Anyx – Starlink (La Rubia Produccione) – You really can’t help but think of the richness of Scott Walker, of Walker’s elegant beauty or maybe a touch the dark melancholy of Roy Orbison’s golden days before they end or perhaps the restrained beauty of Shearwater’s observations or the delicate almost fragile strength of Extra Life; that is very lazy of me though, a list of people to start a review of Starlink, Anyx’s rather powerfully restrained debut album. I guess others are going to hear  “the transformative spells cast by Anohni and Keeley Forsyth” (as some just shouted from he other room just now, I guess the Anohni comparison is almost an obvious one?). This really is richly restrained, dark, brooding. slowly moving, almost (but not quite) gothic. The title apparently “comes from a night spent looking at what appeared to be stars, but were actually man-made satellites: the miraculous eternity of the natural world competing with the follies of billionaires. For Nissen, contemporary life is full of these incongruities; constant reminders of the tension between the capitalist world and the natural world”. The Nissen mentioned is Anyx – aka Berlin-based artist, musician and vocalist Anna Lucia Nissen – Starlink is the first solo work, something emerging from her previous work as frontperson of the trio Anchoress. 

And when she sings of watching the raindrops we can but hope that one day there will be rain again as we listen from the heat of East London where climates change, people melt and there has hardly been a raindrop for something like two months now. These really are beautiful songs whatever the reality might be and even if we can’t hear what they scream (whoever they might be and wherever the fear might reside). Beautiful songs, rich songs, warm songs, you want them to be songs of hope, they feel like songs of alarm, of vulnerability, of fragile lives, of the tension between both the overwhelmingness of it all and the reality. Songs of a Ladybirds spine, of a world we’ve made and the wait for better times than might never come now, that and the dancing by ourselves in the private worlds we create to maybe deal with it all. This is not a throwaway album, there’s a lot of weight here, the vastness of starts that come from nothing more that specks of dust, the things we hear when we’re silent, while we wear our blindfolds and wait for better times to come, this really is dancing in the waiting for it all and not song being sung to make is happy. 

Some of it is almost orchestral, right now as we watch those raindrops fall again, there’s such a gloriously beautiful swell to guide you through it all, guide you to the sunrise. That voice really is rich, golden, compelling, calling you in, a moth to her flame or something more? She said for us the time has come and all the time the music makes shapes, that voice does, The physicality of Nissen’s process indeed connecting with her interrogation of how humanity impacts and shapes the world. it is about shapes, about shaping, it is about the interrogation, about hers of us, about ours of her, about where we are, about the depth of it all, about how far we dare go while we wait for better times to come, about how far we let her lead us…

This is a beautiful album, a compelling album, a deep dark rich inviting intriguing album, a beautifully shaped body of work that reveals more (or maybe doesn’t reveal more as much as it adds to the initial intrigue) with every repeated listening. And you will need to keep on listening to Starlink again and again, you will need to go further in, deeper, that moth to her flame, to the shapes made, to that voice, the richness of it all. A beautiful body of work and almost certainly one of the albums of the year.  (sw)     

Bandcamp / Linktree

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