Already prolific on the New York City Scene for her dance, choreography and movies, Andrea Ward has been engaged on being a quadruple risk by just lately displaying her expertise for music. Already a multi-instrumentalist and singer, Ward has launched a collection of tracks within the run as much as the discharge of her debut album, Ribbon of Water, due out in late January. Inspired by Nordic folks and experimental pop artists like Bjork and Glass Animals, her sound is wealthy and genre-neutral. But is it digital?
The first tracks Ward launched in 2021, “My Only Life” and “Keep Me Awake,” are fairly clearly largely acoustic, save for some sound design on the layered vocals and the engineering. A cross between jazzy and esoteric in nature, Ward’s songwriting makes her work each trendy and timeless on the similar time. As we get into her more moderen tracks, “Game,” “Algorithm” and “Awake at Night,” which simply launched late final month, extra parts of what many would name electronica appear to look. The overlapping vocals are there, and the extremely technical engineering, but in addition the melody seems to have been born of the digital world. Or is it?
The reply is not any, these pingy, glockenspiel-like melodies are acoustic too. The extra hippie-ish amongst us might already acknowledge that the melodies are made by the tongue drum, or hand pan, performed by the eternally versatile Ward herself. This stunning and misleading instrument, together with the sound design and expertly honed ambient work is what provides ward’s latest tracks their digital vibe, however are they really digital?
While actually not EDM, artists like Ward and her predecessors like Bjork are undoubtedly in a position to provide you with a vibe that has the underpinnings of ambient electronica. It’s a steadiness that’s being struck increasingly because the Burner set of hippies goes extra rave. The tongue drum is a type of crossover instruments that, whereas acoustic, bridges the hole between analog tribal folks and ambient, celestial EDM. It’s all frequency, in spite of everything, to loosely quote Bjork, so who cares what the supply is? If it resonates with audiences and is true to the artist’s coronary heart, the supply is irrelevant.
To that finish, the movies that Ward has made to go along with these tracks are equally beautiful and use plenty of media to get the message throughout. As a filmmaker and dancer, all this artwork is in Ward and the movies actually deliver her message collectively in an much more resonant method. “Awake at Night” is a straightforward efficiency video however fantastically shot, whereas “Game” is an ensemble piece with decadent choreography that not solely bridges her worlds of movie, music and dance however the worlds of particular person folks because the three dancers undergo the identical motions from solely totally different views. The video for “Algorithm” is probably going essentially the most stark, as Ward makes use of her dance, mirrors and water to pressure much more perspective, each visually and emotionally.
As traces proceed to blur in artwork between analog and digital, AI and human-made, artists like Andrea Ward are forward of the curve as a result of they work with all totally different media and technique with out worrying about how they’ll be labeled. EDM, digital or not, work like this speaks to listeners and viewers and feelers on so many ranges. It’s each digital and natural, and that’s precisely the way it needs to be.
Check out Andrea Ward’s songs and the upcoming album Ribbon of Water on Spotify and don’t miss her different music movies and their “making of” enhances on her YouTube web page.