Agnes Obel: Independence Is a Quiet Space

Agnes Obel’s music is only getting weirder, and she’s delighted. The Danish musician and producer is on the phone from Ireland, the latest leg of the European tour promoting her latest album Citizen of Glass: a tone poem of sorts honoring the idea of “gläserner bürger” or “glass citizen,” a German concept in sociology that refers to the extent to which the state permits one to maintain her privacy, as one transparent as glass contains no secrets. With her team, Obel has crafted a touring production that is as visually kaleidoscopic as it is sonically, with her boyfriend Alex Brüel Flagstad, an animator and photographer, crafting special prism lenses that double and triple images that appear before the show’s overhead cameras. “It’s a dream come true,” Obel says of the tour. “It’s something I’ve wanted for a long time.”

Obel’s music is founded on her spectral vocals, which flit through velvet pools of baroque sound. In Citizen of Glass, her childhood classical training rears its dignified head, then yanks off its powdered wig. Obel corralled old-timey instruments — a harpsichord-like instrument called a spinet, and a replica Obel commissioned of an early 20th-century synthesizer called a Trautonium — layering and distorting them for a steampunk kick.

In the track “Familiar,” Obel considers surveillance in the context of love by pairing her own sirenic voice with one throaty and sepulchral. The latter, ostensibly male, is in fact Obel’s own pitched down. As the voices sing “Our love is a ghost that the others can’t see,” the deeper voice is itself like a ghost of the female, exhumed to compose Obel in gender chiaroscuro. The music video, which expounds upon the implications of this literal revelation, is filmed as if through a security camera.

Born in Copenhagen, Obel wrote her first songs on a piano “full of cigarette butts” in her school hallway. Soon after, she left school without graduating to enroll in a course for aspiring music producers. In 2006, she moved to Berlin, sorry to leave her friends but anxious to start anew. She can’t work when she’s surrounded, she says, she needs to be alone. “For me, independence is being in a space where it’s quiet and nobody listens and nobody cares,” Obel explains. “It’s sort of like being forgotten. I can follow my own instincts and run with it.”

She hopped from band to band before going solo in 2010 with Philharmonics, released to critical acclaim; Aventine followed three years later. Both showcase her interest in plucked string rhythms and choral timbres. In the music video for “Aventine,” Obel and her musicians appear to perform in a kaleidoscope, their spangled images blinking in and out of focus.

Obel sings in English and plays nearly always with an all-female band, making good on an old “secret wish to find other women who were interested in [this music scene].” Her stance is political insofar as she is just being her artistic self: “Listening and seeing things in a new way, so you can experience things from the eyes of somebody else,” for Obel, is itself a political act.

Obel’s production makes as much of a statement as her music. On each of her three critically-acclaimed albums, Obel sings her own songs in English and produces them too, a fact all too rare in music's male-dominated backend. “I was under the impression that this was what everybody else did, she says.” On one of her first trips to the recording studio, “I was surprised to see that the bands went home and the producers did all the work.” While she says she began producing her music to cut costs, she grew to enjoy the artistic independence and freedom of doing the work alone; that her decision resists the tradition of male-dominated production didn’t hurt, either. “If there are girls out there who have the idea that they want to make albums themselves or make a musical universe themselves, then they will feel it’s less strange when they see somebody like me do it,” she says.

For each new album, Obel is determined to pay forward what she learned from the last. At the moment, she doesn’t know precisely what form her next project will take, but she has an inkling. “I think I might do something even stranger,” she says, sounding a little gleeful.