ANOHNI

🎤 Nina Simone “Isn’t it a Pity”, 🦇 Christian Death “Only Theater of Pain”, 🇦🇺 Martu, and more.

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A TASTE OF TASTE WITH Anohni

🎤 🎵 🦇 🎹 🇦🇺

December 26, 2024

ANOHNI is a UK-born and NYC-based musician and artist. Anohni’s acclaimed discography spans from her solo music, to her ensemble project Anohni and the Johnsons, and has seen collaborations with artists like Björk and Lou Reed. Recently, she left the label Secretly Canadian and created Rebis Music (represented by Rough Trade). Last year, the band reunited to drop their most recent Anohni and the Johnsons album, the highly lauded My Back Was a Bridge For You To Cross. She also tells us that she’s working on a film titled RACHEL (stay tuned). Anohni just wrapped her Europe and US tour, and lucky for us, she’s here to tell us what she’s been into.

WHAT Anohni IS INTO...

🎤

Nina Simone “Isn’t it a Pity”

She recorded this song by George Harrison and improvised new lyrics. She addresses the state of the world in a heartbreaking way. The recording just shakes with feeling. I saw Nina Simone the first time she came back to NYC at Carnegie Hall in about 1992 and it was only half sold. I clung to the balcony rails and cried for 2 hours.

🎵

Buffy Saint-Marie “Little Wheel Spin and Spin”

Buffy is a remarkable song writer and activist. To me she is one the great American song writers of the last century, and she identifies the crisis of capitalism and the cruelty of these structures we are all beholden to in such a visceral way; her artwork is singular. I will always be grateful to her for her vision and her generosity as an artist.

🦇

Christian Death “Only Theater of Pain”

Rozz Williams was a founder of the subculture of LA Death Rock that had a huge influence on me as a kid. Inspired partly by the new scene at the Batcave night club in London, Rozz and Ron Athey created a new American iteration, with an increased sense of seriousness and urgency, Now it could be seen as a response to the burgeoning “Moral Majority” movement in the US and the fire and brimstone televangelist culture that was taking the US in those years of rightwing backlash. Rozz was a visionary.

🎹

William Basinski, “September 23rd”.

Billy’s is my favorite music in the world. His whole catalog is immortal. He just released a new piece called September 23rd. It is a loop based ambient work comprised of a piano melody cut up from the early 80s that has been treated and processed. I always say Basinski’s music is the most helpful artwork I have ever known. I must have listened to his records for tens of thousands of hours. I am playing it before my concerts.

🇦🇺

Martu, Western Australian Desert.

In 2016, I was privileged to visit the Martu in Parnngurr, a remote West Australian Indigenous Community located 370kms East of Newman, on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert. The Martu I met changed the way I thought about life. One elder there, Nola Taylor, told me that after we die we ”Go Back to Country”. She seemed to be suggesting that we remained in the world in some form, and that we do not leave upon death, challenging ideas I had learned as a child that our goal as humans was to escape the cycle of creation. That desire for escape from Nature seems dysphoric to me now.

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ANOHNI

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