Cassette
Objects Forever and Demo Records present Skin Deep: A Study On Human Skin And Concert, the new release from computer folk artist anrimeal. Commissioned by Objects Forever in early 2022 and written over a month in April, the album is a gorgeous sonic quilt of interwoven improvised pieces and spoken word, recorded and produced almost entirely on an iPhone. This approach was borne out of an attempt to understand what a recorded piece of improvised work could be; the result is an intimate 30-minute audio diary that covers a single month of lived experience.
The title is taken from an old sixties book on the complex history of tattooing, a reference that touches on how art can be deeply interwoven into our lives. For anrimeal this release operates like a series of painterly studies, where the artist approaches their subject from different angles in the hope of capturing its essence, “To me this is a study on human skin and concert; togetherness via the skin”.
But it is also a study in transformation, “In March, I came up with the idea of recording bits of audio, creating small songs every day throughout April and collating them into a month long audio diary. I felt that it was going to be a transformative time in my life, but I am also convinced that any time is transformative if you pay enough attention to it. Was it me that created the transformation by looking or was the transformation going to happen regardless of my looking at it?”.
anrimeal started recording and producing on 1st April 2022 and finished on 30th April, the fragments then pieced together throughout the following month. This was almost entirely done on a phone using the voice note and GarageBand apps. “I’d go through recordings at the end of the day, select, record and produce tracks while lying in bed”, she says. “I was attempting to remove the laptop and the gear from my process in order to better capture the spontaneity of the recordings”.
The result is this 30 minute piece, a dream-like patchwork where the listener drifts in and out of ambient synth washes and arpeggios, field recordings, snippets of conversation, scratchy guitars and repeated vocal refrains. All knitted together by the soft tones of anrimeal’s voice, given an ASMR-like quality by its whispered proximity to the phone mic, that unpicks the themes of the album. This is a deeply intimate project that offers a detailed meditation on personal evolution and the creative process by a singular artist.
This piece also features friends and artists Cerys Hafana (Welsh triple harpist) and her family (including her cat Pyjamas), Freda D'Souza (vocal and violin improviser) and Pauline Janier (on flute).
Having released an album - Could Divine - in 2020, and a follow up rework of the album as a memory (Could Divine, Remembered), this new material acts as the inverse, a speculative exercise going into her next album. “I wanted to try and predict what sort of themes I’d be looking after, what sort of ideas and sounds I’d potentially be interested in for my second full-on release”. Skin Deep: A Study On Human Skin And Concert is the thirteenth release on London drone pop band The Leaf Library’s Objects Forever label and is a joint release with anrimeal’s Demo Records label.
