Bachelorette moves on
Sonic experimenter Annabel Alpers, aka Bachelorette, has a new project to engage ears and emotions, writes
Grant Smithies.
Baltimore, Maryland. It makes you think of The Wire, right? The very mention of the place conjures images of urban decay, drug dealers and gun crime.
For many years, it had the second highest murder rate in the USA, more than 14 times that of New York City. Paradise, it ain’t.
And from the midst of this harsh grey place comes the soft gentle voice of a distant New Zealander: Christchurch musician Annabel Alpers, who made quite a name for herself here as solo space-pop musician Bachelorette, well before that name was tainted by reality TV associations.
‘‘Why am I here? It’s complicated. Let’s just say that my partner has family here.’’
Alpers has lived in Baltimore for the past four years. She’s still making music, working on a fascinating surround-sound project called Remote that blends the sounds of Baltimore with the sounds of New Zealand.
When it’s finished, Remote will culminate in an album and a series of live shows throughout New Zealand and the United States.
‘‘It’s inspired by living in Baltimore with New Zealand so very far away,’’ she says, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘‘I often get this yearning feeling over here, a feeling of remoteness from my home and friends and family, and the music is inspired by wanting to connect over that huge distance. I have two homes now, which makes me wonder what home really means. But as a New Zealander, I think you always carry part of the place around with you wherever you go.’’
Alpers has calmly and quietly built a substantial cult following around the world, producing some of the most arresting and distinctive pop music ever made in this country.
After an apprenticeship in early Christchurch noise-rock bands Space Dust and Hiss Explosion, she completed an Honours degree in Music Composition at Auckland University then carved out her solo sound over the following decade, built around creaky old synths, electric guitar and mighty ‘‘Wall of Annabel’’ multi-tracked choirs of her own voice.
In particular, her 2006 album Isolation Loops was a doozy, a break-up record made in a freezing cold bach her grandfather built at the mouth of Canterbury’s Rakaia River in 1928. Alpers hauled a bunch of keyboards to this wee hut and made an intensely personal album about love, loss, atomic particles and planets.
She played all the instruments herself, endlessly layering her cool clear voice atop sounds coaxed from electric and acoustic guitars, banjo, bass, drums and an impressive array of geriatric keyboards, including an ancient Wurlitzer organ she bought on Trade Me and had delivered to the hut.
Before relocating to Baltimore, Alpers released four albums via esteemed American label Drag City, and toured with underground legends galore, among them Bonnie ‘‘Prince’’ Billy, The Magnetic Fields, Low, Stereolab, Bill Callahan and Animal Collective.
‘‘There’s a lot of tension at work in my music,’’ she says. ‘‘When I was at university doing really experimental stuff, I had this aching desire to make melodic pop songs. And then after doing that for a while in Bachelorette, I needed to experiment more again, rather than just fall back on a set of pop songwriting skills I’d developed. There comes a time when you want to challenge both yourself and your audience and push into new territory.’’
The new Remote album is a result of that challenge, with Alpers actively seeking fresh surprises in the studio and giving herself ‘‘new musical problems to solve’’.
It will be built in part from field recordings of sounds from both Aotearoa and America, made over the past seven years then digitally treated to become ‘‘new instruments’’.
These ‘‘found sounds’’ will be woven together with her own voice, guitar and synths, with drums from her audio-engineer partner, Adam Cooke.
‘‘In the background of the songs there’s the sound of cooking and chatting in our kitchen, the hum of aeroplane cabins, people playing drums in subway tunnels,’’ she says. ‘‘I also recorded rhythmic sounds like the washing machine and the dishwasher. I change these familiar sounds so they’re unrecognisable, but they still have a sort of emotional residue.‘‘
Woven together with the American field recordings are sounds gathered on occasional trips back here to see friends and family.
‘‘It sounds like a cliche, but I recorded a lot of bird sounds, and I’ve been modifying those to sound like instruments, while still retaining some sort of essence of where those sounds were harvested from.’’
The plan is to perform the new songs in special surround-sound environments installed within art galleries or theatres, the audiences seated amid multiple speakers in a similar set-up to a movie theatre.
‘‘When I was playing live as Bachelorette in pubs, I’d often think, ‘Why am I doing this? Most of the people are ignoring you because it’s their Friday night out and they want to catch up with their friends.’ The music is lost in that setting.’’
For the Remote tour, Alpers wants to make music special again for the listener, rather than merely some sort of sonic wallpaper that decorates our lives. ‘‘My most magical moments came from listening to records by myself in a darkened room when I was 14, and just getting lost in what was going on. But these days, a lot of people don’t have the time and space to really listen to music like that. Our lives are busier, we’re more distracted, we’re listening to sound files on our phones.’’
Music can, and should, be a more engaging experience for the listener, she says.
‘‘Music can have a very therapeutic effect if you listen to it in the right environment. I used to go to The Gathering and dance to techno and feel this cathartic sense of release from that. But my strongest musical experiences have been lying on my bed in the dark, really listening to it intently. I want to try and set that up for other people. It seems to me that the really transformative aspects of listening to music have been lost, and I want to give people that sort of musical experience again by setting up a special place to do that.’’
This sort of mobile surround-sound set-up is expensive, so Alpers has initiated a Kickstarter campaign to crowd-fund US$11,000 for specialist audio equipment.
She stresses that this is not just a donation: anyone contributing financially to the Remote project will receive rewards of equal or greater value to what they spend: music, artwork, even personal living-room gigs if they cough up enough cash.
The campaign closes on June 28, and Alpers only gets funded if she raises the full amount by that date. Over 100 people have donated so far, and at the time of writing she’s halfway to reaching her goal. Anyone keen to contribute can search under ‘‘Kickstarter’’ and her record label ‘‘Particle Tracks’’ to find her page.
‘‘I’ve been working on this project so long, and now it really feels as though a lot of things are finally coming together. The music so far is a mix of songs and more choral-sounding stuff. I’m trying to keep it reasonably minimalist, rather than just endlessly layering on sounds. I want to focus on the music being simple but powerful.’’
Alpers anticipates the album will come out early next year. And she imagines the Remote live shows being ‘‘enchanting and transformative’’, the audience transfixed by sonic beauty within a perimeter of speakers.
Made in Baltimore while dreaming of New Zealand, it’s a record about home, however you might define it, and Alpers wants the music to be as cathartic for the audience to listen to as it was for her to make.
‘‘I’ve been reading a lot about the homing instincts of animals, the way birds will fly all the way across the planet to a very particular place to breed. We’re animals, too, of course, and I can really relate to that very physical sense of a home, and the emotional magnetism of that.
‘‘When I go back to New Zealand, just the smells alone make my whole body relax. As soon as you get off the plane, it smells like home, and that has an immediate visceral effect.
‘‘You don’t always realise what home feels like until you get there, and you think, ‘Wow, I was only 80 per cent myself before, and now I’m 100 per cent again.’ Suddenly, everything just feels right.’’