Danielle De Picciotto is an unusual cross-media artist who does music, films, performance art and writing…born in Tacoma (Washington State) but living in Berlin and clearly more than conversant with the German language, if her Tacoma (MOABITMUSIC MOA019) album is anything to go by. Here we’ve got nine highly unusual deconstructed songs, whose eerie and skeletal musical arrangements will appeal to anyone who’s a fan of John Cale’s productions for Nico, or even perhaps the more recent productions of Kate Bush. Plenty of wistful drones, spine-tingling electric guitars, and spectral violin tones accompany the vocal parts in tense, fraught, situations. De Picciotto plays and sings everything, with a little help from Alexander Hacke’s guitar on one track; Hacke also produced and mixed the album. Both lyrics and music are packed with personal and idiosyncratic symbolic touches, and it’s clear this artist has been living in a private world for a good many years, exploring its nooks until she’s familiar with every fold in the blanket and every stain on the wallpaper. The front cover casts her in a play-acting role portraying a 19th-century mystic / witch from a lost part of Europe, the sort of transient pariah figure that even Tom Waits would struggle to describe with his craggy voice and halting rough-hewn poetry. On the inside there are photos depicting her desert-nomad Georgia O’Keeffe side…said photos appear to be plucked from the frames of a Herzog movie, and the colour is heightened in some way to push them back to the days of Ektachrome and other redundant technologies…I was also able to glean more from her astonishing gallery of pen and ink drawings, some visible here, where preoccupations such as masks, costumes, tattoos, animal rites, mythical creatures, and other just-plain-inexplicable images of oddness are rendered with the intricate detail of an Indian religious painting. Another world! From 2nd March 2015.
