Tel-Aviv-via-Latvia musician, producer, and DJ Anna Lann recently gained a VEVO account, and one can only hope for more output from the enigmatic artist in the near future. The only video uploaded thus far is the music video for “Moist” (released in July this year) - which has unfortunately been overlooked by all the best-of-2017 year-end listicles.
Co-directed with 16-year-old wunderkind director Jonathan Trichter, it features hauntingly memorable, surreal and otherworldly scenes that render poetic justice to Lann’s brand of “Experimental Interplanetary Pop Music”. Pregnant silences fill up the space between eerie synths and the words in her whispered refrain (‘How much has gone?’), while the unusual tableau of dancers in the midst of displaced natural elements (mushrooms growing on a marble bathtub, totem poles of cabbage, an indoor stream of water, fur and leather coats) echo the parataxis in its minimalist lyrics ('How much has gone... Feels like I'm spending time with you').
The shots of forest fires and volcanic eruptions remind you of the heat and warmth missing from this icy piece of sonic perfection, besides subtly reinforcing Lann’s vision of nature turning its back on us. Lann explained to NPR's Bob Boilen in July that the video represents mankind's God complex: "man creates palaces out of marble, fur coats and leather coats out of animals, et cetera, while placing himself as the dominating species of planet earth, constantly forgetting that it takes the tiniest spark from nature's side to literally delete human kind from the face of the Earth". She echoes the idea of nature as being both beautiful and terrible, utterly indifferent to whether we prove to be responsible for the planetary changes that will make it inhospitable.
The fate of the farmer in Louise Glück’s 2006 poem “Averno” might inevitably be ours: “The terrible moment was the spring after his work was erased,/ when he understood that the earth/ didn’t know how to mourn, that it would change instead./ And then go on existing without him.’
