Borderland - Found Music for a Lost World Anne Clark, Justin Ciuche, Ulla van Daelen
Album info
Album-Release:
2022
HRA-Release:
17.08.2022
Album including Album cover Booklet (PDF)
- 1 It's a Fragile Thing 04:26
- 2 Blown Way Down 02:57
- 3 Soulthought 08:16
- 4 Border Train 05:08
- 5 The Stolen Child 08:01
- 6 A Music Deep Inside 02:56
- 7 Provenance 09:18
- 8 The Blue Bird 02:32
- 9 Book of Days 03:17
- 10 How to Become Unbroken 04:36
- 11 Improvisation IV 07:22
- 12 Improvisation V 04:26
- 13 Open Your Hand 00:57
Info for Borderland - Found Music for a Lost World
The style icon of electronic music and the European New Wave movement, Anne Clark, goes in a completely new and unexpected direction with her new album Borderland. This internationally popular singer brings us a purely acoustic album with spoken poems.
Clark delivers delicate, fragile and very personal lyrics. She frames these with minimalist music. Her poetry tells of the sensual beauty in nature, the unfathomable in art and the courage to let go in life. Her poetry is spoken with care, letting the magic of her voice and every word work and unfold. The music enhances the poignancy of this poetry.
Her band member Justin Ciuche on violin, together with harpist Ulla van Daelen, recorded very reduced sounds in live sessions. These picturesque and beautiful settings let the poems of the language artist shine. In addition to her own texts, she recites poems by William Butler Yeats and Mary Coleridge.
Anne Clark on the new album Borderland: “In a place and time where so many of us have so little control over circumstances and events, I feel privileged to have been given the opportunity to develop and explore ideas and themes around language and music that spontaneously evolved in the great environment of the Stockfisch Records studio.
My co-writer and band member, violinist Justin Ciuche, approached me with the idea of going into the studio with harpist Ulla Van Daelen and recording a full “live” session – with no plan or prior arrangements other than a few notes with ideas for my lyrics.”
Anne Clark, vocals
Justin Ciuche, 5-string quintone violin
Ulla van Daelen, Celtic and concert harps
Anne Clark
For more than 40 years Anne Clark has held a unique place in contemporary music.
Born in South London on May 14th 1960 to an Irish mother and a Scottish father, she left school at sixteen having never been able to really “fit in” with the constraints of the education system.
However, this in no way restricted her voracious appetite for music, books, and an inquisitiveness and practical need to be involved with the world around her.
She took a number of jobs including working as a care assistant in Cane Hill psychiatric hospital and then taking a job at Bonaparte Records, a local independent record store and label. This indeed was good timing! The punk rock scene was just about to explode into life in London. With her need for communication and disregard of formal institutions, along with so many people at the time, punk led the way to a whole new approach for dealing with music, arts, and society itself. At that time anything and everything seemed possible.
Combining literary, socially engaged texts with innovative and genre-breaking music, she has covered every kind of style, while at the same time maintaining her own identity on each and every recording, whether it be the samples (before sampling became a concept) and electronically treated acoustics of The Sitting Room (1982), to the ground-breaking analogue synth classics of Sleeper In Metropolis (1983) and Our Darkness (1984).
Consistently looking for new ways of expression and communication through the emotion of music and language, Anne seeks to not only challenge herself but her audience also.
Going between extremes of the minimal Scandinavian jazz influences of Unstill Life (1991) to the pastoral and poetic interpretations and translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry on Just After Sunset (1997), to the full-on electronics and sparse acoustics of The Smallest Acts Of Kindness (2008), very few artists have covered such a wide spectrum over such a long and consistent career.
At the end of 2010, Anne Clark released the first chapter of a vibrant and on-going project Past & Future Tense, the first release on her own label, After Hours Productions.
Rather than turning out yet another compilation or collection of back catalogue, she decided, in this special anniversary year to invite young and innovative musicians, producers and DJs to take her material, all her material, not the most obvious numbers and to not just “remix” them but completely re-interpret them.
The result a fresh, exciting and contemporary view by a new generation of an artist who in her turn influenced them and their development in the endless possibilities of electronic music.
In January 2011 Anne, in collaboration with her long time pianist and co-composer Murat Parlak. contributed an arrangement of the Charles Baudelaire poem Enivrez-Vous (Be Drunk) to the audio book and radio play Die Künstliche Paradiese, (Hörbuch Hamburg/Radio Bremen), curated by Kai Grehn.
The project was further developed into a “live” concept with a performance at the Volkesbühne in Berlin in October 2011.
Die Künstliche Paradiese went on to win the Deutscher Hörbuch Preis 2012 and after the success of this Anne and Murat were once again asked to arrange settings for 12 Emily Brontë poems to be included in the audiobook/radio play Sturmhöhe (Wuthering Heights).
This also went on to win and be nominated for major audio book prizes.
In view of the public and critical response to both these there are tentative plans for “live” shows featuring the Sturmhöhe and
Die Künstliche Paradiese projects.
As well as continuing to perform with her live band, in early 2013 Anne undertook a new project in collaboration with German musician and producer herrB.
Always a constant with her fans, Anne took a look to her electronic roots, and in a unique and refreshing partnership with herrB wrote and released the 3-track EP Fairytales From The Underground on her After Hours label.
After public and critical success with the project, in April 2014 the duo released their second collection of songs, Life Wires, a 5-track EP, to even greater acclaim and chart success and also undertook their first “live” shows.
In 2015 she embarked on an acoustic tour with long-time musical partners Murat Parlak & Jann Michael Engel, under the title Enough.
With Enough, Anne, Murat and Jann, as the title suggests, stripped” things back to basics. The the essentials – Words, Voice, Piano and Cello.
Booklet for Borderland - Found Music for a Lost World