Blood on the dance floor

visual project Turning resumes picking at the peeling edges where politics and religion paper over the cracks in our lives and finding – as semiotics fans will have deduced from the title – things are far grimmer than our irrational belief in sky gods. 4 Degrees, the song released to coincide with the UN conference on climate change, addresses the artist’s personal complacency because, after all, the Earth will only be four degrees warmer by 2100: “All those lemurs and all those tiny creatures/I want to see them burn/It’s only four degrees!” Musically, too, Hopelessness sees Anohni take a harder radical line – her rich, red velvet voice set not in the pastoral piano landscapes of lauded past albums, but in the contemporary electronic stylings of two producers: Glasgow DJ Hudson Mohawke and his Warp label contemporary, Brooklyn’s Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never. Opener and single Drone Bomb Me sets the contrast high: a dance track ushered in on chiming, synthetic strings to tug at the hearts of old ravers. Only these strings of life – and death – concern a young girl losing both parents in a drone attack and longing to join them. Its lyric uses the language of love songs (“Choose me tonight/Let me be the one”) in chilling contrast to the fatally childish logic that follows: “After all, I’m partly to blame.” The video features model Naomi Campbell, quite brilliant in the role of a weeping military

Lemurs and liars beware: Antony And The Johnsons’ singer-turnedelectro-eco warrior is on the warpath. By