournful sound we’ve come to know and love from Nordic singers like Anna Ternheim and Emiliana Torrini. And so goes all of Philharmonics, a subtlety powerful and singular debut. Singing over a spare cyclical piano riff, she deftly layers her voice into plaintive harmonies that will have you swimming in her bittersweet stream. A heartbreaking song about the ebb, flow and emotional turmoil of life’s currents, Obel brings her lilting, slightly slurred soprano to bear on lyrics of memory and loss. If only for the second track, “Riverside,” the Danish born singer will be in your head forever on first listening. Hear Agnes Obel playing live on Echoes Friday 10/07/11įrom the first nursery rhyme piano solo, “Falling, Catching” to the last breathy vocal of “On Powdered Ground,” Agnes Obel’s debut album, Philharmonics, has captured my melancholy midwinter mood like no other. Minimalist songs of melancholy from Denmark with Echoes January CD of the Month
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