Los Angeles based performance and vocal artist Anna Homler is probably best known for the avant-garde 1985 album Breadwoman & Other Tales, reissued by RVNG Intl in 2016. Throughout her long career as a vocal, visual and performance artist she’s collaborated Geert Waegeman, Sylvia Hallett, Steve Beresford and Michael Pierre Vlatkovich, to name a few. On Deliquium in C, she connects with Alessio Capovilla (Gang of Ducks), Steven Warwick (Heatsick), Mark Davies (The Pylon King) and the late Steve Moshier, who produced the original Breadwoman tape.
Speaking to The Wire she explains “There are a few meanings to the word deliquium. The one I’m interested in is ‘to dissolve in liquid’. Deliquium In C was a title of a performance piece I did in the early 1990s at Highways, Santa Monica. Steve Moshier composed the music and used vocal samples and loops I had given him. The performance was meant to be ‘an underwater sound poem’. This track was the music people heard when they first entered the gallery. Steve’s music is in the key of C. My vocal sounds on this track are meant to represent sea creatures and the wind.”
Merging her quirky vocals with elements of avant–garde folk, pulsing ambient drones and otherworldy electronics, Holmer is as always impossible to pigeonhole.
The songs are all deeply beautiful from the ethereal drones of opener ‘O’sa Va’ya’ featuring Alessio Capovilla, to the dramatic ‘Nepenthe’ featuring Steven Warwick on which her enigmatic voice soars. On the standout title track ‘Deliquium In C’ – a song that features the late Steve Moshier – things are stripped right back and we hear 15 minutes of otherworldly ambient passages undercut by Holmer’s distinctive vocal abstractions.
Utterly singular, mysterious, and endlessly provocative, stream below.
