Sam An is an artist we have been featuring on these pages for quite some time now and the truth is we’re still nowhere nearer working out her beautifully complex art, her music, her performance or where Lana Del Rabies fit into any of it than we were on day one. Lana did disappear for a while with the Strega Beata evolution of musical work by Sam An, seems Sam can’t keep Lana Del Rabies down for too long though and indeed a new Lana Del Rabies album has just emerged on Sam An’s freshly formed record label, the intriguingly named Feral Crone. The new Lana Del Rabies album, her fourth, Omnipotent Fuck, followed the debut release on the label, Ash Barrett’s rather powerful Uncaged back at the start of November (read more about both albums here).
We keep catching hints of things, images from performances in art spaces, visual information via social media feeds, slices of live music, we needed to ask questions.
And so, our traditional 13 questions were dispatched to Los Angeles. The idea is simple, an ongoing series of thirteen questions sent out to people who’s creativity we’re rather admiring and enjoying at the moment – artists, musicians, film makers, cake testers and who knows who, twelve of the questions generic, the thirteenth specific.
Thirteen questions answered by Sam An…
1: WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU DO?
My name (publicly) is Sam An. I am more publicly known as Lana Del Rabies. One day will be known as something else.
Short answer is I am a musician and an artist. A sort of longer answer is I am trying to live out a very niche creative purpose I feel about my life that probably doesn’t make sense to anyone but me. That includes connecting people in creative communities and music fans that normally never intersect.
2: WHERE ARE YOU TODAY? WHERE ARE YOU MOST DAYS?
I am in my little weird home in the Los Angeles area that I live and work in with my cat. I am usually at a weird show or here being weird with my cat.
3: WHO OR WHAT IS EXCITING YOU RIGHT NOW?
True underground music scenes all over the world, but especially in the United States right now. I think the creative underground here is going to be more important than ever, given current politics and the cultural apocalypse of the tech industry and AI. Having global underground communities connected without being enmeshed in the conventions of how social media has devolved will be important as well.
I am excited by the possibilities of creative culture forming again outside of how particularly terrible social media and tech has been in this regard for the last 10-5 years (“everything is content” etc) and people actually understanding how dire the need is for actual creatives, futurists and freaks to come together and build if we are going to survive at all. People are finally starting to admit to themselves (even publicly) everything we have prioritized culturally, politically, economically and technologically is basically unhelpful bullshit. That aspect of things excites me.
4: WHY DO YOU MAKE ART?
I used to think to transmute pain, to express something, now I think it is just a powerful form of communication. I do believe there is alchemy in art, but I find it’s just the most human way to communicate beyond language. Which is important.
I also believe in the power of intuition and I think art is powerful because is intuitive, ultimately.
5: HOW DO YOU WORK?
Obsessively and then with avoidant agony then back to obsessive until it’s done.
In general for music or records I view everything as important and of equal weight from the start – the art direction, the videos, the themes, the sonic elements, production/instruments, who I am collaborating with – so nothing is an afterthought. I also don’t like to follow trends but I like to be aware of what is going on in mainstream culture and the underground, so I can find inspiration in multiple forms and places.
I am not a perfectionist and I don’t believe in over-controlling creative output, but I also do have a standard for myself that I am particular about, that everything I make needs to meet. I would never impose that on anyone else I work with though.
6: TELL US ABOUT THE ART/MUSIC YOU MOST IDENTIFY WITH?
I honestly just care if something “means it”. People throw around “authenticity” like a marketing buzz word now, so I mean that a creative expression needs to mean whatever it is getting at.
I have no allegiance to genre, subculture, or form, and never have. I don’t think any form of human expression is more valid than another. For example, I love pop music, but I like pop music from people who mean it. I’m not taking about being edgy and raw necessarily, just, do you mean what you are doing? Are you connected to it? Do you give a shit about what you are giving the world? That’s all I care about.
7: WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT YOUR OWN WORK?
I have never thought about that. I like the balance of “feralness”/rawness and aesthetic unity. The story of the work is a container for the expression.
I also like that it connects to a really all over the place fanbase and creative network of people. I may not have a clear lane for what I do but I love where it takes me.
I love not being one genre or thing.
8: WHAT DO YOU DISLIKE ABOUT YOUR OWN WORK?
Sometimes I don’t like when things feel too raw or unfocused. I’m not into being feral for feral’s sake. I get nothing from pointless provocation so I try to avoid that. There’s always some kind of story I am telling with anything I do and I am not interested in the focus being on the “shock” of it. I really hate the “scary noise girl” trope for that reason. But it is what it is.
I get annoyed with people trying to put any marketable box on what I do because they are usually wrong about what I do, but it is what it is. It’s why I market myself at this point.
I really hate when the sets feel too messy. I’m not doing harsh noise or trying to be GG Allin. I will be confrontational, even bleed, but I hate when it feels too chaotic and not intentional. Chaos is useful to me in the container of intention. But I also don’t like being too precious about a set or production, and have regretted that as well.
I don’t know if i am ever going to outlive people saying to themselves, “Lana Del RABIES?!???!!” before they engage with my work, but it is what it is.
9: WHAT HAS BEEN THE HAPPIEST MOMENT OF YOUR LIFE SO FAR?
Anytime I have played a big international festival – Roadburn, Coldwaves, Prepare the Ground, New Forms, Soulcrusher. Those are shows where I’ve felt real purpose and grateful to have come as far as I have. I always have made really meaningful connections at those shows too. Spooky even. Life changing.
Every tour. Even when it’s been horrible. I will take a bad tour day over a mediocre normal day, any day. I don’t think it’s really understood how much I love touring. It’s all I want to do. Half the year, anyway.
I was married once. I am not any more. It’s okay. My former husband and I have a lot of love and are still friends (seriously). I think the day we did that is still up there for me. Life has a way of showing you moments fully lived are more important than outcomes.
Anytime I am lost in a good collaboration, onstage or in a shitty practice space. Wherever.
Many moments of being insane with my brothers and best friend.
10: WHAT MAKES YOU ANGRY?
Avoidable urgency and panic. Useless and lazy judgements and assumptions. People who need to put down or control other people because they hate themselves and won’t deal with how obvious that is to everyone.
Not getting enough sleep with no point. Like you were up all night for no good reason and now everything sucks.
11: WHICH SUPERPOWER WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO HAVE AND WHY?
Shapeshifting? Probably useful, right? Is time travelling a power?
No psychic shit.
12: WHAT COULDN’T YOU DO WITHOUT?
The overwhelming sense that there is more than what is in front of us on a daily basis.
Coffee in the morning. It’s basic but yeah.
13: WHAT IS IT ABOUT CHAINS ANYWAY? (Or should I ask what is it about pomegranates and black paint?)
Chains are a theme I’ve had in my art since around middle school. I used to draw them. Probably an emotional metaphor or something. It became a key symbol for LDR. I like that it’s become an anchor-symbol in all of my records, and I always change the context of how they are used. They feel eternal, in a way. Chains have a symbolism in industrial culture but it wasn’t really the point of using them. I had a friend who in the first year of this project made me custom chain jewelry and stage harnesses I’d wear. Everything I wear onstage eventually gets destroyed, so then I started using those chains in the sets, with contact mics, hitting them on things, etc. I’ve used other chains over the years. That’s probably the most industrial thing about me, doing that.
Pomegranates – that’s been since 2024. I wrote Queen of the Black Muses after some particularly bizarre inspiration that put me on a fixation about the myth of Persephone and Hades. It’s not the most original idea, but it also is a symbol that feels eternal. Something about the “forbidden fruit”, the truth. The way you rip it apart, it only seems to multiply and explode. It bleeds.
Black paint – also something I feel like I’ve had in my work a long time. I used to do more photography when I was young, a lot of bodies and black paint. It probably came from feelings of being tainted or marked, now it’s more of a symbolic primal thing. An eternal goo. I started using it in the sets when I was writing Strega Beata. In the Shadow World era I used to wear a sort of Blade Runner Pris paint, and going more primal and approaching it less as makeup and more as ritual felt right at that time. In my videos the paint also is something that morphs, like sometimes it is a stand-in for blood and viscera, sometimes its like a second skin I’m grappling with. I feel like it’s ready to become something new now. I was lucky to do an immersive workshop with Ron Athey this year and have become friends with body mod artists in LA, so now I am interested in how the body itself can express ideas without always using paint.
previously on these pages
Links: Previous Organ coverage / lanadelrabies.com / Feral Crone
Anne Boleyn is from the EP Le Temps Viendra, “Directed, edited, styled, performed and shot by Lana Del Rabies…”
THE ORGAN 