Annabel Alpers, the New Zealand-based pop-electronic songwriter, has a new album coming out on Drag City this May, her third, which makes it a little odd that it’s self-titled, but not unprecedented. I interviewed her a couple of years ago, just after she’d gotten picked up by Drag City for her second full-length My Electric Family…and I liked the record a lot, as well as her earlier Isolation Loops. (Both it and a previous 12” called The End of Things have since been reissued by Drag City.) But I have to say that her new one is better, a really stunning piece of work that is, simultaneously more intricate and easier to process…a really rich kind of experience where you are captivated right from the beginning but, as time goes on, continually noticing new things .
Here’s my “Destined” piece on Bachelorette.
Drag City doesn’t seem to be offering any videos or mp3s from this album…in fact, all I can find is the MySpace.
So, it looks like YouTube isn't permitting people to embed videos anymore...here's a link to a video of Annabel performing live at Cake Shop. You'll have to leave to see it. Bye!
Showing posts with label Bachelorette. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bachelorette. Show all posts
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Monday, January 12, 2009
Dusted's Destined series kicks off with Bachelorette
You’ve undoubtedly heard me whining about how nobody will let me cover breaking bands anymore (if you haven’t and want to, drop me an email, it’s one of my favorite things to complain about)…
In any case, Dusted does a feature early every year called “Destined” where we focus on 10 emerging artists. Last year we had Hercules and Love Affair and Fuck Buttons and I forget who else, but it’s worth watching. Anyway, this the first time I’ve ever been asked to participate. I got Bachelorette, a New Zealand-based singer who sits somewhere between Animal Collective and Joanna Newsom. She’ll have a new album out on Drag City this year.
Here’s a bit of my piece:
You get the sense that Annabel Alpers, the New Zealand electro-pop artist known as Bachelorette, doesn’t much care for talking about her delicate, multilayered songs. She’d rather not theorize about the nexus between synthetic tools and raw human feeling. She has no clear idea of where she’s heading musically, after My Electric Family, the album she’s mixing right now in New Zealand for release on Drag City this spring. She’s perfectly happy to let that question resolve itself later, when she gets back to her computer to write new songs.
“I don’t have a particular direction that I want to go in at all,” she says, by phone, early on New Year’s Eve 2008. “Every time I work on a song or an album, I’m always surprised with how it comes out, because it’s not how I started out with it.”
Yet you can’t mistake this flexibility, this open-ness to the vagaries of inspiration, this refusal to articulate an artistic philosophy, for lack of purpose. “Sometimes I think the reason why I play music is that it’s the way that I’m able to communicate to people,” she says. “It’s better than the way that I’m capable of communicating just through talking or the conventional kinds of communication that other people are satisfied with. That doesn’t satisfy me. So, it’s a way of trying to be satisfied with communicating with other people.”
More
Doo-Wop
I Want to Be Your Girlfriend
In any case, Dusted does a feature early every year called “Destined” where we focus on 10 emerging artists. Last year we had Hercules and Love Affair and Fuck Buttons and I forget who else, but it’s worth watching. Anyway, this the first time I’ve ever been asked to participate. I got Bachelorette, a New Zealand-based singer who sits somewhere between Animal Collective and Joanna Newsom. She’ll have a new album out on Drag City this year.
Here’s a bit of my piece:
You get the sense that Annabel Alpers, the New Zealand electro-pop artist known as Bachelorette, doesn’t much care for talking about her delicate, multilayered songs. She’d rather not theorize about the nexus between synthetic tools and raw human feeling. She has no clear idea of where she’s heading musically, after My Electric Family, the album she’s mixing right now in New Zealand for release on Drag City this spring. She’s perfectly happy to let that question resolve itself later, when she gets back to her computer to write new songs.
“I don’t have a particular direction that I want to go in at all,” she says, by phone, early on New Year’s Eve 2008. “Every time I work on a song or an album, I’m always surprised with how it comes out, because it’s not how I started out with it.”
Yet you can’t mistake this flexibility, this open-ness to the vagaries of inspiration, this refusal to articulate an artistic philosophy, for lack of purpose. “Sometimes I think the reason why I play music is that it’s the way that I’m able to communicate to people,” she says. “It’s better than the way that I’m capable of communicating just through talking or the conventional kinds of communication that other people are satisfied with. That doesn’t satisfy me. So, it’s a way of trying to be satisfied with communicating with other people.”
More
Doo-Wop
I Want to Be Your Girlfriend
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