Anne Laplantine - A Little May Time Be

Since Anne Laplantine has not released a new record for a few years, Ahornfelder is proud to announce the release of a new album by this outstanding French artist.

Over the last years Anne moved between Vienna, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin and Paris where she currently lives. This journey reflects her artistic personality - like an explorer she is constantly searching for the ideal solution and the right thing to say artistically. She uncomprimisingly follows her artistic intuition and each step of this ongoing search is never well prepared or calculated. The destination of her journey is not a safe spot somewhere in the music world. She is not interested in finding her musical home or in marking her territory, rather she seems to be most interested in the promising struggle of a new start.

Maybe that's why Anne confused her audience by releasing records on different labels under many different guises: As "Michiko Kusaki" she had a release on the label Angelika Köhlermann (Vienna), for Tomlab (Cologne) she recorded as "Angelika Köhlermann" and "Anne Hamburg", and on Emphase Records (Berlin) she released a wonderful album under her given name. Besides her musical projects, which also involve a variety of impressive collaborations, she is also involved in an all sorts of art projects in the cities she lives in.

On her latest releases Anne developed her very own way of composing electronic pop music. Concerning structure and harmony her music owes more to baroque polyphony than to the standard track format. Little lo-fi sound samples of flute, guitar, etc. are arranged to create fragile polyphonic minature-masterpieces. This fascinating and friendly way of composing is further developed on her album for Ahornfelder. But this record offers much more to discover: Concentrated experiments with structure and sound, beautiful songs which are sparsely orchestrated with guitars and an old school drum computer, and additionally an incorporated art project. The album contains 58 tracks, 34 of which are nothing but "silences" in between 4 to 20 seconds. But these "silences" are not totally silent. In these short passages you can either hear the first few seconds after a recording is finished, or you can listen to the the stage setting of the next recording to come. You do not hear the recorded music itself. Anne again seems more interested in the promising struggles of new beginnings - where so far nothing is said, but everything could be said - than in fixed results or answers.
It speaks in favour of Anne's focused musical sensibility that this "silences" experiment does not dissipate her album into incoherent pieces. The dramaturgy of the album is conclusive and each little piece of silence helps to bundle the attention of the listener all over again.
I love this record and so will you.
Jochen Briesen

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