Anna Homler

Anna Homler (Los Angeles, 1948) is a vocalist, performance artist and composer, who takes bits and pieces of phonetic clusters from several different languages and combines them into a language that is all her own. She calls this technique "Linguistic Alchemy." She started out in 1980 with performance art, then around 1985 began to focus on the human voice. Anna travels the world with her music, singing with a wide array of different musical groups. She often combines these events with performance art and with found-object sculptures. Her first triumph was the phantasmagoric album Do Ya Sa' Di Do (AMF, 1992), featuring Ethan James, Steve Moshier, David Moss and Bernard Sauser-Hall. She fully revealed her surreal persona in pieces such as "Moshier's Ee Che". After lending her vocals to the first incarnation of "Voices Of Kwahn" and to the project "Sugarconnection "(sound sculptors Frank Schulte and Axel Otto) on the 20 brief vignettes of Plays Alien Cakes (No Man's Land, 1994), Homler teamed up with keyboardist, guitarist and violinist Geert Waegeman and percussionist Pavel Fajt for the 15 abstract folk dances of Macaronic Sines (Lowlands, 1995), one of her most creative works, and the live album Corne de Vache (Victo, 1997). House of Hands (ND, 2000) with Viola Kramer, Steve Roden, Nadine Bal, Alain Neffe, and Lyn Norton offers twelve of her under-developed songs. Kelpland Serenades (Pharmacia Poetica, 2005) is a live improvised collaboration with electronic keyboardist and contrabassist Steuart Liebig. Anna Homler started the project "Puppetina" with multi-instrumentalist Stepanie Payne. Their Piewacket (PNT, 2001 - ReR, 2005), featuring accordionist Ethan Holtzman, was devoted to Homler's simulation of international folk music. The catchier tunes, such as M-Bira Song and Sweet Clarina 12, sounded like a hybrid of Meredith Monk and Enya. But the lively Country Western Song had a rustic and down-to-earth quality that was missing from both the other visionaries of imaginary folk music. Cafe Song evokes a Slavic wedding, Scary Song an expressionist cabaret, Monkey Jazz a swinging radio group from the 1950s, and Accordian Song a Louisiana madhouse party. Electronic noise and hypnotic procedures permeate the Far Eastern-sounding Do Wa Do and Organ Song. The voice is distorted beyond recognition by the electronics in Bongo Song. And no less creative are the instrumentals Bell Song, a micro-concerto for toy instruments and found sounds, French Song, for sampled voices and Parisian merry-go-round, and Barbie Song, six minutes of musique concrete for kindergartens. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.