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Johnny Dowd Tivoli 2018-107.JPG

NEWs

Live on Omroep Vriesland December 16, 2022

Well it’s been a hell of year, 2022. But I wrote a few new tunes, played some great places, and performed on the fantastic Fries radio station, seen below.

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first shows in 18 months!

ON SUNDAY, JULY 26,2020 AT DE SCHALM, WESTWOUD, THE NETHERLANDS, and the Walk The Line Festival in Utrecht on August 1-2. Update from Anna soon. XO

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the curse of eve 10th anniversary tour:

I’m pleased to announce tour dates for the upcoming tour of mainland Europe. This will be a celebration of ten years and almost 20 tours (I’ve actually lost count) across Europe. I will be performing a combination of “The Curse of Eve” live silent film sets and songwriter sets. I’ve been working hard at new songs and new-to-me covers, as well as reviving favorites from nearly 20 years of songwriting. Tickets and venue information are available at my tour page. Hope to see you on the road!

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praise for silent movie month:

I’m so proud to be involved in 2 events in silent movie month here in Ithaca, “The Curse of Eve” (below) which debuts tonight, and “House of Usher”, at the Cornell Cinema on October 30. You can read interviews about these shows at the Ithaca Journal, Ithaca Times, and (another!) at the Ithaca Times.

the curse of eve: New operetta by anna coogan

I am very pleased that as the deadline for the first performance of “The Curse of Eve” is approaching, I am finally wrapping up the composition aspect of the performance and moving towards preparing to perform (all roles, all instruments, for now…) This is such a cool and timely piece, exploring the never-dated concepts of women’s rights, a womans place in the world, #metoo, Ithaca-made films, and so much else. I hope to see you there for the debut, or bring this stunner to you.

Fall Shows, operetta debut, house of usher

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Back again from a wonderful tour of Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Poland. Thanks again to The Tompkins County Community Arts Partnership for Sponsoring my trip, and thanks to Kathy Ziegler for inspiring me and making me laugh SO HARD. I'm back, more or less rested, and preparing for a fall of local shows. I'm finishing a new opera (lot's still to do, but it will be done by Oct 6, the joy of deadlines.) I'm also very excited to be performing a Halloween Special of the House of Usher full theatrical production on Oct 30. Hope to see you out there. More film score dates in US and Europe next winter. Keep in touch!

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summer tours and a new opera

After a spring full of teaching, reading, and refilling the well a bit, I'm looking forward to getting back on the road, both as a sideman and a headliner. First date, as guitarist, is Saturday, July 7th with Janet Batch at the Great Blue Heron Festival. Then I'll be joining Mary Lorson on guitar on Friday, July 20 at the Grassroots Festival. Then I'll be heading to Europe to tour with Kathy Ziegler (we'll be playing solo sets, and joining each other as well.) Dates above. By October, I'll have a new opera to debut, as well as another date for the Fall of the House of Usher. Hope to see you out there.


"House of Usher" in production now!

A timeless re-telling of the Edgar Allen Poe story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” combines the classic 1928 film by Jean Epstein with modern opera, film-noir, and improvisation by musicians Anna Coogan and Tzar. Explores the place where film, theater, music, and storytelling collide. The neo-operatic score was originally written and performed for the Ithaca Fantastik Film Festival in 2015, and returns to the Cherry in 2018 in a new and exciting form. Directed by Samuel Buggeln.Tickets available here for the March 30-31 performances:

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Credit Jos Goverde

Credit Jos Goverde

Home Safe

Home safe after a three week tour of film scores, solo sets, and joining Johnny Dowd as a guest guitar player in some of the most beautiful venues in Europe. You can read a few reviews from the tour HERE and HERE.

In other news, LCOST has made several year end lists, including top 10 in No Depression Through the the Lens, Here Comes the Flood, The Ithaca Journal, which listed it as one of the top 5 records of the year, and Monolith Cocktail. Thanks to everyone for the deep support of this release. Onward.


Daytrotter Session: 9/11/17

Anna and Willie's Daytrotter session, recorded on September 11. 2017 in Davenport, Iowa, is now available at the Paste Magazine site. Art by Johnnie Cluney and sound by Ian Harris. Check it out below. It was a long and beautiful drive to Iowa from Ithaca and back again. 

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Blood of a Poet tour

I'll be leaving in a few weeks for my first ever film score tour, performing an original guitar score to the brilliant 1932 Cocteau masterpiece "The Blood of a Poet" across the UK. You can see clips from the score debut at the Ithaca Fantastik Film Festival HERE and HERE.

You can read a preview of the score in the Ithaca Journal and the North Wales Pioneer.

Photo Credit: Ganesh Van Boggelen

Photo Credit: Ganesh Van Boggelen

About

LONG FORM BIO

“So here we are/We’re listening… Won’t you show me other worlds, please?” The Lonely Cry of Space & Time

Anna Coogan has been preparing for this moment her whole life, ever since she was a girl growing up in Boston, MA, influenced by her classical opera training and her father’s protest albums by Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan. After several efforts with her Pacific Northwest-based alt-country band north 19, a pair of well-received indie solo releases (2010’s The Nocturnal Among Us and 2012’s The Wasted Ocean) and a collaboration with producer JD Foster (2014’s Birth of the Stars), Coogan’s latest, The Lonely Cry of Space & Time, is a stylistic breakthrough.  

The album, a virtual two-person effort which features Willie B (Brian Wilson) on drums and Moog bass, combines Coogan’s three-octave soprano vocals, electric guitar soundscapes and pointed social commentary into a fierce cohesive piece which combines the personal and the political, in a musical hybrid of rock, country, pop and classical opera into a unique whole.  Her new direction was born from her series of performances in her adopted hometown of Ithaca, NY, in which Anna and Willie B created live musical accompaniments for vintage silent films.

The title track for the album – with its praise for scientific reason and rationality and its intimations of extraterrestrial life – was originally composed to accompany Soviet filmmaker Jakov Protazanov’s campy 1929 Aelita, Queen of Mars, which likened an alien invasion to the Russian Revolution. The inspiration was the discovery of gravitational waves by a group of researchers, with an actual audio sample included at the very end. “I’m optimistic whenever there’s a news story that doesn’t involve death and destruction,” says Anna, revealing that one of her relatives was part of the team that unearthed the sounds.

Two of the disc’s goth set pieces, “If You Were the Sun” and “A Wedding Vow,” evoke a childhood listening to Puccini’s La Boheme, both created to accompany French director Jean Epstein’s grisly 1928 horror film, La Chute De La Maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher), the latter playing over a scene in which an unlucky bride is buried alive.

Anna explains that much of the apocalypse-now-fueled The Lonely Cry of Space & Time was written and recorded during the run-up to the historic 2016 election, a reaction to such hot-button topics as inflammatory campaign rhetoric (“Collateral”), the implicit threats to immigration (“Wishing Well”), the environment (the title track) and Middle East unrest (the first single, “Burn for You”).

A distinct stylistic change from her previous work, Coogan explains her shift from the acoustic Americana of her past to the jangly, electronic buzz of the new album could be described as her “Judas moment.”   As a guitarist, think of her rubbery, pneumatic, wah-wah sound like a combination of PJ Harvey, Courtney Barnett and her personal favorites, Bill Frisell and Marc Ribot.

“The music I’m making with Willie is pretty different that my older work,” she says. “I felt I had reached an end point in what I’d been doing, at least for now.”

Just as Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Going On were steeped in the tumultuous ‘60s, Anna Coogan’s The Lonely Cry of Space & Time is inextricably linked to the flammable present.  The more accessible songs, like the girl-group “Sylvia,” a nod to poet Sylvia Plath, the new wave dance-pop of “Meteor” and the blues-country ballad “Follow Me” (co-written with JD Foster and Willie B) are intensely personal. Still, other tracks, such as “Collateral” (with its plea not to be typed or controlled by inflammatory words), “Burn for You” (an “apocalyptic lullaby” in which she describes “the brushfires of empire burn”) and “Wishing Well” (a pro-immigration plea which insists, “If they throw wide the gates, if they slam the doors/Keep on swimming until you find the shore”), all deal with how political issues affect the individual.

There have been many attempts at rock opera in the past, but The Lonely Cry of Space & Time is something different.  Call it operatic rock, a genre previously explored by the likes of Kate Bush, Jane Siberry, Lene Lovich, Yoko Ono and Freddie Mercury, among others. Coogan studied opera at the prestigious Mozarteum University of Salzburg in Austria, before moving to Seattle, where she worked as a fisheries biologist in Washington State and Alaska, which goes a long way to explaining her frequent use of water as a metaphor.  In fact, a drought in the Finger Lakes region of New York where she lived in part was a factor in the immediacy she brought to the new album.

A true independent, Anna releases her own albums and books her own tours, which have taken her all over the world, including international festivals like the Blue Ball in Lucerne, Switzerland, the Maverick in Suffolk, U.K., as well as the Glasgow Americana Festival and Celtic Connections in Scotland.  She has also played extensively in Germany and the Netherlands, and toured as a member of the Johnny Dowd Band.

“Oh let the oceans rise/To the shining skies,” she sings. “I will burn for you.”

On The Lonely Cry of Space & Time, Anna Coogan does just that, providing a shiny ray of hope for a world seemingly bent on self-destruction, deftly weaving the personal and political into a yin-yang hybrid.

“I think the two have been intertwined in me for a long time, since I was a kid” she observes. “And these days, I don’t feel as alone in my perception of current events.”

And now, neither do we.

 

-Roy Trakin

The lonely cry of space and time