Soap&Skin

Anja Plaschg, the person behind Soap&Skin, is only 29 years old, but for six of those years she retired from public life and remained artistically silent, after having been hailed by the German magazine Der Spiegel as a wonderkid of experimental pop at the age of 18. She is now returning with her third album, From Gas to Solid / You Are My Friend, to describe her experiences, her fears, and what kept her away these six years, putting on hold the rapid development of her career. Her melancholic experimental electronic music sounds more mature than ever before, and of course the piano remains at the center of her creative world. She doesn’t belong to any particular musical scene, she says. She’s a bit of an “outsider.”

Born and raised in a farm in an Austrian village, Anja exhibits her wounds in her albums and on stage. She passes from absence to stage presence, explaining that she wanted to create a world where she felt sheltered. “The album is about separation, forgiveness, states of healing and frightening throwbacks.” Her stage presence is distinctive and fragile. “The intimacy that I share with the audience seems almost like a free fall, and makes a concert for me so unbearable and beautiful at the same time,” she says.

The themes that feature in this album are no different from the ones that defined her previous work, but now we see a less raw, aggressive look at things. She is a mother now, she has matured, yet she continues to seek answers, even to personal issues that cause her pain. “I had to let go of what I thought I loved and needed, which also meant bringing enormously painful things up from my subconscious,” she explains. She recorded the album in her home, in a quiet, green neighborhood in Vienna. She created “an imagined world,” which is reflected in her album cover. “Click per click, painting the music on my screen.” A transition from thought to recording led to From Gas to Solid / You Are My Friend. The album ends with a dreamlike, tranquil version of Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World. Because, you see, Anja Plaschg believes this is the most optimistic album she has made so far.