Anohni's performance at the Barbican, London, was a masterful display of songbook reinventions that felt like an out-of-body experience. Accompanied by a virtuosic band and powered by her operatic voice, Anohni proved as adept as Nina Simone at interpreting songs, while her own catalogue proved equally malleable yet strong.
A Journey Through Exile and Alienation
Opening with 'You Are My Enemy,' Anohni declared, 'I never felt a part of this world. I reject the way that we live.' The career-spanning songs and covers selected for this show, titled Wilderness, reiterated themes of exile and alienation. The answer, as a distorted prerecorded monologue explained, lies in the power of creativity to remake the world and the self. In the quarter-century since she emerged from the New York art scene, blessed by William Basinski and Lou Reed, Anohni has held fast to the belief that communication through art is of existential importance, with such unwavering intensity that she makes most singers look like they are just having a laugh.
The Wilderness Experience
Wilderness is typically rigorous. Anohni and her virtuosic band – Gaël Rakotondrabe on grand piano, Chris Vatalaro on percussion, Leo Abrahams on guitar and bass – played before a film of swans gliding through the night. Sometimes they changed colour, but it really was just 90 minutes of swans. Even swans do not want to look at swans for that long. It was much more interesting to watch Anohni herself. With her peroxide-white mane and floor-length black robe, she resembled a cleric or a sorcerer. She barely spoke and, when she sang, she stood motionless but for the hands trembling by her sides, as if making her entire body a channel for her extraordinary, operatic voice and the words it carried.
Masterful Interpretations
Like Nina Simone, her closest precursor, Anohni is a masterly interpreter – when she covers a song, it stays covered. Songs as familiar as Reed's 'Perfect Day' or the traditional spiritual 'Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child' became out-of-body experiences. From her own catalogue, the revelation came when tracks from 2016's eco-panic concept album Hopelessness shed their original electronic skins. 'Drone Bomb Me' became a soul ballad, '4 Degrees' whirled like Kate Bush, and the grand, violent climax of 'I Don't Love You Anymore' evoked both weather and war. The sound-mixing was uncannily good, from Anohni's quavering a cappella to Vatalaro's bloodcurdlingly harsh drum solo. There is really nobody else who can deliver such extremes of beauty and terror. And swans.
