The first of many women we see projected on to a large stage screen tonight is Naomi Campbell, clad in knee-high leather boots, fearsome headgear and little else. For a lingering 20 minutes in black and white she dances playfully to the sound of low drones, like static waves lapping a digital beach. It could be a long-form arty fragrance commercial. You’d only be half surprised if it ended with Anohni breaking out of a box and telling us she’s not going to be the person she’s expected to be any more.
Quite how this pensive intro relates to the former Antony and the Johnsons musician’s Mercury-prize nominated eco-conscious electro album Hopelessness isn’t obvious. Even less so why Campbell – supermodel of chucking-mobile-phone-at-a-maid infamy – has been selected as effectively Anohni’s earth mother spiritual avatar (she will appear onscreen again at the end of the show, miming the words to Drone Bomb Me with tearful eyes). But, as a device for announcing this show’s clever multimedia credentials, not to mention its superior breeding to your average pop performance, it’s effective. Drawing on Chichester-born, New York-made Anohni’s background in performance art, this is a suitably striking audiovisual live treatment of what is comfortably one of the year’s best records.
Anohni finally appears to sing 4 Degrees, her synth-powered banger about rising global temperatures. Dressed like a Jedi, her face shrouded by a veil, she cuts a mysterious, almost forlorn figure, disembodied even from her own gymnastically supple and fragile voice. She’s flanked by American experimental musician Daniel Lopatin AKA Oneohtrix Point Never and Scottish beatsmith and sometime Kanye West go-to guy Ross Birchard AKA Hudson Mohawke. The pair resemble DJ friars in headphones and robes, prodding at laptops as they reconstruct Hopelessness’s crisp, clean, imposing electronic architecture.
The at-times transcendent quality of the music is at jarring odds with the grisliness of Anohni’s words, which range across subjects from the dying natural world to political hypocrisy and sexual violence with unflinching brutality. On Watch Me she coos a sarcastic come-on to CIA snoops watching her watching pornography. On Obama she grimly denounces the outgoing president who swept to power on a tide of the very thing that her album desperately decries a subsequent loss of: hope. Set to a stuttering trap beat, Indian Girls – one of a handful of non-Hopelessness tracks performed tonight – includes such stomach-turning imagery as “you cut the throat of Indian girls / drove a stick from anus to mouth”.
Save for a terse thanks to collaborators and crew after the credits roll, Anohni doesn’t speak a word, lest the spell somehow be broken. It would all feel like the work of someone who takes herself far too seriously were it not all done with such fine theatrical poise. If the catastrophic future which Anohni starkly prophesies comes to pass, we’ll wonder why we didn’t take her words more seriously still.
