The ethereal environs of Anna Anna’s Last Night I Lit The Moon
23 September, 2011This is one that almost slipped past us. We meant to post something about Anna Anna when we first saw her on The Guardian’s New Band of the Day blog back in July, but things were a little busy then and we missed writing about a few things.
Well, now we’re catching up, and Anna Anna is definitely one that deserves a little more attention. Anna Anna is Brazilian Manuela Leal who returned to Brazil in March 2010 after a spell living in the USA. Her music is a very unusual mix of ethereal sounds with Manuela’s voice talking broodily above the backdrop. The reason it deserves some more attention is because it sounds so completely different to everything else we’ve been listening to. The Guardian described Anna Anna’s sole EP Last Night I Lit The Moon using these words: “bafflingly brilliant Brazilian’s ‘sci-fi torch songs’ sound like jungle music from a galaxy far, far away.”
Now the jungle bit seems like a touch of lazy journalism, associating exotic sounds as being from the jungle, but the rest is true. There is a detachedness about the vocals on this EP, which are sung in English by the way, which could hark to a sci-fi narrative. Personally, I think this sounds very similar to the work of Laurie Anderson, or even early electronics pioneers such as Daphne Oram or even Delia Derbyshire, and does manage to stretch the concept over the EP’s five songs. The interesting thing will be whether Anna Anna can maintain interest over a whole album. It’s something that we would definitely like to hear.
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