Before music, singing, the voice: ancestral and primordial art form inspired by innate human spirituality. The most original and evocative debut of recent years is all contained in the voice, in the powerful deconstruction and in the scrupulous stratification of the singing. The debut work of twenty-one-year-old Anastasia Coope, “Darning Woman” brings together apparently antithetical concepts such as terror and beauty. Just over twenty-one minutes that strip the concept of freak-folk and desecrate the sacredness of themes such as love and death.
It is said that some of these songs are close to a century old and that Anastasia Coope has exhumed them during pagan ceremonies (“Sounds Of A Giddy Woman”). In truth, there is little information that anticipated the release of the album: meager notes on the web, a curriculum in which the visual arts prevail over the musical ones, anthropological research on singing as a form of divination and spiritual and physical self-determination.
Space becomes an imaginary and concrete place, where the vibration of the voice, the plaintive warbles, the chaos injected by guitar scratches, the multiplication of voices that emulates polyphony and undermines its rules become one in solid bodies that it is natural to define songs: “He Is On His Way Home, We Don’t Live Together”. The innovative technique that Anastasia Coope uses to multiply her voice and stratify it without depriving it of emotional intensity keeps the harmonic power of even short compositions high. The almost sacred chanting like party bells of “What Doesn’t Work What Does” and the lullaby that acts as title track they are moments of lightness in a sea of voices and choirs that celebrates the pain and torment of popular music. The magical and arcane rituality of “Darning Woman” emerges among madrigals where angels and demons debate (“Sorghum”), or in the most laconic harmonies of a nursery rhyme that seems to come out of Molly Drake’s album (“Woke Up No Feet”).
That the last track “Return To Room” hints at a subdued entrance of piano and wind instruments does not corrupt the impressionist folk style of Anastasia Coope, an artist who is not afraid to present herself naked and raw as a new Brigitte Fontaine or Yoko Ono. Hers is an impressive debut, perhaps disturbing, but undoubtedly not deceptive or subtle. A project that could be described with a multitude of refined and courtly words and lexical associations, but nothing is immediate or easy in the American artist’s debut: take it or leave it.
06/17/2024
