Annika Ström

B. 1964 in Helsingborg Sweden. Lives in Hove, UK

Royal Academy of Art, Media, Copenhagen

First sound work: 1995

”Sometimes, wrongness – the wrong attitude, the wrong aesthetic, the wrong note – feels oddly right. Take Ström’s musical compositions, which both soundtrack her videos and exist in the form of studio recordings and public performances. In these songs, the artist’s sweet, rather melancholy voice floats over one of a number of cheesy built-in backing tracks from a Casio keyboard, repeating phrases that despite or perhaps because of their simplicity evoke the most complex of emotional states. Maybe the best example of this is a composition from the video Six Songs For a Time Like This (2001), in which Ström sings the refrain: ‘I don’t know what to do / I don’t know what to do / I have this feeling for you / I don’t know what to do’. These are words with no fat on them, no gilding, no dangling, unnecessary footnotes. Most of us have felt this way, and we know that Ström’s bald statement of the facts is all that’s needed to communicate the heartbreak of untenable love. When this sentiment is sung, however, it does more than communicate – it also consoles. As the best pop singers have always known, it is the particularity of the human voice that moves us, its quiver of personality, of difference. The logic is simple: if she feels like that and if she’s not me, then I am not alone."/

(Extract from “keep going” by Tom Morton 2006

© Meta.Papers and Tom Morton June 2006)

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