Soap & Skin Music Phenomenon
If music can be either a cure or a weapon, then Anja Plaschg creates both: her songs tear the listener apart only to put back together, better, stronger, but with a lingering taste of sorrow. ‘Kunstlied’ in German means ‘art music’. In music, it means Soap&Skin.
Authenticity usually tends to bypass the elite of music industry, but once in a while rules are to be broken. They were blown away three years ago in Austria when a twenty year old girl with a heavy sight topped the country’s music charts with her then new album ‘Narrow’. Only a talent of perceiving the existence differently from others, so much more sharply and bitterly, can drive a young girl with no one behind her back to an undisputedly rightful pedestal of the music world. Anja’s music sounds dark and exquisitely sorrowful, making it hard to imagine it being this popular in any country other than starkly beautiful Austria.
The enchanting effect it creates may be not lastly owed to the unpredictibility of each composition. Where a tempted listener expects a climax, she’d make a long, heavy pause. Where one waits to hear a light piano, a storm of electronic sounds would burst in. It surprises and gets us, and does so again and again. It is this sense of distorion, being thrown into a sea of a biggger, newer system of sounds, that makes her music both mesmerising and frightful. Classic piano sounds accompany her voice’s softness and seeming fragility conjuring images of creaky houses with tarnish windows. At other times the dramatic crescendo turns the voice abrasive, a stream of frightening sounds carries the truely gothic combination of ephemerality and at the same time unbearable heaviness of emotions. What is always there is the trembling nerve, a tight string of sorrow stretched across each composition. Quite chanting of haunted lyrics, histerical shouting, desperate sobbing, rapid breathing, all become carefully crafted tools in the hands of the young virtuoso. Her most recent singles ‘Homeless’ and ‘Mawal Jamar’ feature lyrics in Arabic, addressing the Syrian refugee crisis, disperse the common myth that dark equals evil. In fact, Anja’s music rather reveals that she has a kind, but tormented heart.
The project has been only hers from start to this day. Even after signing with a label, she is in full control of its every aspect: music, lyrics, production, arrangement, promotion. She produces blood-chilling music videos with disturbing imagery and twisted photograpgy that is a pure pleasure to look at for any horror fan. She also takes part in theatre plays as well as occasionally appears in cinema. Such a wide range of creative activities seems as a rather logical extention of Anja’s artistry. She seems to be one of those people we love most: those who cannot live without constanly artistically expressing themselves. And we are just very glad they do.