(2009)
There is something ominous about the natural beauty alive in Austria. The sky seems a little bit too azure, the ground too teeming with life. In fact, the earth itself seems to barely hold the demons at bay from the angels in the clouds. So many battles have been fought on top of those mountain peaks between gallant saints and raging devils. Soap & Skin comes from this exquisite (maybe even too exquisite) place on earth. Stumbling upon the music of Anja Plaschg is something that can only be described as finding a decomposing corpse in a lush rose garden. With harrowing songs running the gamut from rage to unbearable beauty, her music is a pastiche of dulcet music box ballerinas spinning to a dance macabre something like the death dancers spinning out of their minds to the whirring calliope of noise in Carnival of Souls. Stepping into Plaschgs’ twilight wonderland is a heady and at times viscerally terrifying experience.
Anja Plaschg (pronounced An-ya Pla-sh-g), at a mere nineteen-years-old, has fought head on with her demons on her debut album, Lovetune for Vacuum. She began playing piano at the age of six, took up violin at fourteen, then began developing an appetite for electronic music found in the likes of Björk and Aphex Twin, which gradually began to influence her as well as the music of Serguei Rachmaninoff and Arvo Pärt. She first began to compose the songs for what would eventually become her debut album when she was sixteen-years-old. From Styria, a bundesland (state) in the southeast of Austria, Plaschg grew up on her parents’ pig farm in a small, rural village. Her songs deal with the range of emotions found in a charred-around-the-edges childhood (Spiracle), a fairy tale idyll with a dark soul (Cry Wolf), and the menacing chaos of pounding emotional conflict that can be found in Marche Funebre. Plaschg is as much tied to the land in which she comes from as the music that she creates. It is essential to understand that the music being created here is the result of a culture and land teeming with as much beauty as it is the macabre. The very name she performs under reflects this sense of purity and visceral honesty. She is doing a brave, dare I say ‘honest’ thing by expressing all the humanity, beauty, disgust, and shame that is as much tied into the psyche of a people as it is the soul of a nineteen-year-old girl coming to terms with herself and the world around her.
Lovetune for Vacuum is a picaresque journey to the end of the night. It reads like a dark fairy story starting in the depths, roaming through the cliffs, falling in and out of love, then making its way through dark forests, lonely graveyards, and enchanted caves all found within the soul itself, and all very recognizable to those who have experienced no less than harrowing childhoods. It speaks to that part of you that still remains a child still bruised from the lashings of traumas long gone by.
Oftentimes this album is a study in contrasts. It spins from somber, nearly dirge-like incantations to being swept up to piercing, beautiful harmonies. It captures those rapturous, heady moments in youth that spin from dark despair to manic fascination with young waking senses to primal rage. However, this is not merely the musings of a gothic teen going through the normal angst. So much is left unsaid, and this is one of the most powerful aspects of Plaschgs’ work. Nothing is literal ; in fact, some of these songs feel as though they could have very well been written in the deep, Dark Ages in the cloister of Satanic spiritualist nuns as they could from a 21st century teenager.
It is virtually impossible to come away from this album without having a strong reaction. It could be said with justifiable reason that the songs tend to slip too much towards the hopeless and the despairing. However, in my view this is without listening closely enough to the composition and the actual lyrics. Upon closer listening, hope can be found in one sublime note, in between the hushed vocals dealing with the loss of self found in the buds of young love there are also hints of excitement and ecstasy.
Plaschgs’ voice has often been compared to that of Nico. In fact, she has even performed her on stage in Vienna ! Yet, there is something more primal, more wolfish in the vocals of Plaschgs’ in comparison with that of Nico. I absolutely do not find Plaschg consciously attempting to emulate that of Nicos’ (as can be the case found in so many contemporary indie music artists where it seems lately that certain female singers either attempt to ape the cool, detached style of Nico or the broken rasp of Cat Power). Worse yet is the inevitable The Next Kate Bush Syndrome (followed at a close second with The Next Joanna Newsom Syndrome) that seems to have appeared virtually in the past five years, in which any woman with anything resembling unique artistic sensibilities and a hint of the unconventional is instantly placed alongside Bush (or Newsom, or Nico, or PJ Harvey, or Cat Power, respectively). I would personally, love to see the end of this annoying trend in general of the worn-out pigeon-holing of female musicians as archetypes that can simply be lumped collectively together based on the work they produce. I can state with the utmost certainty that Plaschg as much resembles Kate Bush’s artistic sensibilities (or any of the others for that matter) as she resembles Insane Clown Posse. Plaschgs’ style is her own and she indeed owns it. There is a desperate emergency to her delivery. Indeed she can be compared to predecessors such as Nico and Cat Power, but that is in terms of talent and raw vision, as well as a sense of innovative delivery and that is where the comparison in my mind ends.
This is a formidable debut from an exciting young artist with a unique vision and astounding scope. It is raw and confrontational, but not overtly. It toes the line between the sublime and the horrific with ease and relevance. While it may not be palpable for all tastes, it does strike deeply regardless of what the listener comes away with. Each song is mesmerizing and compelling. The music of Soap & Skin drifts seamlessly from traum (dream) to trauma and back again.