DJ Pick of the Week: ANOHNI, 'Paradise'
by Mark Wheat
March 27, 2017
I've had a soft spot, as the English say, for ANOHNI since she was known as Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) and came to play an in-studio for us.
ANOHNI loved our grand piano and remembered walking around our lakes as a teenager. Although referred to as an English artist, after winning the Mercury Prize, there was some controversy, because the family had moved to the Bay Area when ANOHNI was 10, and some of them still live here; brother Nick is in the band Icy Shores.
Then last year, I named the Hopelessness album one of my Top 10 of the year. ANOHNI's seven-song Paradise EP was just released as a companion piece to the that album. Last week, Pitchfork gave the new EP a 7.7 review.
The Park Avenue Armory in New York was the venue that ANOHNI used to brilliant effect last year, performing the Hopelessness songs while shrouded in a veil, putting the emphasis on the images and faces that were used on a massive screen above the stage, for what reviews called a stunning visual presentation of the album.
Nine of the artists, poets, and activists featured in the Armory show reappear on the cover of Paradise. They are shown weeping, drenched in blood, faces weary with pain. These are the people whose concerns ANOHNI works to vocalize, those who understand that womanhood and the Earth from which we subsist are deeply intertwined. "Only an intervention by women around the world," ANOHIN writes in an accompanying piece, "with their innate knowledge of interdependency, deep listening, empathy, and self-sacrifice, could possibly alter our species' desperate course."
The singer has spoken extensively about gender and ecocide as a member of the Future Feminism collective, but never before has she been so explicit about their cause-and-effect relationship. "My mother's love/Her gentle touch/My father's hand/Rest on my throat," she sings on the title track, contrasting the feminine Earth with those who wish her harm.
More than simply tossing around blame on Paradise, ANOHNI takes responsibility herself and urges her audience to do so as well.
Then ANOHNI has come up with another way of making the consumer-and-artist exchange work: "If you would like the final song from Paradise, email me at anohni@rebismusic.com and share with me in a sentence or two what you care most about, or your hopes for the future," ANOHNI writes in a lengthy Facebook post. "Send this to me instead of the dollar you used to send me in the olden days. The price for this song is a gesture of anonymous vulnerability."
Resources
ANOHNI - official site
