Released last year only in her home territory of Denmark, Band Ane’s first release in five years finally received an international release. And deservedly so: the painstaking efforts that went into its production alone warrant the exposure.
Out in the thickets of Rold Skov, legend has it that Ane (Østergaard) has built a space that lets her creative imagination flow freely, in which four harmoniums inhabit a large organ room, while the attic holds a huge table with innumerable instruments and sound sources of the most varied kind, along with a sound archive with loads of analogue tapes, old lacquer discs, newer vinyl. It’s as much a sound laboratory as a studio, and Ane is the kind of artist who’s as likely to be caught lofting a hand whisk on stage as lurking behind a laptop.
Perched in a cabin up in between the branches of a birch tree, she sits and give mental shape to her many inspirations, and if it sounds like a crazy yarn spun to propagate the myth of a unique creative process, then the album itself reveals precisely what kind of aural sculpturte can emerge from such an environment.
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Floating, ethereal notes hang above subterranean slivers of vocal samples and distant twittering; flickering, stuttering beats and transient moments of melody emerge from between the cracks and fissures, the swimming ambience. To describe it as dreamlike would be misleading: this sounds like no dream I’ve ever experienced, and while the soft, mellow overtones are soothing, the sporadic clicks and whirrs and extraneous noises that interfere with the soft and supple ebb and flow are subtle but intrusive enough as to disrupt the calming currents.
It’s wildly idiosyncratic and highly imaginative, and listening to ‘Anish Music Caravan’ is less like listening to an album and more like entering another world.
Band Ane Online
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