ANYX – Strange Times
Berlin-based artist, musician and vocalist ANYX has shared a new single & visualizer from her debut solo album ‘Starlink’, which is set for release later this month, on August 28th via La Rubia Producciones.
Following previous singles “Window In Your Eyes” and “Ladybirds Spine”, today she shares “Strange Times” – a song that unfolds as foreboding darkness gives way to light. Opening with tolling bells and an atmosphere of unease, it gradually transforms into something expansive and hopeful, reflecting on the fragile relationship between humanity, mythology, technology and the natural world. The track captures another facet of the ever-shifting landscape of ‘Starlink’, where songs evolve, overlap and continually transform.
Speaking on the accompanying video ANYX comments: “For the visual, I wanted to reverse that dynamic by allowing the landscape to shape the film rather than imposing my own ideas upon it. I chose to work with cows because I have always been fascinated by their presence.
“Rather than asking the animals to perform, I wanted to respond to their presence and let the encounter itself shape the film. The cows were never meant to represent anything. What interested me was the choreography that developed between us. They were simply present as living beings with their own rhythm, their own awareness and their own agency.
“In the end, the video became an observation of coexistence rather than a performance.”
‘Starlink’ is the first solo work by ANYX – aka Berlin-based artist, musician and vocalist Anna Lucia Nissen – emerging from her previous work as frontperson of the trio Anchoress. Co-written with previous collaborators Alexander Rathbone and Tobias Textor, it represents both a progression and something of a return to Nissen’s roots as a visual artist. She takes a sculptural approach to her songs, starting with her voice and words as internal navigation from which she works outwards. Around this core, she builds minimal instrumentation – harp, keys, guitar and double bass – until each song is muscular and multi-dimensional. Her songs are ever-fluctuating and unexpected but always rooted in songcraft, and grounded by her unique tenor voice, comparable to the richness of latter-day Scott Walker, or the transformative spells cast by Anohni and Keeley Forsyth.
The physicality of Nissen’s process connects with her album’s interrogation of how humanity impacts and shapes the world. The title ‘Starlink’ comes from a night spent looking at what appeared to be stars, but were actually man-made satellites: the miraculous eternity of the natural world competing with the follies of billionaires. For Nissen, contemporary life is full of these incongruities; constant reminders of the tension between the capitalist world and the natural world.
Nissen often seeks out the perspectives of others from which to write, using her voice as a tool for adopting different personas and characters. This includes non-human animals, whose agency is also suppressed in capitalist society. The songs themselves take on characteristics of the natural world, melding into each other and overlapping, transforming and resolving as they unfold.
The album as a whole is a living body of work, ready to be reshaped and re-inhabited during Nissen’s live performances. Live, she again takes a sculptural approach, working to shape her own body and the space around her, inviting us inside her self-authored universe. On ‘Starlink’, ANYX doesn’t just absorb other perspectives; through her voice and sounds, she sculpts a multitudinous, compassionate world of her own.
ANYX live dates:
Sept 16 – Berlin, DE – Galiläakirche (w/Kristof Hahn & Andy Aquarius)
Oct 22 – Graz, AT – Cafe Wolf
Oct 24 – Linz, AT – Sirup
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