After almost twenty-five years of career, the majority of that time leading, with her partner, the group Thus Owls to rich art rock lands, Montrealer Erika Angell launches a first solo album, The Obsession With Her Voice. It’s about time, right? “Maybe,” Erika says. It’s because I never understood before what the point of making a solo album was. I like collaborating with other musicians. » Why now, then? To find your roots, musical and identity.
“I come from experimental music, something that I missed since I moved here,” says Erika gently, met in a café in her neighborhood, on a gray, cool and humid afternoon to which the strange songs of her first album seem at times to echo. “Experimental music, I feel like I need it to be able to fully express myself, so I started giving some performances here in Montreal, which I had never done before where I come from, in Sweden. »
“Alone on stage, I understood that the audience is then my collaborator,” she continues. I feel when the performance goes well, that it connects with the audience, because a concert is a conversation, a vibe. It’s offering something to people. When I rehearse at home, I’m in my head, between four walls, but when I go on stage, we share the work, the spectator and me. The concert is for two people. It’s very subtle; sometimes I feel that the audience is more difficult, less receptive. More often, the feeling is warm, and everyone, me, the people in the room, come away galvanized. »
That said, Erika Angell still has questions. “Making a solo album of experimental music is still difficult: what is the point of putting so much energy into a project that is so difficult to approach? »
Let’s get one thing straight: experimental music is less a genre than a black hole of music. An insatiable beast, impossible to pin down, which feeds on all influences — “When I was young,” says Erika, “I sang jazz, pop, opera, soul. I tried everything wondering what genre I should go for. At one point I realized it didn’t matter. In this record, all the elements of my musical personality are expressed, all this in what she calls experimental music and which, by focusing on it, turns out to be much less difficult to approach than she thinks.
A repeated, minimalist, analog synth motif opens the seven minutes of Dress of Stillness as an album opener; Erika’s amber voice, barely masked by studio effects, chants for a few minutes before a string quartet — orchestrated by composer Jonathan Cayer — bursts into the soaring song. On Up my Sleeve which follows, a simple keyboard note acts as a drone, disrupted again by the violins and the syncopated drumming of South Korean-born jazz drummer Mili Hong. Like in the theater German Singer which we discover later, Erika mixes song with story, song with poetic declamation.
Throughout the album, the performer alternates between spoken word and singing; the musical accompaniment, a mixture of kosmische rock and chamber music with touches of jazz and electronic sounds, serves as a breadcrumb trail. Erika Angell’s experimental music is complex, certainly, but never fierce; it captures our attention, between its more mysterious passages and those, like the ballad Never Sorted to Runmore brightly pop.
Self-portrait
Born from studio improvisation sessions, all the songs however share the same spark, the same origin: Erika’s notebook of lyrics. “I can spend months just writing,” explains the musician, who claims the influence of Patti Smith, “less on this album than in my life, in general. Sometimes what I write becomes poetry in itself, sometimes it’s just words that sound good together. I dig in there to find songs”, an approach that she expresses in the text of the song One.
The music is first improvised, relying on the words, “their form, their sound. I know I’ll sing those words in that exact spot, and then the drums come in — certain parts of the song are predetermined, but the performance is improvised, and I always try to draw in somewhere else in the song “. The body of the album was recorded with the heart of the orchestra; the strings were recorded during different sessions, but always starting from improvisations; arranger Cayer then composed the orchestrations from these sessions.
“All the songs address different aspects of my life, giving a portrait of who I am,” summarizes Erika. She particularly addresses her immigrant status, having settled here with her partner, Simon Angell, a dozen years ago. “Yes, I’m nostalgic for Sweden, but in truth, not so much anymore. This is actually the first year I’ve felt settled. »
“We feel a form of disconnection after a while,” explains the musician. Becoming an immigrant and trying to integrate [à la société d’accueil] gave me so much empathy for those who also take this action”, often in conditions much more difficult than her own, she admits straight away. “I didn’t move here out of necessity, but I fell in love, so leaving my country was a kind of obligation for the relationship to survive. I didn’t even know what it meant to be Swedish before I came here, but once I arrived, I could recognize a Swede on the street at a glance. I instantly feel something, a connection, with them, even though I don’t know them. »
“It’s something you end up discovering: an understanding of who we are in relation to others who have lived in the same place as us, in the same culture, speaking the same language”, Swedish, French, English or experimental music.