Agnes Obel Its Happening Again Meaning
I t'south mid-afternoon and a surprise heatwave is weighing heavily in the Victorian corridors and stairwells of Hoxton Hall. Heading to a cool room in the attic of the London venue is the woman playing her new tape here this night: a pale-eyed Dane who'due south already had two platinum-selling albums beyond mainland Europe.
Her 3rd, Denizen of Glass, isn't your typical floor-filler. It begins with shivering, gothic violins, eerie cello pizzicato, and the trembling horror of a replica 1920s synthesiser called a Trautonium. "Information technology's huge and it tin assassinate people," says Agnes Obel, settling down on a chair in a tiny, shabby dressing room. "Strangely we oasis't brought it this night."
Obel'southward first two albums, 2010's Philharmonics and 2013's Aventine, were darkly intimate affairs, the piece of work of a rich, characterful singer at her piano at night. They made her a top v creative person in France, Belgium, kingdom of the netherlands and Kingdom of denmark, and well-known in her adopted hometown of Berlin, where she's lived and worked for 10 years. "I have genuinely no idea," she says nigh apologetically, when asked to explicate their success.
Denizen of Glass marks a huge departure. Its album artwork doesn't feature her stark, striking portrait as before (stake and defiant on Philharmonics, lit in red in contour on Aventine) merely her confront is repeated, obscured and distorted – with more layers, instruments, mood and scope in her new music to match.
It's her kickoff concept album, she explains. "I was reading Der Spiegel on bout in 2014: this long commodity about the concept of the gläserner berger – about how these days, as people, we're all meant to be made of glass." In person, Obel is tiny and warm – she's aware that being inspired past broadsheet features isn't entirely in cahoots with rock'n'roll – just she's also alert, like a bird, and direct. "The idea that we're meant to tell everyone the stories of our inner and outer lives, to publish them online, to be completely open and transparent, and how big a change that is for u.s.a. all as homo beings. That subject is fascinating to me." She nods. "Although doing that doesn't come up naturally to me."
Born in 1980, Obel was brought up in artsy Copenhagen, her female parent a jurist by day and an exceptional pianist, her father a jazz musician who gave up his vocation for a professional career. Obel attended schools where children were encouraged to focus on their artistic endeavours, and generally do what they liked. "I wrote my first songs as a teenager on a piano in the school hall," she says of her loftier school, half-laughing. "It was total of cigarette butts. I find it crazy now that nosotros were immune to smoke anywhere."
She dropped out earlier finishing, though, joining a training plan largely populated with "younger, troubled kids" to become a record producer. Yet in her teens, she made friends with someone setting up a studio, and learned how to tape large bands and jazz ensembles, falling in love with the thought of sculpting and shaping sounds (ever since then, she has mixed and produced her own music).
Obel also became obsessed with musicians who created dramatic landscapes in their records, including Lee Hazlewood and Scott Walker – regarding the latter, her enthusiasm is infectious. "I remember listening to the Walker Brothers' Nite Flights for the outset fourth dimension, and the rail The Electrician - wow! Information technology was so experimental and cute, but also like he was creating a mental state. You lot were correct in his head, and I wanted to exercise that. To paint a huge world, just with audio."
On Citizen Of Glass, she's accomplished that. She's arranged complicated string parts, layered 250 tracks on top of each other, and candy her voice to sound both depression and high; on Familiar it sounds like she'due south duetting with a male cyborg version of herself, while Gold Green is earwormy pop at its nearly eerie. Lots of the album was recorded in her cheap, large Berlin flat, with older keyed instruments similar the spinet, celeste and aforementioned Trautonium (which she got made and shipped across Germany). "I wanted the record to sound like my concept completely: similar drinking glass, as well every bit accept lyrics that felt glass-like. It had to sound strong besides as frail, harsh but easy to interruption."
In the by, Obel's never liked describing her music, but this time, she's trying to. "I've realised in that location's something powerful in pushing yourself over the borders when you're finding things hard," she says, gingerly. The spur for this isn't just musical appetite either, but something much more close-to-domicile: the expiry of her male parent in April 2014. In an interview with Smooth webzine Enter The Room later on that year, his importance in her life brightly shone out: "Everything I know near music, I learned it from [him]".
Obel was touring Aventine when he died. She cancelled a few shows to go home to her family, but couldn't cancel them all considering she didn't have insurance to cover the costs of not playing them. Thankfully, she found music cathartic, though, and read the slice in Der Spiegel the same year. "I merely couldn't terminate writing. Everything felt so personal to me." She played the results to some friends a few months ago – before preparing her alive album shows, like tonight's – and idea they'd all know what the songs were about. "I'chiliad still amazed how many of them didn't."
Information technology'due south unsurprising, though: Citizen of Glass doesn't play like a series of confessionals, but it is an intense sequence of gorgeously pitiful, abstract songs, with some lyrics certainly suggesting grief. "Rend a black drib from my heart/With the weight of days" the title runway begins, while the stunning It'south Happening Once more, has a similarly affecting opening: "I swear it is true/The past isn't dead/It'southward alive, it is happening/In the back of my caput."
"After he died, I thought so much virtually his whole life, knowing how my life is now," she says. "He should have been a musician and I'm very aware I take something my male parent didn't." Moving to Berlin in 2006 meant she could live cheaply enough to be a musician full-time, without working all hours, which was the making of her, she believes. "I've realised ever since if at that place are things you want to do, whatever they are, yet hard they are, information technology'south good to do them. It's skillful not to hide."
Playing a whole anthology inspired by a challenging experience, before it's fifty-fifty released, is certainly one fashion of not hiding. Four hours later, Obel is behind her keyboard, direct-backed, in the muggy, packed hall, fronting her classically-trained female person band; they swap cellos, drums and clarinets as they weave together the elements of her rich, sonic world. The music lives in a similar space to that of Nick Cavern, Anna Calvi and Bat For Lashes, but Obel performs without costume, stage-set or props, in a blackness strapless peak and jeans. She's an even more startling presence for the absence of things hiding her.
Fifty-fifty when her hair unfurls in the oestrus, she keeps going, as if she'southward non even noticed. "In the dark I hear you sing," she tells us, openly and transparently; in the midst of information technology all, finding her own star.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/17/agnes-obel-its-called-a-trautonium-and-it-can-electrocute-people
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