By David D. Robbins Jr. | Their Bated Breath
Anna-Anna “Last Night, I Lit the Moon”
Anna-Anna is a project by the artist Manuela Leal, based in Rio de Janeiro. She says her newest EP “Last Night, I Lit the Moon” was informed by some of her interests: soundtracks, ballads and French pop. And that the project is conceived as an homage to Anna-Anna, the fictional every-woman from films. Her songs are eerie cinematic musings with haunting synth and half-sung bouts of highly introspective cosmic poetry. The songs exist as flowing dreams, scary planetary visions, and incorporeal wanderings. The song, “Last Night, I Lit the Moon”, begins with sharp strings, rhapsodic minimalism and these silvery thoughts: “Climbed and climbed / I fly with time / On the surface is a field of dust / Electric dust with space and sun / Saw the earth from above / Pin my ear to the ground / Heard the moon tremble.”
Her song “Tiny Feathers” also focuses on imagery of looking down on things from above. It mixes images of the mythological Icarus with thoughts of humanity’s infinite capacity: “Blue hummingbird of love … / If you are truly a bird, what do you see from above? / I’ll put on wings of silver / To find you’re closer to the sun … / If it wasn’t for the feather you’ve dropped, I wouldn’t know that to be human … / To do impossible things.” There’s a sort of oneness about the presentation of her four songs, but there’s something endlessly impressive and ambitious about the lyricism and expositions as a whole. The music is dark, strange and disquieting — with a lightness of touch that comes from the song’s distant observation.
Anna-Anna’s arrangements are beautiful in their seeming simplicity, but they create fragile and complex moods. “Mirrors of America” feels orchestral, like some long-lost score for an expressionistic, futuristic silent film like Fritz Lang’s 1927 “Metropolis” or perhaps Jean-Luc Goddard’s “Alphaville” (1965) featuring famed actress Anna Karina. Anna-Anna sings “Mirrors of America” like a chanteuse, in golden sweeping verses of cityscapes and sad reminiscence, backed by darkening brass and weeping strings. It’s a song constructing a city of the mind, finding consciousness in stone, in patterns, in movement, in architecture and the pain of placelessness. She does for her metaphysical metropolis of consciousness what Elizabeth Bishop did in her poem “Monument” — showing thought as constructive voyaging: “Mirrors of America / Palaces of gold and plaster / Leaving the city of straight lines / Breathing the dust of a golden age / Buildings circumvent our movements / Bodies move along lines of shifting shadows / The city cast in stone and concrete / Moves in predictable jolts … / What can be seen is already past.” The most beautiful phrasing comes when Anna-Anna sings “hover” with the delicacy of a floating feather: “If cities were made from images / Of thoughts that hover / There would be street palaces …” It’s a sullen symphony, quietly dynamic like destination architecture — reaching for skyscraper heights of happiness before it crumbles into rubble.
It’s absolutely stunning. “Mirrors of America” is reminiscent of some of the thoughts of Walter Benjamin, about how human creation, like architecture, is the mirroring of the internal and how it’s a preservation of “unconscious amorphous dream(ing)”. This is a music that is completely its own. It’s the way Bjork fans feel when they hear her at her best. “Last Night, I Lit the Moon” is a subtle, but ambitiously bold marrying of human possibility and the concept album. Anna-Anna is everything and nothing in these songs. As soon as you begin to build a picture of this fictive nom de plume, she disappears behind macabre melody, shadowy lyricism and unearthly imagination. These tracks come highly recommended, and compile one of my favorite EPs of the year. Note: Lyrics are all unofficial.
Anna-Anna “Mirrors of America”
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