Buzzin Pop Music

Tipped by many to make it big in 2011, singer and producer Nanna Oland Fabricius, artistically known as Oh Land has been making waves on the New York circuit since arriving in Brooklyn at the start of 2010.

Originating from the outskirts of Copenhagen Oh Land was a creative and artistic child who was educated with the Royal Danish and Royal Swedish Ballet Schools while enjoying a ‘circus like upbringing’ thanks to a family of creative souls.

Their unique and individual talents have left deep imprints on how Oh Land experiences and interprets the world around her. Having an opera singing mother, church organist father and clothes designing sister that artistic flair was bound to come out sooner or later and her music bears the fruit of her incredibly stimulating childhood.

Her approach to songwriting reaches beyond melody to touch on shared experience; her music simultaneously incorporates the whirrs, tics, and thumps of machinery and the soft, human tug of strings and delicately layered vocals.  It was this dual quality of her music – human, yet otherworldly — that landed this peculiar, talented, and determined artist on the radar of Epic Records during a 2009 showcase at SXSW at the end of a brief US tour that Oh Land booked herself.

Since relocating to Brooklyn, Oh Land started writing for her album, hooking up with producers Dan Carey (The Kills, Franz Ferdinand, Hot Chip) and Dave McCracken (Depeche Mode, Beyoncé, AFI).

The jungle drumming and layered vocals of White Nights evokes a quest to find peace and a sense of home in the chaos of a city that never sleeps.  She sings, “There’s a restlessness in me/Keeps me up ’till the dawn/There is no silence/I will keep following the sirens,” alluding to both the noise and throb of the city and the mythological seducers that call to lonely sailors.

“I wanted my new album to strike a balance between the big city and nature, because they’re both pulling me in different directions all the time.  I live and grow in the eye of the storm.”

That duality is also at play in the steady pulse and lavish loops of Sun of a Gun, which layers literal references to the sun (a symbol of the divine that we’re now afraid of) over unflinching comparisons to the twilight of an ill-fated relationship.

Oh Land says that music got her through the darkest days so far in her life, when a crippling back injury spelt the end of her dancing career. During those dark times the singer realised that it was music that had encouraged her to dance in the first place and began work on writing what would become her debut album in 2008.

Oh Land’s self-produced debut album, Fauna was released by Scandinavian tastemaker/producer/DJ, Kasper Bjorke, the album featured Oh Land’s first 10 tracks as an artist – lush otherworldly soundscapes that wouldn’t sound out of place alongside the Bjork LPs and trip-hop tracks that she obsessed over while growing up.

Certainly a name and voice to look out for in 2011, here is a clip of the singer performing the song Sun Of A Gun on the roof of The Guest Apartment.