Myopia

For almost a decade, Agnes Obel has been one of the most independent and original artists in contemporary music. Now she returns with her highly anticipated new album Myopia – through Deutsche Grammophon.

Following the same principles as with her previous albums (Philharmonics, Aventine and Citizen Of Glass), which she completed as a one-woman project in her own Berlin home studio, Obel has been under self-imposed creative isolation with the removal of all outside influences and distractions in the writing, recording, and mixing process. “The albums I’ve worked on have all required that I build a bubble of some kind in which everything becomes about the album.”

“For me, the production is intertwined with the lyrics and story behind the songs,” says Obel. This is precisely what makes her music so compelling and the same is true with Myopia. “Paradoxically, for me, I need to create my own myopia to make music.”

Obel was experimenting with techniques of recording processing, warping, and pitching down vocals, strings, piano, celesta, and lutheal piano, finding ways to meld these elements together to become one and twisting them in a way that you feel at home within the sound she conjures throughout the record.

Although Obel’s music can often curate a monologue of modern-day dystopian-esque news stories that we are all now subject to, the contents of Island Of Doom are much more personal, as she explains: “The song is made up of pitched-down piano and cello pizzicato and vocals, all choirs are pitched down and up… In my experience when someone close to you dies it is simply impossible to comprehend that you can’t ever talk to them or reach them somehow ever again. They are in many ways still alive because in your consciousness nothing has changed, they’re still there with everyone else you know.”