Bachelorette on Myspace

MP3: Mindwarp (from My Electric Family)

MP3: Doo-Wop (from Isolation Loops)

Video: Her Rotating Head

MY ELECTRIC FAMILY by BACHELORETTE

Bachelorette’s Annabel Alpers has a family of synthesizers, keyboards and computers that beam to us all the way from Christchurch, New Zealand. Since 2005 she’s released an EP and a full-length record (Isolation Loops - Mistletone 2007), both of them amazing distillations of her psychedelic pop.

The all-new MY ELECTRIC FAMILY (released on Mistletone in Australia, and Drag City in the US) brings other humans into the relationship, working alongside her machines. Relationships with machines are among the themes of the album, as is the idea of technology as escape and expression. MY ELECTRIC FAMILY is a hand-woven sci-folk lullaby that delves into your subconscious and hits you right at your electric core.

Bachelorette is currently on an extensive US tour with her new band featuring Melbourne’s own Evelyn Morris (Pikelet), including a bunch of support slots for Bill Callahan and Bonnie Prince Billy. Bachelorette will return to Australia to tour as a band later in 2009.

Inpress review:

Dusted feature: Destined: Bachelorette

Dusted’s Jennifer Kelly profiles our first Destined selection of 2009: New Zealand avant-pop artist Bachelorette. 

You get the sense that Annabel Alpers, the New Zealand electro-pop artist known as Bachelorette, doesn’t much care for talking about her delicate, multilayered songs. She’d rather not theorize about the nexus between synthetic tools and raw human feeling. She has no clear idea of where she’s heading musically, after My Electric Family, the album she’s mixing right now in New Zealand for release on Drag City this spring. She’s perfectly happy to let that question resolve itself later, when she gets back to her computer to write new songs.

“I don’t have a particular direction that I want to go in at all,” she says, by phone, early on New Year’s Eve 2008. “Every time I work on a song or an album, I’m always surprised with how it comes out, because it’s not how I started out with it.”

Yet you can’t mistake this flexibility, this open-ness to the vagaries of inspiration, this refusal to articulate an artistic philosophy, for lack of purpose. “Sometimes I think the reason why I play music is that it’s the way that I’m able to communicate to people,” she says. “It’s better than the way that I’m capable of communicating just through talking or the conventional kinds of communication that other people are satisfied with. That doesn’t satisfy me. So, it’s a way of trying to be satisfied with communicating with other people.”

Alpers has been in and out of bands in her hometown of Christchurch for more than a decade, getting closest to the mainstream with psychedelic surf favorites, Hawaii Five-O, but also spending time in electronic noise bands like Space Dust and the Hiss Explosion.

Eventually, though, playing keyboards and guitars on other people’s songs started to pall, and Alpers looked for another outlet. “I just started writing more of my own songs. It was getting harder to get my ideas across to the band,” she said. “I had ideas that I really wanted to work on and really the only way to go about it was to go on my own. That’s how Bachelorette came about. It was just having this collection of ideas that I wanted to record.”

At the same time that she was splitting off on her own as a songwriter, Alpers was also pursuing a graduate degree in music at Auckland University, focusing on computer-based composition. The program gave her access to a broad array of equipment, gave her a good grounding in recording technology and, she says, allowed her to think beyond the constraints of ordinary songwriting. “I think the university was good in terms of pushing my boundaries,” she says. “I had to get out of old habits and lazy ways of writing music, going beyond the obvious and exploring new possibilities.” But, she adds, she always meant to apply this experimental aesthetic to tuneful, melodic songs. “My intention was always for doing more pop kind of stuff.”

Alpers made a seven-song EP called The End of Things in 2005, overlaying staccato synths with whispery, surreal vocals. In the opening “My Electric Husband,” Alpers sings quietly over a thicket of sharp keyboard stabs, little blurts of video-game noise punctuating ethereal wordless choruses. By “The End of Things,” the closer, she has added the warmth of country guitar, the shimmering brush of looped harmonies to her palette, for a purity that never seems entirely natural.

Her first full-length, Isolation Loops followed two years later and represented a significant step forward. The album was recorded all alone, in a 1920s cottage (or “bach”) near the ocean, that had been in Alpers’ family for generations. There, with electricity but no hot water, Alpers spent weeks in total isolation, tweaking and retweaking her songs until she felt they were exactly right.

“I went out there to do it because it was a cheap place, where I wouldn’t have to pay any rent and where I could spend a good amount of time just focusing on music and nothing else,” she says. “I wasn’t really doing it as a romantic, artistic statement. It was just practical, a practical way of being able to spend time on music. Because otherwise, if I’m living in the city, I have to work full time to get by and it’s really hard to focus on music.”

She would arrive loaded up with supermarket supplies and stay the week, getting up early and working until she couldn’t anymore. “There were sort of bursts where really good things happened and unexpected things happened, which made it exciting,” she recalls. “And then there’s the other side where I might spend a whole afternoon working on something and then just having to get rid of it all because it’s not working.”

That solitary labor paid off on Isolation Loops, an album that was sonically richer and more complicated than the EP, with layered vocal counterparts and live-sounding drums and guitars. Alpers sounds as forlornly gorgeous as Nico when she sings alone on this CD, yet elsewhere in multi-tracked harmonies, she builds Spector-esque spaces and girl group sweetness into her delicate songs. She turns tough, too, on piano-framed “Doo Wop,” infusing angelic murmurs with unexpected snarl and rasp. It’s a very accomplished album, full of surprises and unusual shadings, and it won Alpers a fair amount of attention. She toured New Zealand on the strength of it with Cassette and the Ned Collette Band, then did a six-week tour of the US, then supported Beach House in dates throughout Australia.

By contrast, My Electric Family is more collaborative and band-oriented. “I started out making music on my own because that was the easiest way of getting my ideas across and getting them recorded and finished,” she says. “This album that I’m mixing at the moment has more instruments on it and it was getting to the point where I preferred to play with a band. It’s not just that. It’s gotten to the point where I really enjoy playing with other people.”

“It’s interesting because I sort of expected that it would be the same as last time,” she explains. “But my ability to focus for long periods was …I wasn’t able to do that so much this time. It became more of a social album this time. I got more people involved.”

She adds, “I did spend some time living out in that bach in the north island and I was out there for a few months with this album, but this time around I didn’t have that isolation. I actually felt better about involving other people in it.”

And as more people got involved – drummers, guitarists, and a brass band from Auckland – the album took on a direction of its own. “I’ve had a couple of different drummers who are much better drummers than I am…so that’s pretty much their style that brings out the beats in the music. There were a couple of guitarists that I got to work on it that just bring better skills in those areas,” she recalls. “That makes it more fun to work on because there’s the element of the unknown that they bring to it. They can inspire me to come up with different idea that I wouldn’t come up with if I was doing it all by myself.”

As before, with Isolation Loops, the album coalesced around a broad conceptual foundation. “Probably this is my academic background in music,” says Alpers. “I generally need some sort of concept to get excited about the album as a whole. I like to feel like I have to complete some sort of personal mission.” Still, she added, “As I record, that generally changes a bit. And maybe goes a slightly different direction. But it’s good to have a tight concept at the start.”

Isolation Loops’s unifying concept was the end of a romantic relationship. My Electric Family, by contrast, makes Alper’s creative process its main subject. “This album was about my own relationship with machines — and thinking about machines as being my family,” she explains. “I was interested in exploring the idea of communication through machines. Because that is what computer based recording is.”

Alpers says that she had a fairly definite idea of the vocal melodies and structures of her songs when she went into the studio, but that they changed during the recording process. Some songs came relatively easily. Others took months, even years. Alpers began work on one song on My Electric Family more than a year before recording. “I wasn’t able to sit down and say, okay, I’m going to record this song and let’s do it. It was almost like a puzzle that needed to be worked out over time,” she says. “It took a whole year of just kind of going back to it for it to really unfold and write itself or construct itself.”

Alpers’ songs, like her process, balance craft and immediacy, intellectual rigor with serendipity. Although her latest work sounds a good deal more organic than The End of Things, it retains a good deal of the precision and clarity of electronically derived music. It is buoyant, infectious pop, with soaring vocal melodies and quirky keyboard fillips, yet skewed through the curving mirrors and alternate realities of experimental music.

Asked about her influences, Alpers skips past recent electro-pop bands, right over the synthy pioneers of the 1970s and 1980s and lands, unexpectedly, at the very beginnings of pop history. “I’ve always been interested in 1960s psychedelic music and 1970s,” she admits. “ It depends on how early you want to go, but probably one of the first bands that I was really passionately into was the Beatles. As a child and as a teenager, and I’ve always gone back to the Beatles.”

Nearly all pop musicians are influenced by the Beatles in one way or another, but Alpers points to their balance of art and emotional transparency. “It’s John Lennon, in particular,” she explains. “His music was complex, but it was totally emotional. I think his songwriting, it came from him. He wasn’t trying to be clever. From his songs, you’d just get that raw emotions, delivered in this really intricate, this really tasteful way. I always just loved the sounds, the guitar sounds and George Martin’s production.”

What about electronic artists? Alpers rattles through a list that includes Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin. “There’s a lot of stuff that I like. I wouldn’t say that there’s anything that I’ve tried to emulate,” she says. “I think the biggest influence of my sound is just what instruments I have available.”

Alpers has been working with voice, synthesizer, keyboards and guitars for most of her career, lately settling on a couple of stand-up organs as a signature element of her sound. She had access to a couple of organs a few months ago and recorded their sounds into her computer for later reference. She also hired a brass band to back her up on the musical hall exuberant “Dream Sequence,” from the new album. But she says that she’s not the type to rummage through gear stores or glue herself to eBay in search of just the right sound for her next set of songs.

“I just use whatever I had lying around to record my ideas,” she says. “It’s a little bit like playing when you’re a kid and you use whatever’s around to make a collage or something, and there’s not a whole lot of thought you put into it. I feel that about what I make. I’ll come across a sound and then I’ll say, OK, I like that. I’m going to use that. It’s a little haphazard in some ways, but I sort of like doing it that way, because you come out with something that you wouldn’t have planned.”

Alpers is finishing her new album now, putting together a band to play her songs live, and continuing to follow her music wherever it leads her. “The important thing for me is that …I only want to keep playing music as long as I have something that I really need to express or communicate,” she says. “If I’m not doing it for those reasons then I don’t think I will keep playing. But as long as there’s some kind of need to get a particular sound out, as long as it’s enjoyable and as long as I’m doing it for the right reasons then I’ll be happy with where I go.”

By Jennifer Kelly

Inpress article: THE POWER OF ONE

BACHELORETTE alter ego ANNABEL ALPERS has once again gone into complete isolation in New Zealand to create her “fruity” second album. ADAM CURLEY breaks the silence.

The middle of winter isn’t, as you could imagine, peak tourist season in the beach towns along New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast, but that hasn’t deterred Annabel Alpers from abandoning her Christchurch home to take up residency in a salt-swept pad on the shore of Otaki Beach. Alpers, who plays fuzzy, laptop-crafted folk pop tunes under the guise of Bachelorette, presumably wasn’t looking for a ‘sun, surf ‘n’ sex’ getaway when she made the journey; just a getaway of any kind – an escape from the distractions of city life to record the follow-up to her 2007 debut album, Isolation Loops, which saw her embraced by Australian audiences when Melbourne-based label Mistletone Records added her to their artist roster.

Neither was Alpers looking for her newest batch of songs to follow in the footsteps of her debut, which was also recorded during a beach stay, in a hut her grandfather built on the south island. “I never meant for it to be a trend of mine to keep staying at beaches to record albums,” she laughs from the porch of her current shack-turned-studio, “but it seems to work quite well. I always find when I live in a city that I can easily end up wasting my day just doing stuff around town because there are friends to see and lots of appealing activities to get distracted by. So it’s good to get away from that. But it’s frustrating as well because sometimes I’m just craving social interaction and don’t have any access to it!”

It would be understandable if Alpers were to have a harder time welcoming her segregation from society a second time around. Since Isolation Loops was released, she’s barely spent a minute alone, chasing her Australian visit with a tour around New Zealand with fellow countrymen Cassette and Melbourne’s Ned Collette Band, as well as a six-week trek across the States, from west to east, supporting a string of likeminded acts as well as playing a handful of headline shows.

While Alpers is modest about any following she may have gained from her time Stateside, and gets more excited talking about how “fun and nice” her gigs were than talking up her connections to the internationally known artists she was sharing bills with, there was one particular experience that stood out for its utter bizarreness, she says. “Probably the highlight for me was a show I did in the Santa Cruz mountains in a haunted lodge, which had this crazy history of gambling and booze-running during prohibition and weird deaths in the lodge, which caused all the hauntings. That was with – I don’t know if you’ve heard of her – Scout Niblett, and Will Oldham was playing with her that night as well. That was pretty cool.”

Soon, Bachelorette will be able to add yet another acclaimed American band to her ‘Have toured with…’ list, as she makes her way back across the Tasman to join Baltimore indie pop outsiders Beach House for their first tour of Australia. The Melbourne leg of the jaunt sees Beach House and Bachelorette joined by a gaggle of impressive acts for the Mistletone Winter Notes party at Roxanne Parlour on Friday 22nd August, including Crayon Fields, Love Of Diagrams, Kes Band, Pikelet, Qua, Beaches, Panel Of Judges, Barrage, Actor/Model, Talkshow Boy and Lost Animal. But that’s news to Alpers, who clearly hasn’t had much contact with her label since she holed herself up to record. “Are you serious? Wow, that’s crazy!” she responds to news of the massive line-up. “I didn’t know that. What time does it start? Wow, that’s mad. That’ll be so much fun.”

While Alpers says recording her newie is unlikely to be finished before the tour, there is a chance we’ll be hearing “one or two” fresh songs from her when she takes to the stage. What they’ll sound like, however, will be a surprise. “I kind of don’t want to give away too much about the style [of the next album],” she says with the utmost politeness. “But I have been quite surprised by a couple of the tracks; I really didn’t expect myself to come out with something quite so fruity. There’s a couple
of really fruity numbers that turned out like that because that’s what the song wanted and not at all what I had planned.”

Indeed, Alpers admits much of her current bout of songwriting and recording has gone in a different direction to that which she had in mind before it commenced. “I guess, when you get started on projects, you always have an idea of what you want to do, but it’s not good for the music to put too many constraints on it. In the end, it starts doing its own things and stops fitting
into the original idea.”

One idea Alpers is keen to see fulfilled, and is willing to divulge, is a change to the Bachelorette live show. Where, in the past, she’s performed only with computers onstage to create her layers of spaced out sounds as well as add visuals, now she’s looking to increase the human element of her live act. “At least for these [Australian] shows I’ll be doing my usual solo set-up with visuals, but I’m thinking for my next album I might even have to get a band, because on this new album I’m using more live drums. And also, it was crazy touring around America, because with my solo show I was using computer monitors to play my visuals and in each place I was having to find some, either by borrowing them or getting them from a thrift shop. And it was crazy, running around trying to find computer monitors and then having to carry them around, because they were these big, ridiculous, old, heavy ones.

“So I’m starting to think that band members with legs might be a good alternative to electronic band members who need to be carried everywhere. And also they’ll be more interesting to hang out with.”

InPress live review:

Taking up the whole stage with her guitar and amp, laptop and projector and bank of keyboards comes Bachelorette. Following a false start, 10 minutes of technical problems (admirably covered by stilted improvisations that reveal her humble and humorous fluster - and the good natured patience of her fans), we get the ’60s cyber girl-group sounds of Doo Wop followed by the sublime glistening pop of A Lifetime. Backed by projections of moonscapes and soundwaves, “Bichilorit” (as she calls herself) seems to take a little while to ease into the show after the initial difficulties. Allowing herself a few wry smiles at the enthusiastic dances that I Want To Be Your Girlfriend brings out, she is soon joking and “apologising for needing something to apologise for”. She needn’t apologise for anything though, the sound is fantastic and her meticulously crafted and wonderfully dorky songs are warmly rendered and even more warmly received. The closing canon of My Electic Husband, On The Four and The End Of Things makes the perfect ending to a great gig, and the best place to escape to on this rainy night.

by ANDY HAZEL

 

From mX newspaper:

Bachelorette singer Annabel Alpers can’t think of anything worse than being stereotyped

There’s a clear thread of a failed romance in her simplistic songwriting, but Bachelorette creator Annabel Alpers doesn’t want to be cast as a ‘‘difficult female singer’’.

‘‘I always feel stupid talking about it because it’s a bit of a cliche as a musician, but it was a break-up, a love affair gone wrong that had caused a few problems,’’ Alpers said.

‘‘Most of the subject material is about a break-up. I guess I don’t like pointing that stuff out too much.

‘‘I’d like to avoid being classed as a difficult female singer-songwriter. You can’t help what inspires you and I’ve always tried to avoid fitting into too many stereotypes.’’

The New Zealander instead sees the main thrust of her debut album Isolation Loops as the isolation that was both unexpected and intentional in her life at this time.

‘‘My first release was an EP in 2005 and that was a mix of songs that weren’t related to each other, so with Isolation Loops I wanted it to have some sense of continuity and feeling that it’s a whole,’’ she said.

‘‘It was a concept album as well so I had songs based around the theme of isolation.

‘‘That theme kept popping up in my work then other things happened to make it even more so in my life.

‘‘I became more isolated in my life and I took it on as a personal exercise to make the most of this isolation.’’

Recorded in her great-grandfather’s hut in New Zealand’s Canterbury Plains, the album was recorded and mixed entirely by Alpers.

‘‘I was out there for the peace and quiet really and to get away from the city. It is incredibly calming,’’ she said.

‘‘When you’re making music you want your ears and eyes to be rested and it gave me a bit more space to be able to concentrate on music.’’

The album is a calm blend of psychedelic pop and folk and the addition of Alpers’ love of vintage instruments is obvious.

‘‘I started pretty early just buying different keyboards and organs from junk shops and other things like tape reel machines and things like that,’’ she said. It was a pretty organic process. ‘‘I didn’t have a set idea of what I was going to use, I just used what I had around.’’

Alpers said the ever-evolving addition of computers to music making allowed her to form the solo project Bachelorette.

‘‘It just sort of happened really. I used to play in bands and have always enjoyed playing music with other people,’’ Alpers said.

‘‘I would have material that I would come up with that didn’t sit with the band or vocal harmonies, and the band situation wasn’t quite right for getting those ideas across. I reached a point where I had a lot of stuff I wanted to do.

‘‘Computers were becoming more successful with multi-tracking so it was becoming more possible to record my ideas on my own. It was a natural process really.’’

by KARINA DUNGER

From Inpress: Bachelorette by Anthony Carew

By taking the name Bachelorette, Kiwi one-man-band Annabel Alpers isn’t outing herself as some sort of reality-television tragic. Rather, the Auckland-based, Christchurch-raised 28-year-old is a loner; a woman whose musical status is determinedly single. Her debut longplayer, as Bachelorette, is called Isolation Loops; such a title invoking not merely the looped keyboards and guitars that fill out her thickly, homely, bashful keytone-pop compositions, but also the fact that Alpers recorded it in isolation.

“I approached Isolation Loops as an album. It had a bit of a theme going on: the idea of isolation. True to that, I imposed isolation on myself. Not in a ’suffering artist’ kind of way, more seeing what the product was from spending time on my own,” Alpers explains, speaking in anticipation of her first-ever tour of the Australia.

That “imposed isolation” came in the form of a tiny, slightly rickety wooden hut, in the aptly-named village Rakaia Huts, a tiny fishing spot near the mouth of the Rakaia river, in the Canterbury plains on the coast south of Christchurch. Hand-built by Alpers’ great-grandfather, the hut allowed Alpers to function amidst isolation both actual and conceptual.

“I had a date in my mind that I wanted all the recording done by, so I thought that if I went and stayed by myself, somewhere far away from all distractions, that I’d be able to get things done more quickly,” she offers. “But I was also interested in how that isolation would influence my songs. It was quite an intense period. I was there about three months, all up. I was working on it pretty much the whole time. I’d have bursts of creativity, and then I’d hit a wall, and need a break. So I’d go into the nearest town, to be resocialised, then I’d go back to the hut.”

Given that Alpers confesses to being “very much the stereotypical teenaged outsider”, and given that she offers that her “favourite pastime as a teenager was shutting myself in my room in the dark, listening to records”, and given that those records were by The Smiths, Nick Cave, and The Jesus & Mary Chain, well, it’d be easy to portray Alpers as perpetual outsider, as antisocialist musician still functioning in teenaged isolation.

Except, Alpers has a whole history of wholly ’social’ performance; from her first band, Mouse, to a long-running Christchurch combo called Hawaii 5-0, in which she sang and played keyboards. “That band was such a matey, social sort of thing,” Alpers offers, deflating those ‘forever loner’ notions. “There were people in that band who weren’t really at all into the idea of success; for them it was about being with their friends, having fun.”

“Playing with other people has this simplicity to it: you share the fun of recording, touring, practicing. It’s about being together, about doing; not about being by yourself, thinking. But, at the same time, it’s limiting. If I had ideas for sound or vocal harmonies that I wasn’t able to communicate, to translate to the other members, that was frustrating; we couldn’t record or perform those ideas, so they’d just die.”

These days, in an era in which “people can record unlimited amounts of instruments and vocals at home, as opposed to needing a label to pay thousands of dollars for a 16-track studio”, Alpers has found her place, and her space. On her own, in isolation.

“I think there’s a lot more interesting, original ideas coming through in music right now,” she says. “If someone has something that they want to express in a really certain way, I think it’s only natural that they work on this themselves to try and communicate that. Does that make someone a control-freak? Maybe. But just because someone might be a control-freak with their art, doesn’t make them a control-freak with people, or with any other part of their life.”

From Beat magazine: Shane Moritz speaks to New Zealand’s most eligible pop lover

“I think I’m just happy looking at the whole Milky Way,” enthuses Bachelorette’s Annabel Alpers. Annabel doesn’t have a favourite constellation, but her favourite Monkee is Mike Nesmith (who is definitely not a constellation, but you never know, give him time anything is possible). “Once when I was 7, my family and I were returning from a trip to the country (actually, from the same hut where I recorded my album) and we saw space rubble flaming through the atmosphere. It descended to the earth in an arc.” Annabel’s connection with the atmosphere is personal, atmospheric even. It bedazzles her mind and infiltrates her music in a bonkers way. She probably has a glow-in-the-dark solar system on her bedroom ceiling.

Her CD Isolation Loops is girly space pop; a galaxy of starry-eyed boy-crushes distilled into electronic snuggles over neon beats. The album neatly evokes Annabel’s ongoing concerns and fascinations: “Boys mainly…People and machines. Trees. Space.” Annabel says the hard part about making a record as complex as Isolation Loops is that it’s never just one thing, it’s several. “A lot of different challenges and frustrations pop up as you’re recording, and you learn a lot along the way. I found that I had to make some concessions with the recording quality in order to get the album finished in the amount of time I gave myself, and I had to learn when to stop working on a track before it became overworked. Often the essence of the original idea for a song can get diluted during the recording process, so I was constantly trying to negotiate that line between retaining the song’s essence and being happy with the production quality. I’m always just learning as I go.” What part of the process comes easiest for you? “Again, I’m not sure that one particular factor is any easier than another. It’s all a challenge, but for some reason it’s a challenge that I enjoy. Music is one of the only things that I’ll happily devote my time to without needing some sort of compensation.”

As a toddler growing up in New Zealand, the star-gazer and supernova melody music maker had an active imagination. “When I was about 3 or 4 I had two imaginary friends called Clennyrule and Clennery who lived inside my family’s piano. I would go up and open the lid and sit there talking to them.” Annabel still lives in New Zealand and has a beef with her friends who visit Melbourne and never come back. She can’t blame them though. Last time she was here she didn’t want to leave either! She played some shows and wowed crowds and now she has even more friends! One of her best friends is The Tranquilizers’ princely Paul Ward. Back in N.Z., they played in a band named after a funky cop show. Upon request, she reluctantly tells a funny story about him. “I think Paul is one of those people that just can’t be joked about. There is one thing though - when he was a kid he had a sticker on his bike helmet that said “Now You’re Jammin!””

Annabel is competent on hundreds perhaps thousands of instruments. And not only does she love them all equally but she will look them in the eye the next morning, which begs the question: if she had to take one instrument to a desert island what one would it be? “Perhaps a ukulele. That would suit the desert island setting.” Now pick an album. “Easy. Panda Bear’s Person Pitch. I never get sick of hearing that album.”

Finally, have you considered what will happen to the name Bachelorette if and when you get married? “I haven’t thought about it, but that’s OK. There are plenty of other band names waiting to be plucked from the ether.”

From The Age: From Cottage to Cosmos

Bachelorette’s beautifully odd, inter-planetary pop seduces Dan Rule.

It’s difficult to conjure a more appropriate title for Isolation Loops, the celestial, future-folk-tinged debut from one-woman computer-pop symphony Bachelorette.

A product of neither a studio nor a hipster art clique, the album’s dulcet melodic tones and art-pop-inspired dynamics were brought to life in an archaic wooden hut on the forest-darkened fringes of the Canterbury Plains on New Zealand’s South Island.

And for a bashful Annabel Alpers, the blunt-fringed 28-year-old musician and sound artist behind the project, it’s a locale that holds a special significance.

“It’s an old family place,” she offers quietly, while chatting from her current home in Christchurch. “My great-grandfather built it and I went there a lot as a kid. It’s very primitive; there’s electricity, obviously, but there’s no hot running water or anything like that.

“It’s in this little valley with some trees, near the mouth of the Rakaia River,” she continues. “It was traditionally a fishing village.”

For Alpers, there couldn’t have been a more conducive environment for making music. “It was just perfect,” she sighs. “I was down there for about three months and there really wasn’t a lot of stimulus outside of the actual process.

“I definitely need a lot of space in order to concentrate on music.”

Alpers, it seems, has always been happy to keep music as her sole companion. Having grown up at the influential musical whim of her older brother, she spent her high school years as “the stereotypical outsider”, engrossed in the angst-riddled noise of bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain, rather than the latest chart hits.

“I just spent all my weekends in my room listening to music,” she laughs.

“That’s all I’d do. I learnt the bass and guitar, and due to my brother, I just got more and more into underground music.”

By the end of high school she was building a collection of antiquated keyboards, later doing a stint in late-’90s NZ psych-pop band Hawaii Five-O. But Alpers also gravitated towards academic fields, studying composition and computer-based sound design at Canterbury and then Auckland universities. And it’s in this context that Bachelorette really began to take form.

“I had been playing more psychedelic rock/pop kind of music in bands,” she says. “But once I was able to access computers with multi-tracking and electronic instrumentation, the more my solo stuff developed and the more fascinating it became. Bachelorette was really born out of computers.”

Beat review:

From the confines of her great-grandfather’s hut in New Zealand’s Canterbury Plains, Annabel Alpers is alone but never lonely. A bachelorette, perhaps, but one with the love and support of her computer and vintage keyboards. There’s also a great deal of self-harmonising, as an army of Alpers create warm and inviting melodies that wrap themselves around the listener like a thermal blanket. This space cadet hasn’t always been playing solitaire - I recall seeing her alongside Paul Ward (The Tranquilizers) in Christchurch band Hawaii 5-0 years back - but it’s clear that, as a solo artist, she is completely in her element.

Isolation Loops is a dizzying blend of indie folk and retro electronica (sci-folk?) that could easily be filed alongside Broadcast or Saturday Looks Good To Me. The songs take inner thoughts (fears, hopes, secret crushes) and beam them into an outer space setting. The “ultimately lonesome” Duet Plus One quickly establishes the unique juxtaposition of the mundane with fantasy - one minute the potential lovers are drinking tea, next comparing “space echoes”. Doo-Wop is a girl-group tribute that gets sucked into a space vacuum, as the smitten gal floats like a cloud into the stratosphere - this is human chemistry through cosmology. Other times, it’s just chemistry: “E = MC2″, Alpers sighs on Complex History of a Dying Star, sung as if this equation somehow explains all of our flaws, dreams and destinies.

The cutesy Poppachino does a dangerous balancing act on the borderline of Tweesville, but generally the element of kitsch is balanced with an organic sensibility and avoids being too whimsical. The best tracks — And The Earth Knew Absence, Isolation — have a quietly disarming quality, and the slow build from lo-fi to technicolour achieved in Your Magic Air is masterful. It’s really quite a debut and one that demands repeat listens. Eleven songs will do for now, but it’s tempting to deadlock the doors of that South Island hut, so Alpers can be forced to endure more unadulterated isolation for the benefit of us all.

by Chris Girdler

Mess + Noise review:

Bachelorette – New Zealand’s Annabel Alpers – seems like the private type. Her pop songs are wrapped up snug in a quilt of digital and analogue patches. They’re obviously all hers, hand woven through and through. On her debut, lyrically, Alpers tends towards the everyday and the simple to charming effects. You get the impression that even a cup of tea for her has the inbuilt soundtrack of Isolation Loops’ space odysseys and whimsical musings. It’s a well-paced and fascinated dawdle through quaint and quiet sounds, filled with bright Casio keyboards gazing out at a carpet of glow-in-the-dark stars.

It’s playful for the most part, but the kitschy keyboard veneer gives way to a poignant sense of storytelling. The sparse ‘And The Earth Knew Absence’ falls after the drum machine-driven ‘Intergalactic Solitude’, beginning with the hushed, ‘I lost my friend today/I can feel his presence all around’. For all the times where Alpers’ voice is buoyant atop her vast palette of sound, there are others where it’s isolated, left floating alone, unguided. This is an insular record, curious; just her voice and ideas on their own, wealthy with inspiration and easy to be swept up by. You glance out the window, the world goes by – it seems faster than usual.

by Richard MacFarlane