Antony and the Johnsons - L’estasi blu dell’angelo

From underground cult to leading light of the alternative scene, in the space of a single album. A record, I Am A Bird Now, which, like few others in the international singer-songwriter landscape of recent years, has sparked a massive and almost universal chorus of praise. In the background echo the fans' declarations of identification with the new romanticism of which Antony is the standard-bearer. Just reading most of the reviews and articles devoted to him, or trawling through themed online forums, is enough to confirm an Antony who is a lucid conjurer of the soul, already at ease among the most powerful shamans of the modern pop heart. His magic? Having awakened the dormant power of emotional songwriting, steeped in melancholy and a yearning for light, of the best new wave pied pipers of the 80s, emerging with a sensibility that is both new and at the same time more ancient and universal than the forebears of that decade, which, according to the magazine "The Word" (September 2006), was among the most revolutionary in the history of pop.

1982. The child takes the record in his hands, and as if in a mirror, the icon of Boy George looks back at him from the cover of "Kissing To Be Clever", the debut album by Culture Club. Antony thinks: "Right, so this is what people like me do: they become singers." Born in Chichester in 1971, in the English county of West Sussex, Antony Hegarty moved with his family first to Amsterdam, then, at the age of ten, to San Jose, California. There, attending a Catholic school, this child with a markedly feminine sensibility experienced from the very start the judgment directed at his "difference". It's with the discovery of Boy George that his sense of not belonging becomes a source of strength. For his eleventh birthday Antony receives a Casio keyboard, on which he begins trying out songs by Kate Bush, Soft Cell and Yazoo, while at school he sings in the choir and in a band inspired by the dark-punk of Christian Death and Sex Gang Children.

His attraction to the stage took shape and defined some important traits of his future direction at the School for the Performing Arts in San Jose, to the point that, at eighteen, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Antony was already staging his first performances inspired by John Waters and the icon-guru Divine.

It would be the viewing of "Mondo New York", however — the cult documentary devoted to the drag and cabaret scene of 1980s New York — that pushed him to take the big step of moving to the Big Apple, where he would find the environment best suited to his artistic sensibility and his expressive pursuit centred on the theme of gender identity: "I loved those artists... Joey Arias, Dean Johnson, Phoebe Legere. They were so elegant and so punk. What inspired me most was Joey singing 'A Hard Day's Night' dressed as Billie Holiday." Statements like this, coming from a pure fan and admirer of other artists, are a constant trait of the singer's rhetoric to this day, and not only in his interviews, but at the very heart of his songs and live performances: the distance between artistic work, person and persona tends to dissolve, conveying intimate values such as gratitude, hope and sincerity — something fairly marginal, though not entirely foreign, to that space between avant-garde and pop in which Antony operates.

1990. Through the looking glass. Antony finally enters a world that can give flesh to his dream: inventing his own identity, becoming someone else in order to trace a path toward himself, immersing himself in the chanteuse glow that enveloped Isabella Rossellini in "Blue Velvet", embodying the bald drag queen on the cover of Soft Cell's "Torch" single. His artistic quest for identity and belonging finds its perfect dimension in the East Village's punk and drag scene, Antony's first New York stage, where in those days he could be found at the Pyramid Club in a girdle, shaved head and cigarette between his fingers. Here he begins performing regularly with the avant-garde cabaret collective Blacklips: their after-hours performances were a provocative blend of grand guignol and transgender aesthetics, punk attitude, musicals and theatrical pieces thrown together within a week. Taking turns with the other members of the group, Antony invents characters, writes scenarios, songs and arrangements, and takes the stage at two in the morning as Fiona Blue, a drag queen and androgynous archetype inspired by Klaus Nomi, Leigh Bowery and the violent communicative approach of Diamanda Galas, as he tries to draw the nightclub's drunken crowd into an extreme session of grotesque theatre and emotional catharsis. Bearing witness to this phase of the persona is his appearance in the documentary "Wigstock: The Movie", about the city's annual drag festival.

In the same period Antony manages to graduate in "Experimental Theatre", while witnessing the apocalypse that struck New York's gay community, where the tragedy of AIDS had by then devastated not only people's lives but also the transgressive cultural climate of the previous decade.

1995. Antony decides to devote himself entirely to his main passion, music. From the just-disbanded Blacklips he recruits drummer Todd Cohen, who together with Joan Wasser and Maxim Moston on violin, Jeff Langston on electric bass, Jason Hart on piano and guest Michele Schifferle on cello, form the small orchestra behind the refined arrangements of his compositions. Thus Antony and the Johnsons are born, the name inspired by Marsha P. Johnson, the New York drag queen who in 1970 founded the STAR shelter for transvestites, and whose tragic death in the Hudson River would later be evoked in "River Of Sorrow".

The group quickly builds a loyal following through performances at alternative clubs such as Joe's Pub, The Kitchen and the Knitting Factory. In 1996, besides producing the demo "Blue Angel" thanks to NYFA funding, they appear on the drag-queen compilation "God Shave The Queen" with the instant classic "Cripple And The Starfish". This torch song (in the version that would later appear on the debut album), distilled from one of the Blacklips-era shows, lays out the essential lines of Antony's poetics with a clarity of form and an impact that made it the Johnsons' calling card throughout the first phase of their career. The desolate intro entrusted to the violin, the classical piano counter-melody, Antony's voice entering, alien and lyrical, singing of a homoerotic scene that turns into a masochistic invocation, the strings and harp cradling it, ethereal, the horns heightening the shades of drama up to the final crescendo, complete with drums and sax as the voice lets itself be carried by an almost gospel surge: a triumph, something never heard before, even though, on reflection, the formula itself isn't especially original or avant-garde. Beyond the quality of the writing, it's the singing that makes the performance unique, presenting itself as an entirely new and romantic synthesis of some of the twentieth century's most dense voices: from the powerful tenor of Elvis Presley to the emotional intensity of Nina Simone, from the leap into abyss and sublime of Tim Buckley to the painful starkness of Diamanda Galas, from the naked soul of Otis Redding to the vulnerability under the magnifying glass of Billie Holiday and Jimmy Scott, passing through the dark mirror of Scott Walker, the decadent sentimentalism of Brian Ferry and the fairy-tale airiness of Kate Bush. Antony himself cites some of these influences in interviews (along with Alison Moyet, Marc Almond and Boy George), saying that by continually adding sources of inspiration to his recipe, over the years his own personal voice has naturally emerged from the "compilation" of all these artists.

Thanks to a mutual friend, "Blue Angel" ends up in the hands of David Tibet, leader of Current 93 and head of Durtro, a label specialising in apocalyptic folk and the last standard-bearer of the early-80s industrial saga. Tibet falls in love with it instantly, and in 1999 the Johnsons are signed to his label. A tour follows alongside the group of their new patron, while in 2000 Durtro releases first a split single featuring a Current 93 track and "Cripple And The Starfish", and later the Johnsons' debut album.

Despite the landmark value of Antony and the Johnsons, it would take the 2004 reissue on Secretly Canadian, with the ensuing promotional wave, for the audience to expand beyond the ranks of devoted New Yorkers and admirers of the esoteric circle of artists around David Tibet. The album features Baby Dee (a brilliant transsexual artist with a singer-songwriter path very close to Antony's) on harp, Charles Nelson on guitar, Francois Gehin on bass, William Basinski (creator of hypnotic, original electronic works) on clarinet, plus a number of guests on strings.

The cover announces the solemn character of the record, both carnal and transcendent: Antony at the centre, like an imposing Aphrodite rising from the sea, face lit by a medieval saint's halo, with white light fading into blue and the atmosphere suspended in a space outside of time. The magnetism of the androgynous archetype is set in motion, and the evocation of psychic depths intimately bound to human emotion already begins here. The cover is both painting and performance (the halo looks like the effect of a circle cut out of a veil placed between the lens and the subject), and it connects both to Antony's artistic past and to the multimedia attitude of the "neighbouring" Warhol world.

Opening the proceedings is "Twilight", like imagining the most lyrical and dramatic Nick Cave a few octaves higher, like Nina Simone staging both defeat and glory within the same song. Antony moves from the plaintive to the titanic, to the sweet, recitative-like invocation of the close, touching on every emotion of a Shakespearean act, while the instruments paint a dark landscape with sharply defined colours, following, heightening and dramatising the singer's trajectories. The backdrop, at once rich and built from minimal sequences, creates romantic dynamism while maintaining a solid neoclassical composure, a trait that remains virtually unchanged throughout the album. The already mentioned "Cripple And The Starfish" is followed by the striking "Hitler In My Heart": a Weill/Brecht number gone mad, alternating an unusual piano tempo with a plunge into a 4/4 in which Antony reaches the peak of his gospel drama, staging a cathartic rite that seems to transcend horror and anguish into a pantheistic vision of existence, with the sensibility of someone who grasps, in the movements of the soul, the pain and hope of all humanity.

"Atrocities" frames God's sorrow in the face of History, and builds on the contrast between an ever more soulful Antony's lament, sustained by cello, and the martial explosion at the centre of the song, in which singer and orchestra seem, epically, to want to seize control of destiny once more. When the voice comes in on "River of Sorrow" it's almost impossible not to think once again of the most heartfelt Nina Simone, while the ever-excellent string work now recalls the ethereal sweetness of This Mortal Coil. "Rapture", a slow, enveloping, mournful litany counting the tears and falls from the ecstasy of those in love, rests primarily on piano, harp and flute, with a coda that naturally recalls Badalamenti's orchestrations for "Twin Peaks". Of the last three songs, the one that stands out for power and epic scope is the dedication to John Waters' muse, "Divine", a soul ballad charged with the spirit of a manifesto on otherness, pride, independence and blazing passion, an act of love for a Divine who is "Mother Of America" and "Self-determined Guru". The originality of the writing and arrangements, the immediacy of a kind of "chamber pop", the ability to handle romantic, melancholic material without flattening it into "gothic" stereotypes, instead entrusting it to nuances and contrasts that enrich it with vision and compassion, Antony's lyricism and pathos, together with his formidable control of the risky camp factor, make this record an essential work in the international singer-songwriter landscape of the year 2000.

The Johnsons keep performing live at their favourite New York clubs, while in the city's vibrant art scene word about the new musical phenomenon begins to spread: actor and director Steve Buscemi contacts Antony to offer him a cameo in his film "Animal Factory", set in the world of American prisons. Antony appears in a scene where he sings "Rapture" in front of a group of inmates, and the scene is actually shot in a real prison with real prisoners. For the singer it's a formative experience in shaping his vision of performance, a moment in which the possibility of baring one's own soul comes into play, a process that can fuel a vital exchange between artist and audience. 2001, meanwhile, opens with the EP, again for Durtro, I Fell In Love With A Dead Boy, featuring three songs that refine and broaden the project's vision. The title track is another instant classic, one of the peaks of the repertoire, a heartfelt and covertly ironic "take" on the dark teenage drama made famous by the Shangri-Las in the 1960s: the plaintive intro, just voice and piano, sets the desperate, dramatic scene, after which the song sways on honeyed violins recounting desire and its impossibility, growing in intensity through the chorus and culminating in the coda, like a jammed Spectorian gem, with the piercing vibrato of a rapt Billie Holiday asking, "Are you a boy or a girl?" "Mysteries Of Love" is, finally, a cover of Badalamenti/Lynch, models of inspiration from the very start, floating suspended even more, if possible, than Julee Cruise's original. "Soft Black Stars", meanwhile, is a heartfelt tribute to David Tibet, rendered here more melodious without losing the original's glittering darkness. It seems that, at the time of its release, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed bought this CD single in a record shop purely for its cover: once more a painting-performance between carnality and archetypal depth, with an Antony-dead boy and two unsettling mythological beings looming over his body as in a pagan ritual. More than the artwork, however, it is Antony's voice that casts an unexpected spell on Warhol's former Factory protégé: Lou Reed, notoriously reserved if not downright cold when it comes to showing emotion, is moved to tears. And so Antony finds his second, and influential, patron.

In December 2001 Lou Reed, together with Robert Wilson, staged the show "POEtry" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, devoted to the tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe. A year later the project found its recorded form on "The Raven", produced by Hal Willner, with Reed's new protégé appearing as backing vocalist and as an uncanny voice over spectral synthesisers in the rendition of the classic "Perfect Day".

This amounts to a real launch for Antony, who begins to be noted by music critics worldwide as "that strange countertenor voice accompanying Lou Reed on his latest productions".

In 2003 Antony follows Reed as a backing vocalist on the long tour from which the live album "Animal Serenade" (2004) is drawn, featuring his version of the Velvets ballad that, more than any other, unites the two artists' worlds of inspiration, "Candy Says" (written by Reed with Candy Darling in mind).

But 2003 is still a year of releases for Durtro. In May comes the split EP, once again shared with Current 93, Live At St.Olave's, recorded in 2002 in an ancient London church. Of the three songs, performed by Antony on piano accompanied only by Maxim Moston's violin, his tribute to Poe's poetry, "The Lake", stands out. The minimalism of the piano passages allows Antony to express himself through subtle, powerful vocal variations, while his passionate, aching vibrato, captured in the transcendent atmosphere of the church, lends maximum lyricism to the nineteenth-century sense of Endless Nostalgia evoked by Poe's words. The other two tracks are the brief, sublime "You Stand Above Me" and a new version of "Cripple And The Starfish". "Virgin Mary", meanwhile, appears as the B-side of the Current 93 single "Calling For Vanished Faces".

The liaison with cinema is renewed thanks to Sebastien Liefshitz, who for his second independent feature, "Wild Side", invites Antony to sing "I Fell In Love With A Dead Boy" in front of an audience of transsexuals in a Parisian café. The scene opens the film, and Antony's poetics marry perfectly with its delicate drama of love, existence and identity. Even greater attention comes with the inclusion of "The Lake" on the compilation "Golden Apples Of The Sun", curated in 2004 by new-folk guru Devendra Banhart exclusively for "Arthur Magazine". The song appears alongside artists such as Joanna Newsom, Cocorosie, Currituck Co., Vetiver, Josephine Foster and White Magic: Banhart seems to want to present the sum of a scene that would later be labelled weird-folk, prewar-folk or freak-folk, but which in reality only partially draws on models of traditional American or English music: instead, its unifying rationale seems to lie in an attitude of treating folk material as a catalyzing element within a progressive vision of pop. Antony himself describes the current moment in the history of popular music, referring in particular to the artists close to him, as the era of "Blooming Beauty", in which "hope and sincerity are the new punk".

Banhart is a key figure in the completion of the Johnsons' second album, on which Antony had been working for two years and which he was on the verge of abandoning more than once. The young folkster's inclusion on the record, alongside several other guests and friends, would reflect precisely Antony's way of seeking common ground between art and life, offering the listener a sense of humanity in which they can place and recognize themselves. Also in 2004, the Johnsons signed to the Secretly Canadian label, which reissued the debut, now available to a wider audience. November saw the release of the EP The Lake, featuring a new, more intimate and less intense version of the title track, the sketch "The Horror Has Gone" and the rhythm'n'blues gem "Fistful Of Love", destined for the forthcoming album. It's a 60s soul number that, after a spoken intro by Lou Reed (who also plays guitar), in full Shangri-Las style, swells from a desolate elegy on masochistic dependency, complete with a robust horn section, into a power-ballad worthy of Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin. The track, written several years earlier, is one of the clearest expressions of Antony's declared intent to take a painful feeling and transform it from within into something akin to jubilation. Of an entirely different nature is his contemporaneous collaboration on Rufus Wainwright's album "Want Two", where Antony duets on "Old Whore's Diet", riding a reggae-calypso rhythm and unleashing lyrical flourishes with a vaguely comic result.

I Am A Bird Now came out in February 2005 and immediately stirred up critical acclaim; within a few months its popular success grew exponentially. The record marked Antony & The Johnsons' new direction toward a more intimate, less dramatic examination of emotion. Antony himself has said that with this album he felt the need to move away from the earlier proximity to forms of theatre or cabaret, in order to conceive a modern version of the torch-song with a thinner, more direct breath. His voice, too, takes on new shades, at times brushing against a lightness close to a whisper. The album opens with the masterpiece "Hope There's Someone", a piano ballad about the fear of death and loneliness, a call to the other, to closeness, to hope, which sounds like a heartfelt prayer before plunging into a spiral in which piano, organ and vocal layers intertwine to mimic the descent into a psychic maelstrom. "My Lady Story" is as pleasant and tender as a Bacharach-esque candy, but while still toying with stories of dependency and a vibrant feminine archetype, it feels short-winded and merely sketched. Despite its brevity, "For Today I Am A Boy", by contrast, stages the dream of an "other" identity with far greater dramatic and lyrical weight, while the harmonies of Antony's multiplied voice chase one another, building an ecstatic atmosphere of exultation mixed with desire, a minute description of the childhood feeling about life to come. "Man Is The Baby" harks back to the desolate, tormented mood of Lou Reed's "Berlin", and while the vocal part sounds redundant, the exquisite work of viola, cello and violin redeems and elevates it.

Throughout the album, the string arrangements are by Julia Kent (cello) and Maxim Moston (violin), and are largely a strong point, orchestrated with restraint and fluidity to underline the most lyrical moments. In some cases, however, partly because of the prominence of the strings, the songs seem to sink into an all-too-easy poetic effect reminiscent of This Mortal Coil. Antony plays piano with minimal mastery, brushing in the tracks that his voice follows, like the steps from which he leaps to reach his emotional peaks. One of these, "You Are My Sister", introduces the first of the guest duet partners, Boy George. A circle closes with this song, and the boy who once saw himself reflected in the icon now plays piano and sings alongside that very icon, whose voice, seasoned and cracked, adds a further dimension of humanity. Rufus Wainwright, meanwhile, is the protagonist of "What Can I Do?", an interlude that recalls the brevity and resignation of the Smiths' "Never Had No One Ever". Next comes "Fistful Of Love", in the same version as on the The Lake EP, which in this position on the album reveals itself as its high point, even though the spiritual and identity-driven quest that is the work's clear theme continues through the following three tracks without adding anything, indeed draining away some of its evocative power.

"Spiralling", which features Banhart's stylized sob at the opening, seems written somewhat carelessly, even as it brilliantly balances a vocal delivery that, for the first time, is not sung at full voice but whispered, lifting into the long, suspended notes of the chorus. "Free At Last" is an interlude recited by Julia Yasuda over Morse code, while the closing track "Bird Gehrl", for all its immediacy, is probably the album's low point. Up to this point Antony had rarely touched on moments of vacuity, but this song seems to trivialize, with clichéd lines and syrupy arrangements, the complexity of the journey undertaken at the record's start. Perhaps, though, to understand its intent one should look at the album cover, the splendid Peter Hujar photograph "Candy Darling on her Deathbed", in which the model and Warhol superstar is portrayed with empathy in the hospital bed where she would die. "Bird Gehrl" then becomes a simple gesture of love (it's no coincidence that McTeigue and the Wachowski siblings used it in a key scene of their 2006 film "V for Vendetta" to underscore a similar gesture). Searching, compassion, movement and openness toward the other are the record's central themes, and it's clear that Antony is pursuing forms capable of expressing this vision with a modern communicative power.

With I Am A Bird Now, the group wins the "Mercury Prize 2005" against all odds (the favourites were Kaiser Chiefs), and the award ceremony remains memorable, with a brilliant, self-deprecating Antony who wins over and disarms the British audience with his wit. The prize launches the Johnsons into the mainstream orbit (fifth place on the UK chart), and 2005 continues with a long world tour: the live dimension is the occasion to discover that, although the substance of his music is often dark and tormented, Antony creates a conversational performance space in which he draws in the audience or improvises stories and comic interludes. As the gruelling tour continues with almost daily dates across both Europe and America, the singles "Hope There's Someone" and "You Are My Sister" are released: the former, alongside the delightful "Just One Star", contains the precious "Frankenstein", once again on the theme of growth and identity, one of the high points of Antony's more intimate side, which better than some of the album tracks captures the soul-gospel warmth, the torch-song quality and the ecstatic sense of "vision" in his own emotions. The latter, released in two different editions, contains the unfinished, syrupy "Forest Of Love", the experimental "Poorest Ear", with an abstract vaudeville instrumental coda that could hint at unexpected developments, and the celestial, all-too-brief "Paddy's Gone": as if Aaron Neville, multiplied in a room of echoes, were tackling a cover of "The Nightingale", again from the "Twin Peaks" soundtrack.

Following the success of I Am A Bird Now, Antony has naturally broadened his scope, and by now his appearances in humanitarian projects are countless (from the concert for the "Teenage Cancer Trust", to the duet with Boy George for the "War Child" album, to the track included on the "Not Alone" compilation for Doctors Without Borders), as well as his duets (from Cocorosie's "Beautiful Boyz" on "Noah's Ark" to the track "I Defy" on Joan As A Policewoman's album "Real Life") and collaborations with kindred artists (from "Semen Song For James Bidgood" on Matmos's latest album, to two tracks on Current 93's formidable "Black Ships Ate The Sky"), while autumn 2006 finds him returning to the dimension of performance, with the "Turning" project, exclusively in London and Rome (31 October and 1 November at the Auditorium Parco della Musica), in which Antony and the Johnsons perform against a backdrop created by director and video artist Charles Atlas, with the projection and live editing of thirteen portraits of New York beauties. Antony's art reveals a new, unexplored level of contemporary pop, blending a Warholian arty attitude with a magnetic communicativeness rooted in torch-song, jazz and soul vocal traditions, and in the legacy of certain great songwriters (among them Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen, the latter paid tribute to live with a cover of "The Guests").

His influences are constantly transcended in a drive to open up and celebrate the present moment and the artistic act itself (thanks also, and above all, to the quality and use of his voice). This process relates directly to the idea of human creativity, and this may be one of the keys to understanding Antony's success in deeply touching the chords of emotion: in his voice and his songs vibrates the possibility of transforming what is dark into something beautiful, luminous and open to the future. Simply put, as "Hitler In My Heart" closes: "From the corpses flowers grow".

Antony quickly rose to become international rock's most sought-after guest star. Everyone wants his voice on their records, from Bjork (on "Volta") to Hercules & Love Affair (with whom he scores a global hit thanks to the dancefloor-smashing single "Blind").

Another World EP (2008) serves as a preview of "The Crying Light", a third album expected at the start of the following year. Antony returns with his refined, introspective songwriting style and immediately picks up the thread left hanging three years earlier, with a handful of tender, chiaroscuro ballads such as "Another World", "Crackagen", "Sing For Me". Furtive glances behind the curtain, images of an empty stage where only a dim light illuminates the solitary singer and his piano. No surprises, but, at least in the case of the title track, the enchantment is powerful and undeniable. The melodic quest is still aimed at dreamlike resonances, at a painful yet liberating self-analysis. In this sense, the closing track "Hope Mountain", by far the most minimal and bare-boned, perhaps achieves the most striking result on this brief collection. Only "Shake That Devil" experiments with a different form, somewhere between the esotericism of his mentor David Tibet and a skeletal rock-blues. An unconvincing experiment, but one that might also represent an interesting digression from his usual patterns.

A preparatory, fairly minor release, offering a listen that gives us back Antony just as we left him, with his strengths, his flaws, his crystalline class.

The piano ballad that defined I Am A Bird Now is also the scaffolding for the songs on Antony's third full-length, The Crying Light (2008). What changes is the way the spaces are filled and, consequently, the result. The album, dedicated to the dancer Kazuo Ohno, starts from a different vantage point than its predecessors: where the debut spoke of his own life (idols, dreams, the everyday) and the second album plunged headlong into his own self, The Crying Light seeks an even deeper dimension and opens up toward humankind in general and the universal, looking at the world and nature, at the principles underlying things.

Conceptual maturity goes hand in hand with musical maturity. The Johnsons on the first record were an ensemble that made its weight felt, loading the songs with emphasis. On the second, they had become an essential — though hardly bare-bones — pop-rock band, bending to serve the message. The Crying Light, instead, presents a more singer-songwriter-like Antony, who reclaims space for orchestration and takes it away from the drums.

It's a record of perfect sonic balance, one that tempers the insistence on certain melodic and lyrical devices that had nonetheless been his fortune. Striking melodies give way to a quest cloaked in spirituality, capable of opening and closing suddenly, of navigating between the airy and the dark, grinding up and digesting classical harmonies, 50s song forms, Black music.

The depth of the introversion into which "One Dove" sinks is astonishing, as is the class with which it does so. Even more astonishing is the flash with which the melody emerges from the undertow: a single piano note, the voice shifting key, the violins accompanying the lyrics. It's the peak of the entire record, set between two other atypical gems: the multifaceted "Epilepsy Is Dancing", rich in mood shifts, and the imaginative "Kiss My Name", an unexpected dance step. The arrangements, as fervent as they are restrained, glorify its biting, imaginative songwriting.

Antony allows himself the luxury of doing a bit of everything, revealing an eclecticism he himself might not have known he possessed: the title track is a folk piece steeped in the flavor of time passing, while "Dust And Water" is a gospel for solo voice and background distortion. The intensity in which the few notes of "Another World" are immersed is a perfect snapshot of the dimension Hegarty has reached. The striking gospel "Aeon", recited over raw electric guitar arpeggios, lays bare the aura of religiosity enveloping the entire record.

The ten or so songs that make up this sort of concept album about the world and its light and shade ("Daylight and the Sun") bring to mind one of the most overused words in music writing: artist. Antony and the Johnsons find their ideal synthesis in their most elaborate, most self-aware record.

The following EP Thank You For Your Love (2010) precedes by just a few weeks the fourth album, Swanlights, offering five unreleased tracks, including two covers. The title track is the only song also included on the album, with its soul shadings that let Antony's dark soul surface, in expressive dialogue with fragments of a ballad that starts out plain before blossoming into a horn-driven gospel with vibrant rhythms, as unleashed and joyous as ever.

The song's positive charge and a certain grandiosity in the arrangement are counterbalanced by the two following piano ballads, in which Antony delivers his finest interpretive work, first in the vocal contortions that mark the two minutes of "You Are The Treasure", and then in the sinuous melody of "My Lord My Love". The EP's eighteen minutes are rounded out by two covers. The first is "Pressing On", certainly not one of Bob Dylan's best-known songs (taken from "Saved", 1980), rendered here as a hushed acoustic ballad. The other cover needs no introduction: Antony takes up the guitar on "Imagine", pairing a plain-spoken reading and luminous picking with gentle gusts of frequencies and reverb courtesy of William Basinski.

Swanlights largely lives up to that promise, as part of an elaborate multimedia project (a companion book was published simultaneously, collecting writings, photographs and other visual works created by the eclectic New York artist). Musically speaking, the record comes across as more colorful and even joyful than its predecessor. The immateriality of light remains at the heart of Antony's inspiration, but this time it's a kaleidoscopic, positive light, expressed through more complex sonic solutions that at times are also accompanied by lively harmonies, brisk in pace and occasionally tinged with soul.

The other building block of Swanlights's poetics is water, whose imagery recurs in more than one of the song titles and lyrics: Antony seems to be invoking "panta rei" when he calls for the elegiac purification of "The Spirit Was Gone" (which probes the mysteries of life and death, almost echoing "Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground"), or when he seeks refuge in the primal element with the moving dedication to his parents in "The Great White Ocean", or again in the visionary psalm of a surreal religion that is "Salt Silver Oxygen".

Building on these themes, Antony paints a human, emotional portrait, as fragile and graceful as ever, yet endowed with a range of shadings spanning from the breadth of orchestral arrangements – handled, as always, by the ever-present Nico Muhly – to the bare essentials of just piano and voice. Antony's expressive performances likewise adapt to each different context, ranging from soul-inflected tones to hieratic declamations, proving capable of arching into daring vocal contortions but also of settling into simple vocalizing, and even of stepping back into the background on the duet with Björk, "Fletta", in which the Icelandic artist takes on the role of guide.

Although the album is indeed quite varied and finds Antony working with a particularly rich sonic palette, it does show some flaws in terms of narrative cohesion and, above all, in expressive intensity — both in the performances and in melodic effectiveness: a work that is, in a sense, "minor" — not to say rushed, compared with his usual timeframes — and in any case secondary to an artistic project in which Antony takes center stage through means other than purely musical ones. But even though it's not an exhilarating album, where Antony is concerned it's always a great listen.

2012 brought Cut The World, an album recorded live with the Danish National Chamber Orchestra. Although the material isn't "innovative", it's impossible not to be swept up, soothed and shaken to the core by the splendid pages of one of the most "powerful" figures of the last twenty years. There are two new tracks: the title track, placed at the opening, a rather "typical" ballad with powerful noir shadings, accompanied by a brutal and decidedly feminist video, lays out its almost provocative tones as if it were the seed that gave rise to the whole work. It's followed, in fact, by the much-discussed "Future Feminism", an almost eight-minute spoken piece in which Antony, starting from an analysis of the influence of lunar cycles, traces his personal worldview, his conflicted relationship with religion as a transgender person, and his hopes for a sustainable future on Planet Earth for all living beings. It's a complex discourse – one that some may even find blasphemous depending on their own religious beliefs – but the artist manages, thanks also to a pinch of well-deployed irony, to communicate deeply personal views without descending into a political sermon. The debate remains open.

The remaining tracks, drawn from the artist's back catalogue, form the true backbone of the record. The songs taken from the self-titled debut album never fail to move mountains: standout versions include "Twilight", with its rhythmic crescendo performed with great passion, and "Cripple And The Starfish", on which the opening violin line is triumphantly reinforced by the full orchestra, but it's "Rapture" that reduces even the most distracted listener to tears. There's also room for "I Fell In Love With A Dead Boy", "You Are My Sister" (without Boy George), four selections from "The Crying Light", and the title track of Swanlights.

Cut The World is many things: it's a live album performed with almost unnatural perfection in front of a minimal audience, it's a record of orchestral reworkings arranged with sublime, unassuming class, and it's also a collection of excellent songs without being a "best of" of greatest hits.

In 2013 Antony met Franco Battiato, sharing a concert with him at the Verona Arena from which the double live album Of His Swift Flight was drawn, featuring the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini conducted by Rob Moose.

Three years later, the caterpillar Antony becomes a butterfly, and Anohni is her name. Having definitively shed the chains of the past, including the rejection of the male designation explicitly demanded via press release, the singer and guiding force of Antony And The Johnsons returns to the scene with Hopelessness under a new guise, a full six years after her last LP made entirely of new material.

New project, new name and new production: Anohni tosses into the memory bin all the orchestral trappings that have always defined her style, embracing almost entirely purely electronic solutions, entrusted on this occasion to two heavyweights of cerebral entertainment: Ross Birchard, aka Hudson Mohawke, and Daniel Lopatin, better known as Oneohtrix Point Never.

It's an unexpected, disorienting partnership, one that sets poignant vocals against voltaic shards scattered here and there like metal scraps hurled furiously into the back of a truck, driven forward with violence by raw, muted beats, as tough as they are visceral. Adding extra spice to this bizarre recipe are the themes Anohni herself tackles, railing throughout the record against the stupidity of human violence, perpetuated everywhere by the world's rulers, taking aim in plain terms and with disarming bluntness at the most powerful of them all: the much-criticized Obama, to whom an entire song is dedicated, fittingly titled "Obama".

Anohni goes after killer drones, the torturers of Guantanamo, praying with all her soul – though with a certain vagueness – for protection from global terrorism, from the crimes of paedophilia, in short from the evil raging across this earth. The artist is thus shaken, and she channels this torment into a sound often garishly electronic, yet solidly compact in its virulent digressions, embracing Dubstep passages – as in the ecstatic, Hyperdub-inflected crescendo of "Crisis" – or the overbearing, cloying keyboards of "Watch Me".

The alternating and overlapping presence in the production booth of the aforementioned Birchard and Lopatin helps enrich and elevate Anohni's global dramas to a higher plane through a vortex of dissonance designed to build a dark climax, in which, alongside denunciation and defeat, there's often a human will to see light at the end of the tunnel, no matter what.

However, what doesn't quite add up in the actual execution of this new musical metamorphosis is the sharp, almost too dry contrast between the underlying electronics and the pristine, gentle quality of Anohni's voice – not to mention the thinness of the lyrics and the unsolicited political undertone that comes with them. It's a pairing that tends to disorient, and it only really works when the two worlds find common synergy, as in the commanding pulse of "4 Degrees", where the singer locks perfectly into the resolute stride set by the two producers.

It's this deliberately gaudy, post-rave-adjacent sonic drift that fuels the biggest doubts about the artistic merit of the record. To be a true chameleon, sometimes changing your skin isn't enough: you also need to find the right tree to perch on, and gauge the actual colour contrasts, so as not to risk being caught out by whatever predator happens to be lurking, or by the demon of bad taste.

The only way to get hold of "I Never Stopped Loving You", the seventh track on the subsequent Paradise EP (2017), is to send Anohni herself an email, sharing a personal reflection on your hopes for the future. The artist wants her listeners involved; she wants to shake us out of our seats as much as possible and make us feel first-hand the urgency of the issues closest to her heart. And if Hopelessness took no prisoners, with its electronic clangour and its uncompromisingly raw, heartfelt lyrics, the addition of Paradise follows right in its wake.

Seven tracks in total, then, once again co-produced by the odd couple of Lopatin/Mohawke, who still hit you in the gut but at other times deliberately repel the ear, while Anohni's voice thunders and resounds through drones and HD-sharp synth flourishes. The opening of "In My Dreams" almost sounds like the intro to a metal track, but the expected noisy explosion never comes, leaving it instead to the mighty "Paradise" to set up the discussion and point the finger, especially when it intones:

My Mother's hand

Her gente touch

My Father's hand

Rests on my throat

"Jesus Will Kill You" is then another title impossible to ignore: the track crawls along, noisy and grating, and makes no effort to be likeable – much like the unpleasant imagery described in its lyrics, which unflinchingly accuses all those who abuse their power in the name of Jesus.

Luckily, even this time around, there are tracks where, beyond the urgency of the message, Anohni delivers a pure and simple musicality that can still move you; "You Are My Enemy" is like a sacred hymn, an organ line rippling beneath a barely-there beat as the voice rises toward gospel tones, "Ricochet" advances imposingly over a gorgeous, airy pop melody with strong soul-tinged counter-vocals, while the ending of "She Doesn't Mourn Her Loss" is almost pastoral with its flute and acoustic guitar line – a clear contrast to the dramatic lyrics of the song.

There's really no easy way to get on board with Anohni's new direction. Using one's art to advance such weighty socio-political ideas with this level of conviction is undoubtedly a double-edged sword, and anyone whose heart was warmed over the years by the records made with the Johnsons might well feel disoriented by this electronic turn, where the soul has been wrapped in clouds of toxic black smoke – exactly like the Earth we live on, as the artist herself is keen to point out. Deep down, each of us will find our own best way to move from ideal to action as we see fit; what matters most to Anohni is simply not letting inertia win.

Contributions by Mauro Roma (“Another World EP”), Ciro Frattini (“The Crying Light”), Raffaello Russo (“Thank You For Your Love” and “Swanlights”), Damiano Pandolfini (“Cut The World”, Anohni – “Paradise”), Giuliano Delli Paoli (Anohni – “Hopelessness”), Gianfranco Marmoro (“My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross”)

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