Who is anja garbarek

One of the biggest challenges we experienced during the recording had nothing to do with the music at all. With so many individual sounds to keep tags on it was a nightmare making sure that nothing got lost in the transfer.

Having worked at different stages with different people, I was the only one with a total overview of all the sounds. At one point during the mix, I noticed that a sound was missing. It was only tiny, but to me it was a huge deal. Needless to say, we did find it and I was able to sleep again! He has been on hand to work on some of the arrangements for a number of your albums. You work mainly in electronic and pop music. In what way do you think your father influences the structure of your music when he helps out with arrangements, since you two work in very different genres of music?

At the end of the day, music is music. There are only a certain number of chords and being a jazz musician, he knows them all. He is a very skilled arranger, and when it comes down to string arrangements and such he is able to give me a number of options that I can choose to use or not.

It also means I get to spend a lot of time with him, which is nice. I feel very safe having him around in the first stages of the music coming together.

Your very first album was in the Norwegian language. Your next four albums were sung in English. Yet much of your success is in your native Norway. Why do you choose to sing in English?

Do you ever think you might record in Norwegian again? I have always been lucky in that I have had the opportunity to make exactly the kind of music I want to make. My wish is to communicate with people. And to be able to communicate with as many people as possible, I have to sing in English.

My lyrics are the most important part of my music; they tell the story. The sounds I use are carefully chosen to fit and enhance the meaning in the words. This is the way that I have always worked. What have your experiences with working the overseas markets been like for you in the past? I had recently met my husband, and chose to relocate to London to live with him. A huge amount of work was put in at the beginning, with press articles and excellent reviews in important magazines.

But, for whatever reason, they were all printed two months before the record was released. This was before the internet. There was nothing in the shops, and people have short memories. When I came with Smiling and Waving in , they had no idea what to do with them. Luckily, I still had a close connection with the people at Virgin in Norway and they were able to negotiate my release from BMG.

That is not to say that I have not worked to promote my records in other countries. So much in this industry is down to luck. It only takes one important person to notice you or your music to whisk you out of obscurity. I remember us both simultaneously reacting to the sound of a garbage truck outside his window.

It had both a beat and a melody. Luckily, I had my Dictaphone on hand ready to record it. After a short period working in his studio in a run-down loft in Manhattan, I brought him back to London and he moved in with my husband and me, sleeping on our couch for the next six months or so.

We sat together in my little studio at home for hours a day while he made hundreds of different glitchy noises and beats using a Shure SM57 mic and his Akai S sampler which I then put together to create the soundscapes that would become the backdrop for the album.

It had the same spirit I wanted to achieve with the music I was currently working on. I went straight home and called the record company and asked them what my chances were of working with Mark. I presumed he was still active, but they told me that he had retired from the music industry after releasing his solo album. Somehow, they managed to set up a meeting with him and we got on really well.

The tenderness in his voice moves me every time I hear it. When I had finished recording the two songs with Mark, we still needed to find the person I was going to finish the album with. BMG organized meetings with a few different prospective producers, and it was Steven Wilson who I felt was the right man for the job. He was able to draw on his circle of friends and bring Richard, Steve and Theo into the project. Myriad musicians I know tried to get Hollis to collaborate with them and none succeeded.

What do you think it was about your work that brought him out of retirement for what turned out to be his final project?

I think I must have been extremely lucky. You feel you have a place there. I can only hope that that was the case for Mark. But then I eventually change my mind. I always hoped that Mark would come around too, but sadly that never happened He was such a fantastically-talented person. I feel extremely privileged that he said yes to my album and that I got to know him for a little while. My songs are carved out of the sounds that create them.

Sometimes, they may take away more than they add in order to create space, whilst other times they may come with musical or arrangement changes. Now, we can try different things. Steven was wonderful to work with. He had a lot of great ideas.

He understood the drama in my music and he instinctively knew when to let go and when to hold back. He treated each song with delicacy and sensitivity. How did the other musicians involved on the album influence its direction? I spend a lot of time getting the instrumentation exactly right using samples and soft synths.

Everything is planned to the utmost detail and almost nothing is left to chance. We then print out the score and replace the parts we feel would benefit from using real instruments.

I love the combination of my unnatural digital world together with the purity and depth that you get from a musician or a string section playing in a room.

One exception to this though was Steve Jansen. We wanted a more dirty sound. I instantly clicked with Steve. He was such an easygoing guy. We became great friends and worked together on a number of projects after that. I think I had had that song for about a year.

His part was finished, it just required the lyrics and melody. It already existed and I had to try to figure out where it was transporting me. You get given a piece of the sky, a car wheel and maybe a teddy bear, but you have no idea what the final picture is supposed to look like.

But suddenly you find all the corners and everything else falls into place. After that, it was done in about an afternoon. I recorded the vocals at home and sent them back to him. Not long after that, he told me about the live performance of Slope that he was putting together for Japan and asked if I would be willing to make a video for it. I filmed all my parts at home using my husband as cameraman. They wanted the main part to be against a white background, so we had to take all the pictures down from the kitchen wall.

I also had a lot of fun running around in the cellar, dressing up, and using masks and mirrors. The ruthless irony and humour here is that he cannot swim. The eerie calm and exchange between Garbarek and Wyatt, who alternate between perspectives of the audience and diver, is relayed with chilling detachment.

Framed within a stationary space of emotion, the song feels as though it should be a painting, a story depicted with lines drawn in simple, fluid colour. Yet the story is sung — and with the same Nordic composure that is the preserve of Tarjei Vesaas and Stig Dagerman novels. From the low hum of white noise emerges yet another mystery, this time of a man rising from the depths of an ocean and crawling toward a nondescript building of some sort, seeking help. Its sparse, barely-there narrative is pulled together like the fragments from a half-remembered dream, evaporating before any conclusions can be sourced from its non-linear logic.

Or does the figure simply represent a cold and incontestable end, a levelling out to an indisputable, utter blank? Garbarek would return to her eerily puzzling tales of murder and missing persons with the electro-whimsy that was Briefly Shaking in , this time building her blood-cold love stories on a foundation of heavy electronic beats. It would be an album worlds away from the starkly minimalist Smiling and Waving , with stronger pop leanings and structures falling a little more on the side of convention.

It seems a fitting win for an album which belongs neither here nor there, one that hovers just below the larger mystery it appears to refer to — and just above the grasp of those who try to solve it. Skip to content Search for:.