Starlink, the title of Anyx's debut album, comes from a night spent looking at what appeared to be stars, but were actually man-made satellites: the miraculous eternity of the natural world competing with the follies of billionaires. For Nissen, contemporary life is full of these incongruities; constant reminders of the tension between the capitalist world and the natural world.
The 9-track album opens with assertive grandiosity: an authoritative drumbeat in tandem with a wall of guitar noise, vast and all-encompassing. But when a voice enters the frame, it does so with disarming vulnerability:
The 9-track album opens with assertive grandiosity: an authoritative drumbeat in tandem with a wall of guitar noise, vast and all-encompassing. But when a voice enters the frame, it does so with disarming vulnerability:
On the back
of a Ladybird’s spine
Life seemed too much,
too much for my kind
of a Ladybird’s spine
Life seemed too much,
too much for my kind
Starlink exists in the tension between both the overwhelming world we occupy and the private worlds we build for ourselves; capturing both the vastness of the stars in the sky, and the speck of dust that they all emerged from.
Anyx takes a sculptural approach to her songs, starting with her voice and words as internal navigation from which she works outwards. Around this core, she builds minimal instrumentation, harp, keys, guitar, double bass, until each song is muscular and multi-dimensional. Her songs are ever-fluctuating and unexpected but always rooted in songcraft, and grounded by her unique tenor voice, comparable to the richness of latterday Scott Walker, or the transformative spells cast by Anohni and Keeley Forsyth.
(Claire Biddles on Bandcamp)
Anyx takes a sculptural approach to her songs, starting with her voice and words as internal navigation from which she works outwards. Around this core, she builds minimal instrumentation, harp, keys, guitar, double bass, until each song is muscular and multi-dimensional. Her songs are ever-fluctuating and unexpected but always rooted in songcraft, and grounded by her unique tenor voice, comparable to the richness of latterday Scott Walker, or the transformative spells cast by Anohni and Keeley Forsyth.
(Claire Biddles on Bandcamp)
