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Oh Land
Fauna
“What does it sound like? What does it smell like? What does it look like? How does it feel? I always ask myself these questions when I’m writing,” says singer and producer Nanna Øland Fabricius. ”I think that Oh Land has a unique landscape all on its own. I strive to make the possibilities endless and to have all the senses collide in to a language on their own.”
Her multi-sensory approach to songwriting has been present from the beginning. Before Oh Land had a name, or even songs, she was a restless child on the outskirts of Copenhagen, where she wove together imaginary languages, characters, and magazines. Though she didn’t know it then, this sense of play would develop naturally into the skewed and rich aesthetic of Oh Land’s music and performance style.
She is the product of extremes. A disciplined ballet dancer who was educated with the Royal Danish and Royal Swedish Ballet schools coupled with a “circus-like” upbringing courtesy of a family of creative souls. Their unique and individual talents have left deep imprints on how Oh Land experiences and interprets the world around her. She has created a soundscape that dreams as hard as it dances.
“I want my music to feel like 2050 meets something really classic, like meeting a stranger that feels as familiar as an old friend.” says Oh Land.
Her approach to songwriting reaches beyond melody to touch on shared experience; her music simultaneously incorporates the whirrs, tics, and thumps of machinery and the soft, human tug of strings and delicately layered vocals. It was this dual quality of her music – human, yet otherworldly — that landed this peculiar, talented, and determined artist on the radar of Epic Records during a 2009 showcase at SXSW at the end of a brief US tour that Oh Land booked herself.
Used to pushing the boundaries of her talent, Oh Land relocated to Brooklyn at the beginning of 2010 to write the latest chapters of her whirlwind story: an ever-evolving album that features speaker-panning samples, honeyed hooks, and the knob-twiddling skills of Dan Carey (The Kills, Franz Ferdinand, Hot Chip) and Dave McCracken (Depeche Mode, Beyoncé, AFI).
Oh Land’s lyrics evoke storybook imagery that is both rich and moving, inviting the listener to step to the edge of the rabbit hole and plummet. For instance, “Wolf & I” works as both a trippy, heart-stirring ballad as well as a “modern fable about doubt and fear” that tells the tale of a love triangle between a wolf, the sun, and the moon.
The jungle drumming and layered vocals of “White Nights” evokes a quest to find peace and a sense of home in the chaos of a city that never sleeps. She sings, “There’s a restlessness in me/Keeps me up ’till the dawn/There is no silence/I will keep following the sirens,” alluding to both the noise and throb of the city and the mythological seducers that call to lonely sailors.
That duality is also at play in the steady pulse and lavish loops of “Sun of a Gun,” which layers literal references to the sun (“a symbol of the divine that we’re now afraid of”) over unflinching comparisons to the twilight of an ill-fated relationship.
After a career-ending back injury, Oh Land was no longer able to dance, leading her to discover that the entire reason she danced in the first place was ecause of the music and that was the creative medium she wanted to mold as her own.
This discovery manifested itself in Oh Land’s self-produced debut album, Fauna. Released in 2008 by Scandinavian tastemaker/producer/DJ, Kasper Bjorke, the album featured Oh Land’s first 10 tracks as an artist – lush otherworldly soundscapes that wouldn’t sound out of place alongside the Bjork LPs and trip-hop tracks that she obsessed over while growing up.
Oh Land’s US debut, her self-titled EP, will see an October 19 release date via Epic Records with a full length album to follow in 2011.
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Fauna - Album Art
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Epic Records
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Epic Records
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Epic Records
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Epic Records
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Epic Records
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Epic Records