Soap&Skin
Under the stage name “Soap&Skin” Anja Plaschg produces beguiling and engrossing music. She combines piano and violin themes with electronic sounds, harmony comes across dissonance without crossing it, and Anja’s distant, fragile voice floats above all. The songs she composes are serious and sublime – but at the same time there’s a fragility to them, as if balancing on a tightrope above the abyss between the frail, the fraught and the majestic.
Still the career of Anja Plaschg, born in 1990 on a farm in the tiny village of Gnas in the south of Styria and living in Vienna currently, is at the very beginning, but developing stunningly fast. In 2006, just after burning her first demo-CDs, Soap&Skin was “adopted” by the German Techno-Punk T. Raumschmiere, who also released the piece “Mr. Gaunt PT 1000” on the “STRIKE75 EP”. (In early 2009 the song will be part of the score of Austria’s horror-blockbuster „dead in three days – the sequel“.) 2007 was the year of her breakthrough with dozens of shows all over Europe and euphoric press, 2008 brings her first release to the long time waiting fans.
To date Soap&Skin’s MySpace page forms the center of her artistic (self-)presentation. The graphic environment is completely designed by Anja herself and proves, just like the photographs and the videos on the site, her strength even in the visual field. On Myspace the extent and level of Soap&Skin’s independence and expressive creativity in any kind of medium becomes immediately apparent. No wonder she was asked in 2007 already to play a part in a performance production, to which she has successfully agreed, and will be seen as an actress on stage in 2008 – interpreting the legendary Nico.
Soap&Skin’s approach to music is based on two independent supports: solid training in classical piano as well as the violin and the resulting technical skills on these instruments, and, opposed to that, the composition of rawer sounds on the laptop, where there’s always a certain hard to control, random element involved. Soap&Skin succeeds in making these opposed forces (almost recalling Nietzsches Apollinian and Dionysian principles) allies in her musical quest, which is all the more intense for the tension between its elements.
In her music the two elements – almost echoing the metaphor of soap and skin – rarely completely mix, rather one of the two musical styles stands out. There are her mostly acoustically instrumented compositions, where her ecstatic, goose bump inducing voice, with its otherworldly distance resonates with the piano and the violin. And then there is the electronic side of Soap&Skin: tracks, which are primarily fed through computer programs, mostly do not use vocals and unfold their character from mixing sound collages of everyday noises (like from her parents hog farm) with idm-beats.
And why the name Soap&Skin?
Anja explains that soap and skin are two substances which react on each other in different ways – not only soap cleans skin but it also protects it, and foam is as beautiful as it is vanishing rapidly…
website :
Myspace : http://www.myspace.com/soapandskin
