The Danish singer, pianist and composer Agnes Obel published her splendid album Myopia in 2020, but the pandemic made it difficult to go live. Now she is doing it and today she will present it at the Jardins de Pedralbes Festival (10 pm), where she will show her dreamy and elegant combination of chamber pop, piano, voice, strings and loops.
Rigorous question: I guess I missed the direct.
This time twice. I spent the last two years playing and recording in my studio, which is a pretty small room, being pregnant and I had an almost vital desire to hear that music in large spaces. Get that abstract creation out of my head and share it with people.
In other words, he has been composing and recording non-stop when he had just released his new album and couldn’t show it.
Yes, a very strange situation for me. She had never experienced it. But at the same time I think it’s a creative opportunity, because it allows me to play the previous Myopia album live and also do it with other radically unreleased material. The idea is to play these latest songs in theaters and closed spaces, and the album in open spaces.
How have you thought about the concerts of this tour?
I have a new band, with two cellists and a classical percussionist who doubles as flute and sax, and on stage there will be novelties, especially lighting and more interactive so that the public can see what we do. And more than focused on my last album, it will be like a mix of the four I’ve done. And also some of the music written during the pandemic, and that revolves a lot around biology and neuroscience coinciding with pregnancy.
Returning to Myopia, how was the work born?
It is a reflection on myself, how I am and how I work, and that involved talking about my environment, my family. It was a critical look at myself but it also conveyed my vision of the world and the reality that surrounds us.
These songs can be understood as…
… as a paradox, that is, we need to be alone, to reflect and be myopic, and once that is done we are able to see the outside. And there are other issues that only revolve around me.
How do you define yourself?
A very optimistic person, but also in the history of my family I was prone to depression and this is something I always think about and even more so now. I’m kind of on alert not to go back to that stadium. And somehow my music reflects that situation.
But it is also often said that his songs have therapeutic effects.
For me, making music is not necessarily something therapeutic but rather an exercise in deep concentration. But there is a time when it can be therapeutic for me because your self can disappear in that process of creation. It is something fascinating, and it is something that can also happen in a concert, and that I wish would happen, disappear and only my music would remain.
Is music the best way of expression, more than the word?
Yes absolutely. Music is a mystery, but it unites us and can unite us much more than words can. Oliver Sachs says so.
What do you listen to at home?
Many things, but old soundtracks never fail, like Ennio Morricone.
