Anna Homler
Anna Homler is a vocal, visual and performance artist based in Los Angeles. She sings in an improvised melodic language of her own creation, and has performed around the globe with a wide range of collaborators. Anna’s original music is “both ancient and post-modern.” Its deep earthly origins are evident, yet it’s tied to no genre or classification. She appeared on a dozen recordings between the 1980s and early 2000s.
However, one definitive recording was seemingly lost in archives without a publisher for nearly two decades. Produced during an artist residency at Jack Straw Cultural Center in collaboration with several of Seattle’s finest improvisers, the album Reverie is at last available, through Right Brain Records. Its 13 tracks showcase the alternate musical universe of Anna’s creation. See this review in Igloo Magagzine.
Reverie was recorded over four days in April, 2008. The album’s supporting cast includes:
Amy Denio - voice
Bill Horist - acoustic guitar
Elizabeth Falconer - koto
Lori Goldston - cello
Susie Kozawa - voice
Ikue Mori - elctronics
Steve Peters - suling gambuh, piano, percussion
Steve Peters also produced the recording.
Post-session: Bill, Anna, Susie, Lori, Elizabeth.
“Reverie is a tour of unadorned castles in the air, playful and strange vocals, music inspiring pleasant dream-like thoughts, expressed with wordless musical vocalisms, fluid speech-like syllables that might lack any readily comprehensible meaning, an extravagant conceit of the imagination, a lost sense of dreaming while awake. There is an extraordinary array of great talent here.”
“Variously quaint and cutting, charming and provocative, and utterly musical and engaging.”
“Homler seems to sing in the forgotten dialect from some past life or world... disconcertedly bewitching.”
Photo: Helen Van Der Neer