Soap&Skin - An untamable liturgy

It can't have been easy for sixteen-year-old Anja Plaschg to leave behind the pastoral calm of Gnas, a village of six thousand souls in southeastern Styria, for the far more chaotic Vienna. A choice born of the need to become independent and one day fulfil her dream of becoming a respectable singer-songwriter. The first two years the very young Anja spent at the Academy of Fine Arts in the Austrian capital were decidedly intense, especially thanks to Daniel Richter in a masterclass that would prove fundamental. But then Anja decided to drop out of everything and carry on as a self-taught artist.

In 2008, having just come of age, the future star of Austrian songwriting devoted herself body and soul to writing her first album, Lovetune For Vacuum, which would be released just a year later, in 2009, on the ever-meritorious Pias. It's a record that won over almost everyone right from the start, one that links in thirteen movements the unease of Nico - especially in Anja's vocal delivery, which recalls her unmistakably - with the electronic extravagances of the era, think of other artists of Plaschg's generation who were just then emerging on the music scene, first and foremost a certain James Blake.

Anja has repeatedly stated that, besides the aforementioned Nico, she drew on a very varied range of influences, spanning Xiu Xiu, Cat Power, Björk, Aphex Twin, but also Sergei Rachmaninoff and Arvo Pärt, for a debut that feels like a miracle and that even deserves to be analysed starting from its ending, picking up on the words written in 2009 by Francesca Garofano: “A muffled thud, like a gunshot, closes the album and instantly silences the chirping of a bird, the buzzing of an insect, silences silence itself. After that, nothing more - if 'nothing' is the right word for the overwhelming sensation of having experienced something, in its own way, unique.” And again: “The ending, where we start from, actually casts a bridge three years long between itself and the very beginning. A feeling as clear and sharp as the one we had on first hearing, back in 2006, 'Mr. Gaunt Pt 1000' (a track that the German label Shitkatapult plucked from her pile of demos and included on the compilation 'Shitkatapult Empfiehlt!', alongside artists like Apparat, Fenin and others). The source was Myspace, three tracks in the player that sounded like fragments, outtakes, rehearsal run-throughs. The page had a white background and little information, but out of that pixelated blankness, the carcass of a small bird, lying there lifeless, stared straight back at you.

Anja Plaschg was sixteen at the time (another detail worth noting) and already had very clear ideas. The hope was that time would leave her intact and give us a first album as strong as what could already be glimpsed, preceded by an EP made up of 4 tracks (one of which, 'X-Ray Heartland', remixed by Fennesz).” A gripping analysis for an equally thunderous work, returning once again to the words of the review from the time: “The music of Soap&Skin has the essence of a Pina Bausch dance step, a Käthe Kollwitz painting, a Francesca Woodman photograph. It reflects any artistic expression that grapples with inner torment, anguish, violence, but, just like the artists mentioned, in a peculiarly feminine way.

Lovetune For Vacuum is a uterine album like few others, powerful in channelling a certain kind of feeling, in refusing to disguise it, 'moody' in the way it exposes it. A case in point is what's told between the lines of 'Spiracle' (“When I was a child peers pushed me hard/ in my head, in my neck, in my chest, in my waist, in my butt/ I still beg please help me”).”

Anja's intense songwriting is echoed by electronics that are as troubled as they are concise in their sounds, dry enough to set the atmosphere alight, while Plaschg's voice bounces from wall to wall like a bat possessed by the demon of ultrasound. It's the prelude to her first success and to a successful European tour, with extremely intense shows that include covers of Nico (here we go again), such as the unforgettable 'Janitor Of Lunacy'. Plaschg's total veneration for Nico begins in earnest in 2008, with her participation in Werner Fritsch's show 'Nico – Sphinx aus Eis' in Berlin and Vienna. In 2011, Anja then recorded the track 'Goodbye' in collaboration with Apparat, de facto her instrumental alter ego, which was used first in the final episode of the fourth season of the iconic TV series 'Breaking Bad' and then as the opening theme of 'Dark', the acclaimed German Netflix series.

These are the wonderful symptoms of a career beginning that straddles music and film, one that will also lead Anja to act in the role of Carmen, a secondary character in the Austrian film 'Stillleben' (English title: 'Still Life') by Sebastian Meise. Later on, to be precise in 2017, two more of her songs, 'Italy' and 'Safe With Me', would be used in the soundtrack of 'Sicilian Ghost Story', a film written and directed by Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza. A love for Italy that has never been hidden, but one that is not without criticism either, particularly towards Italian policy regarding migrants who have for years tried to reach the shores of Sicily from Africa. During an interview for Musik Express, the Austrian musician stated: “Wake me up, I hope, in Italy. That's just how it came to me. My first thought was: this is all completely stupid. But then a thousand doors opened up inside me. Italy: the illusion of a place that should be better, but which instead closes its ports to refugees. It's absurd!”

Going back to 2009, for Anja it was also a year of grief, since her father died of a heart attack, leaving her in despair, to the point that she was hospitalised for depression in the months that followed. That tragedy would be at the heart of Soap&Skin's second album, Narrow, released in 2012. The wounded-eyed girl becomes a woman, while the experience gained touring around Europe broadens a talent that was already immense in its own right. On Narrow, Anja appears as a wounded lioness. In her eyes lies the immense suffering for a father who vanished suddenly. And in her pale hands lies the whole desire to expel an unbearable inner anguish from her soul.

Narrow thus gathers the shards of a bleeding soul. Plaschg pours out all her torment, spilling onto the piano keys both tears and, at the same time, a dormant hope. The long-awaited second album by the introverted Austrian composer is actually a mini-album, made up mostly of already-known tracks, played repeatedly on her latest European tour. Eight songs describing dark days and passions never extinguished. Anja freely vents her fears in German, French and English. There are many points of contact with her acclaimed debut. And the pianist from Gnas doesn't hold back on decadent piano gusts, building up to crescendos as epic as they are grave.

Thus, the doom-laden theatricality that pervades the opening track 'Vater' - a song entirely dedicated to her father - lays bare every illusion in a moving succession of memories and inner voids. 'Voyage Voyage', the famous 80s hit by French singer Desireless, is performed with unexpected melancholy and confirms Plaschg's ability to magnificently twist anything to her own liking. Meanwhile, the electronic turmoil of the following 'Deathmental' stirs the soul, evoking the upheaval of 'DDMMYYYY', before the measured, fear-ridden pace laid bare in the two minutes of 'Cradlesong' brings to mind a hazier possible variant of the divine Nico (here we go again). But the emotional epicentre lies both in the intimate choral quality of 'Wonder', a sensational prayer placed at the centre of the record like a candle in the middle of a dark room, and in the strangled cry of pain of the all-too-brief 'Boat Turns Toward The Port', shaped here and there with typewriter-like sounds.

With Narrow, young Anja's emotional instability turns into a stark, raw moment of reckoning. Childhood seen through a dark disillusionment. If Lovetune For Vacuum staged a fall into the void, Narrow then foreshadows its final crash.

The second album, however, also marks the beginning of Plaschg's first very long hiatus, as she doesn't return to the spotlight until 2018, a full six years later, having in the meantime again shown off her acting chops by playing Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann in the film "Die Geträumten". Her return to music was first sensed after a performance with Anna Calvi at the Basilica of Saint-Denis in Paris, ahead of the announcement of an album decidedly more relaxed than her usual standard; a work born within the walls of her home and the fruit of a newfound serenity that came with motherhood. And a title, From Gas To Solid/You Are My Friend, that captures the essence of a broadened gaze, no longer turned purely inward but opened up to sweeping existential reflections on the world and on matter.

The volatility and solidity of the elements found in nature embody the metaphor through which she expresses an unusual outward openness, despite spending an excessive amount of time at home, the very place where the twelve songs on the album were born. It's thus an unexpected approach from the composer from Gnas, who on one hand indulges the electronic exploration that was widely shared from the start, and on the other draws on writing that is certainly more full-bodied and less jagged. What dominates is a newfound strength of spirit, and the need to question life and creation, as the words of the opening "This Day" clearly show, with piano and violin gently accompanying Plaschg's voice: "What is in creation? If a god had left us to stay? Show me revelation. Or a thing that's not in the play. A tiny little ration. That is your due".

The glitch component of her early days intersects beautifully with the crepuscular piano of the following "Athom", a meditation on time and love that unfolds timidly before dissolving in the finale. Meanwhile, Italy serves as a dreamed-of destination in the playful ticking and folkloric mantra of the aforementioned "Italy", all before darkness and light return to alternate among the Gregorian, instrumental specters of "(This Is) Water".

The "Spinozan" quest to find a higher entity within nature itself is beautifully expressed in the sweet "Creep", complete with an ascetic quality and sampled birdsong at the end, preceding the unusual, long-awaited optimism that emerges forcefully in the album's first single, "Heal", between imperceptible beats and a sinuous melodic crescendo bristling with hope.

Less engaging are "Foot Chamber", with its Balkan flair, and the gothic "Falling", lost as it is among organ-filtered divertissements and electronic trinkets. More exciting, though not entirely captivating, is yet another minimal piano ballad with double vocals: "Safe With Me". By contrast, her deeply personal and heartfelt cover of "What A Wonderful World" is a genuine surprise—the era-defining hit written by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss, made immortal by Louis Armstrong's 1967 rendition.

From Gas To Solid/You Are My Friend is a well-crafted record, even if the heights reached on her first album remain, for the most part, still out of reach. Still, it's a successful album overall, one that reveals several more "hidden" sides of the Austrian singer-songwriter.

Soap&Skin's second long break in her career runs instead from 2018 to 2024. Six years spent mostly devoted to family and to her parallel passion for film scores, starting with the fine soundtrack she composed for "Des Teufels Bad", a horror film written and directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala.

Torso (2024) marks a long-awaited return. But it's a covers album. A choice that catches you off guard, even if it follows a path trodden by many of Anja's peers, chief among them Cat Power, who, as it happens, is paid tribute on the record with an epic version of "Maybe Not", one of the wonders penned by "the cat" Chan Marshall, surely among the most moving sad ballads of the 2000s, by some distance.

The Austrian artist's choice to put forward deeply personal reimaginings of other people's songs actually dates back to 2011, the year she recorded her own version of "Voyage, Voyage", Desireless's most famous hit, for the soundtrack of Sebastian Meise's film "Stillleben". A reworking of the 1980s earworm rendered in a darker key, it quickly became a fixture of her live repertoire, and now resurfaces at the center of an album that is, for the most part, a success.

It opens with "Mystery Of Love" by Sufjan Stevens, rearranged by Anja with the valuable contribution of French horn and trombone; the original version, incidentally, received an Oscar and Grammy nomination, having been featured in the soundtrack of Luca Guadagnino's film "Call Me by Your Name".

"When I listen to a song, I often feel there's something else I'd like to add. At that point I let go of the original and stop listening to it. Sometimes for years. So I record the covers a long time afterward, mostly from memory. I haven't listened to the Doors, for instance, in more than seven years. 'The End' is also one of my favorite songs, a little time capsule. So is Shirley Bassey's 'Born To Lose'", the singer-songwriter explains.

Then there's "Girl Loves Me" by David Bowie, taken from "Blackstar", filtered for the occasion into a cataclysmic orchestral variant that renders its pathos through Anja's own worldview, which once again resembles a dark forest. And there's "Johnsburg, Illinois" by Tom Waits, arranged however with less dismay and more "joy", complete with a theremin acting as a nightingale.

On Torso, Anja sings the whole way through like a fallen angel. No offense intended to fans of Nada or of Wim Wenders.

"Pale Blue Eyes" by the Velvet Underground, meanwhile, is gently launched into orbit, naturally by night, with the rocket positioned somewhere among the trees of Bregenz. While "Gods & Monsters" by Lana Del Rey stands apart entirely, since Soap&Skin partly crumples up its words, altering them to fit her own vision as a caring mother and a woman now far removed from life's cruder vices, especially when she sings: "Fame and liquor? That is nothing holy".

Recorded in Vienna with an ensemble conducted by Plaschg herself, Torso is the classic covers album of songs revisited by a now mature musician, confident in herself and thus open to "dialogue" — however platonic — with the music she has loved most in her life. “It's in my style to assemble music in a safe space, which consequently means alone at home, drawing on previously recorded samples. However, perhaps what is created collaboratively should also be recorded collaboratively,” Anja reflects further, alongside a description meant to explain the reasons behind an operation that is, on the whole, enjoyable, and which finds its most nostalgic moment in the pyrotechnic “What's Up?”, the 4 Non Blondes classic — at least for anyone who loved her first LP and who, age-wise, sits somewhere between fans of the Doors, present at the close with a piano version of “The End”, and fans of Lana Del Rey.

* Thanks to Francesca Garofano for her valuable contributions (“Lovetune For Vacuum”)

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