Festival Music
Anohni
Edinburgh Playhouse
Nicola Meighan
four Stars
ON her extraordinary new album, Hopelessness, the artist formerly known as Antony and the Johnsons unflinchingly tackles ecocide, terrorism, drone warfare and mass surveillance, via foreboding – and beautiful – machine music. She joined forces with electronic trailblazers Oneohtrix Point Never and Glasgow's Hudson Mohawke for the LP, both of whom flanked Anohni onstage for this rare and striking show.
The evening began with a (rather too) lengthy film of Naomi Campbell variously invoking Mad Max and the Statue of Liberty. She gyrated, flexed and eyeballed us from a lifeless room (prison? shelter?) – defying us to look away – reinforcing the album's unrelenting subject matter, and perhaps our propensity for denial.
Rocking a full-length cloak that resembled a funereal veil, or the grim reaper's cowl, Anohni hid in shadows throughout, and diverted our attention to the bigger picture – literally – playing out on screens above her. Campbell was replaced by a series of women's faces which mimed Anohni's every word (with varying degrees of conviction), and recalled the transgender artist's 2014 Turning documentary, which featured thirteen women and transexuals.
The patriarchy took a doing. Anohni's shrouded figure was particularly dramatic during Obama, wherein she stalked the stage, dragging the mic stand behind her like a corpse, and she followed that with Violent Men.
Hopelessness, however, does not so much apportion blame as explore accountability, awareness, and our collective complicity (the spotlight was turned on us more than once), and the evening's musical climax – Crisis – was also its most lyrically revelatory. For all of the dread disco psalms to bombed-out habitats, boiling planets, and executed bodies and animals, one phrase rang out above all others in this unforgettable performance: I'm sorry.
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