Anohni (Antony Hegarty) part 2

Antony and the Johnsons, was named after Marsha P. Johnson, a drag queen and transgender rights activist. Recently, there's been a name change of the group's lead singer and main artist: Anohni is the new “spirit name” of Antony Hegarty, and the next step in a path to self-definition, from youth in England to college in California and her current life in New York. She has identified as transgender since childhood but “cowardice and shame” prevented her from asking people to call her “she”. “‘She’ used to make my skin crawl,” she says now. “Within a gay context it can be used very snidely: to contain trans people and to denigrate other men. But working and socialising with women, and doing [campaign group] Future Feminism, empowered me in the feminine, and I could accept that it was OK to be the way I am. But I don’t feel emphatically female, it’s more subtle than that.”

“I was never going to become a beautiful, passable woman, and I was never going to be a man,” she says. “It’s a quandary. But the trans condition is a beautiful mystery; it’s one of nature’s best ideas. What an incredible impulse, that compels a five-year-old child to tell its parents it isn’t what they think it is. Given just a tiny bit of oxygen, those children can flourish and be such a gift. They give other people licence to explore themselves more deeply, allowing the colours in their own psyche to flourish.”

What hasn’t changed is her voice: a liquid, sustained, tremulous, androgynous croon that is simultaneously weighty and unearthly, and immediately arresting. Anohni developed it, she said, by trying to copy favorite singers: dance-pop soul disciples like Boy George, Marc Almond of Soft Cell and Alison Moyet of Yaz and their American role models, like Ray Charles and Nina Simone: “People that were singing their heart out,” Anohni said. “I was drawn to people that were expressing feeling because that was what was taboo in my family, expressing feeling. And that was what I was made of.”

2009 saw the release of the follow up to Antony and the Johnsons career-defining album I Am a Bird Now. It was called The Crying Light. It received very good reviews, but not as stellar as the previous album. However, it was more successful, commercially: it made #1 in Belgium, #2 in Spain & Sweden, #3 in Denmark, #4 in France, the Netherlands and Norway, #7 in Switzerland, #9 in Italy, #15 in Germany, #18 in the UK, #23 in Finland, #33 in Australia and #65 in the US.

Lead single Another World was the the first indication that Anohni was taking nature politics very seriously indeed: “I need another world, this one’s nearly gone”, was what she sang:

Aeon was also released as a single, as a double A-side with a very good cover of Beyonce's Crazy In Love. Here's Aeon:

...And here's Crazy In Love:

Epilepsy Is Dancing was another single. The official video for the single was produced by The Wachowskis (Matrix, Sense8) and featured his former associate Johanna Constantine, SF choreographer Sean Dorsey and the design of painters Tino Rodríguez and Virgo Paraiso. Here it is:

In 2010 she collaborated with Laurie Anderson. One of the songs that these two unique artists recorded was called Strange Perfumes:

2010 also saw the release of Antony and the Johnsons' fourth album, called Swanlights. The critical response was great. Stereogum placed Swanlights in its Top 50 Albums of the year at #8. Tiny Mix Tapes gave Swanlights a 4.5/5 saying that “yet another gorgeous creation by one of the most unique artists of the 2000s.”. Pitchfork's review stated “Swanlights might be Antony's richest album yet, with musical and thematic charms that take their time to take their hold....” Mojo scored Swanlights with 4 out of 5 stars saying, "Death, love, the ghosts they leave behind; these are grand themes, and Antony channels their spirit with magical grace."

The lead single from this album was Thank You for Your Love. It's a song that projects a Kate Bush-esque sensibility.

The single was also released in EP form. This included a cover of John Lennon's ultimate masterpiece, Imagine. Rolling Stone magazine called the Lennon cover "an unlikely, gorgeous reinvention".

The album also included a song that he co-wrote with Björk called Flétta.

Another great song from this album was The Spirit Was Gone. The video pays homage to Kazuo Ohno, a pioneer of a Japanese dance form known as butoh.

Swanlights was another song that stood out:

From the Swanlights EP in 2011, here's Kissing NoOne with the divine Tilda Swinton on video:

In 2012 the Museum of Modern Art commissioned an elaborately staged concert with a 60-piece orchestra at Radio City Music Hall. By then, the songs’ exploration of femininity and creative power held echoes of environmentalism, thinking about Mother Earth.

“Subjugation of women and of the Earth are one and the same,” Anohni said. “Kill the mother and appropriate her power. That’s what I see - I see a boy-child who so resents and is so frightened of her creative power that he seeks to destroy her agency, enslave her body and appropriate her power.”

Ecological themes moved upfront in “Manta Ray,” a ballad that Anohni sang and co-wrote for the documentary “Racing Extinction.” It was nominated for a 2016 Academy Award for best original song — and probably the only nominee ever in the category to mention “biodiversity” in its lyrics. After the Oscars telecast left Anohni in limbo about whether she would perform, eventually announcing that she wouldn’t, Anohni decided not to go to the ceremony.

“The reason I didn’t attend wasn’t because I wasn’t invited to perform,” she said. “That’s completely their prerogative.” But, she added, “they could have called me at the beginning of the process and said, ‘You’re not going to be performing,’ rather than leaving me for weeks wondering. And they could have said, ‘We’ll take care of the press so you won’t be reflected on in a poor light, as if you’re being deprived of something when really we’re trying to honor you.’”

Here's Manta Ray:

In the six years since the last Antony and the Johnsons studio album, Anohni toured her own songs, played a central role in the large-scale performance piece “The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic” and worked on drawings, paintings and sculptures.

She changed her name: first among friends, then as a public figure. “I’ve been talking about myself as transgender for as long as I can remember, so it’s not so much an issue of transformation as it is just a slow shifting,” she said. “It was just about changing the lens a little bit to see slightly differently, just to have a more feminine name. It was incongruous for me to have a man’s name, because I don’t identify as a man and I never have.”

She also decided to write openly political songs. “Hopelessness” was three years in the making. She started it with Daniel Lopatin, who as Oneohtrix Point Never produces absorbingly disorienting electronic tracks. They had initially thought about making music that, Anohni said, was a “kind of ‘Blade Runner’-Kitaro-Japanimation soundtrack.’”

But Anohni was also drawn to the opposite of those pastoral electronics: she approached the Scottish producer Hudson Mohawke, who has made hip-hop tracks with Kanye West and others, to join the project. “I was looking for the right opportunity to do something that did have some teeth to it,” Anohni said. “And the kind of relentless, exuberant, almost ecstatic positiveness of Hudson’s music was the perfect foil for more challenging lyrics than people would be used to hearing from me.”

None of them were entirely sure the concept would work. “You shouldn’t have these sort of sugary sweet, almost R&B style mainstream instruments, with quite heavy lyrics on them,” Hudson Mohawke recalled thinking at times. “This might turn out terrible.”

Both producers worked on all the songs, along with extensive “painting over” by Anohni herself. “Part of the magic of this record is the volleying of ideas back and forth in a haphazard way,” Mr. Lopatin said. “The whole record was basically undergoing metamorphosis up until the 11th hour. Anohni is really a producer, and she’s not just writing these songs. She loves getting in there and twisting stuff up in Pro Tools and chopping stuff up and editing and rearranging. She’s permanently finding all of these little magic things that wouldn’t have occurred to us. Until I heard the final mixes I didn’t realize, this is how it goes?”

The album came out 3 months ago and the reviews were once again stellar. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 83, based on 21 reviews, which indicates "universal acclaim". Lead single off the album was 4 Degrees, which was released along with an accompanying message: "In solidarity with the climate conference in Paris, giving myself a good hard look, not my aspirations but my behaviors, revealing my insidious complicity. It's a whole new world. Let’s be brave and tell the truth as much as we can."

Over a brusque, irregular beat and blaring, hornlike synthesizers, it exults in an impending catastrophe of global warming, as she sings, “I want to see this world, I want to see it boil.”

The perspective isn’t a mocking one, Anohni said. “My idea with 4 Degrees was to articulate for a minute, not my ideal vision of how I wanted to perceive my relationship to nature, but the reality,” she said. “If I could give a voice to my behavior, what would that voice be? Taking planes, enjoying first-world fossil fuel, an addict of first-world comfort. So it’s not entirely ironic. There’s actually something kind of desperate about it, too.”

The album's opening song and second single Drone Bomb Me featured Naomi Campbell on its video. The song's perspective is of a child whose parents have been killed in drone attacks and who longs to die in the same way. “There’s nothing more confounding to someone who wants to hurt you, than someone who wants to be hurt,” Anohni says. “You cling to their leg so they can’t punch you in the face. It’s a feminine way of dealing with rage and disempowerment.”

She's really angry, as well as pessimistic on what is happening: “We’re still expecting capitalism to solve problems: ‘Maybe if we sell enough oil, we can give some profits to an environmental agency!’ Capitalism isn’t a moral system.” But what if sustainability can be made financially attractive? The best thing we can do is vote, and meanwhile billions of dollars are being spent to manipulate Americans to vote against their best interests. Look at Trump. All the bankers are thinking: isn’t that fucking brilliant, all the white trash are going to vote for a billionaire."

“As long as poor and middle-class people are looking at their neighbours as the source of their suffering, they’re never going to look at the gated communities,” she continues. “Why did they shut down Occupy so swiftly and so brutally? People for the first time in America were saying: ‘Oh, I always thought it was Democrats versus Republicans, but I suddenly realised it’s 99% against 1%.’ What a revelation, showing Oz behind the curtain, a little man with a megaphone and all this power.”

Agree or disagree with her views, Anohni is a thinking person. She also a great artist who will continue making intriguing music for some time to come.