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Being among the artists invited by Animal Collective to perform at a festival in Europe is certainly a way to make a splash on the international indie scene. Even more so if you are only 19 years old and have only one self-published EP. In 2022, when the band joined the curatorship of Le Guess Who in the Netherlands, that's what happened to Anastasia Coope.
Her noisy debut was followed by performances as the opening act on a European tour by Avey Tare, lead singer of Animal Collective, who said that Coope's experimental folk gives the impression of being ‘isolated in a special, perhaps supernatural place, but also seems rooted in the here and now’. An idea that the singer explores in a brief conversation with Agenda Porto, moments before taking to the stage in Paris. In her creative search for the ‘perfect culmination’, she says she is always trying to distance herself ‘from being particularly influenced by anything in particular’. Her aspiration, she says, is to synthesise what interests her ‘into her own invention’, into ‘something totally new’.
It was during the COVID-19 lockdown that the young woman, who grew up in Cold Spring — a small town in the Hudson Valley, New York State — began exploring sound with tools such as Garage Band, without dissociating herself from her artistic training in painting and drawing. While some describe her songs as sculptural, she confides that she is ‘always thinking visually when composing’.
To ‘try to translate a visual representation of life into sound,’ Anastasia Coope uses techniques that have been compared to collage or minimalist painting, in which her voice, superimposed in different layers, functions more as an instrument than as a vehicle for messages. Something that confirms to us: ‘I feel that the lyrics exist only for me to transform them into sound.’
The author admits that, although she can ‘compose on the guitar, piano or other instruments,’ her ‘ideas usually start with singing,’ because ‘the voice is more readily available.’ She also explains that the songs she publishes often ‘include her first ideas and first recordings’ and are created under a ‘veil of abstraction that makes it easier to share with the public’. Rather than thinking about writing a song on a particular theme, she reveals that, in most cases, she takes on ‘the role of different characters’.
Despite her intimate creative method, the composer admits to Agenda Porto that her music, marked by overlapping and repetition, ‘can sometimes be very scattered’. She says she likes to ‘externalise’ a ‘thought process’ that consists of ‘having an idea, executing it or thinking about it over and over again, and rewriting it’. Something that ‘starts out as convenient and then becomes more hypnotic’. Like the simple phrases you hear in the songs, which take on a distinct weight as the loops multiply and intertwine.
Anastasia Coope | © Ellie Hoffman
Anastasia Coope | © Paper Magazine
Regarding her influences, in previous interviews we found references to Brigitte Fontaine and Nico, icons of the 1960s and 1970s, or earlier names such as Pete Seeger, The Everly Brothers and The Chordettes, but also more recent bands such as Broadcast, Black Dice and Clinic. There are also allusions to Enya, who was introduced to him by his grandmother, or to medieval choral music and liturgical music, as well as to impressionist painting and French cinema. But Coope has emphasised more than once that such ‘influences seem to be more deeply rooted in ideology than in music’, meaning that, more than aesthetics or techniques, he is interested in the artists' ways of thinking and positioning themselves.
A year after the first famous endorsement, it was time for another name to focus on Anastasia Coope's soundscapes. Angus Andrew, lead singer of Liars, released her seven-inch Tough Sun on his label No Gold. Then, in May 2024, her North American debut album, Darning Woman, was finally released by Jagjaguwar, a label whose catalogue includes artists such as Angel Olsen, Bon Iver, Dinosaur Jr., Jamila Woods and Unknown Mortal Orchestra. It was also in that year that the singer, who had since moved to Brooklyn, performed live for the first time in Portugal, at the Mucho Flow festival in Guimarães.
After releasing DOT, an EP with six new tracks, in November last year, the 22-year-old returns to Portugal this week for a performance in Aveiro on Friday and another in Porto, scheduled for 6:45 pm on Saturday, 28 February, at the Lovers & Lollypops record label venue. On stage, she will be accompanied by another heavyweight who has been accompanying her on this short tour of our continent: drummer and percussionist Moses Archuleta, one of the founders of Deerhunter.
‘I always find that European audiences are more immediately interested in my music than American audiences. I love discovering new places, and I'm lucky to have an agent in Europe who gets me really interesting and unconventional gigs.’
Capa do primeiro álbum da cantora, lançado em 2024 | © Jagjaguwar
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