Annie Hogan’s new album Destress Of Permanence is out now on Downwards Records with this new immersive film made by J D Waring which is also available on Annie’s YouTube Channel.

Stunning hour-long soundtrack from Regis and Anni Hogan; a suite of gentle, highly evocative nocturnes that weave and wind through wonderful melodic episodes and glistening atmospherics, landing somewhere between shoegaze bliss and melancholy romance.

Moving between daylight, dusk, and nocturnal moods, the soundtrack is largely shorn of percussion and tendered by Annie’s classically expressive keys. Imprinted with the tonalities of traditional strings and head-less choral arrangements that hint at ancient Greek music, the whole thing is set around reverberating room & field recordings, with Anni’s voice echoing through like pretty much nothing we’ve heard before.

Limited edition of 125 copies, includes a download.

Look out for the brand new March edition of Blitzed Magazine which includes a four page interview with Anni Hogan, as well as features on Some Bizzare, Soft Cell (The Art Of Falling Apart at 40), Martyn Ware, Wolfgang Flür and much more.

I’m excited to share my first ever piano remix which has just been released today! It’s for the very cool YOVA and their beautiful track ‘Where there is smoke’. I really enjoyed working on it and hope you like it too!

Signed copies are available HERE.

Limited Edition Clear Vinyl (300 Copies)

Out Now on Downwards Records

Ann Margaret Hogan’s latest album continues her navigations in to the ancient past via landscape, sound and memory begun on 2020’s Honeysuckle Burials. While that collection was inspired by her exploration of the ancient trackways, burial mounds and iron age hillforts of the Clywdian Range in North Wales, the inspiration for Funeral Cargo lies closer to home: Hogan’s birthplace in Oxton, on The Wirral, where Vikings crossing the sea from Ireland settled around 902AD; and the place where she now resides, looking out onto the Mersey from her home Studio Blue.

“Forty generations ago, The Wirral had a thriving Scandi community,” she explains. “There was a Norse parliament at Thingwall; Meols – previously Meir – Sandbank was a Viking sea port, walkable along the coast from me, and a lot of Viking remnants have been found there. Raby Mere, where I used to drive little motor boats as a kid, was a boundary settlement; Thurstaston has the legend of Thor’s Stone, a large red sandstone rock I used to climb as a kid and regularly dog walk now. I found huge inspiration, as you can imagine.”

The eight, mostly improvised, solo piano pieces that trace this ancient landscape of rock, river, sea and sky are augmented by atmospheric field recordings from Hogan’s walks around these shores, the Studio Blue garden and the Wirral docks. All but ‘Wolfswaltzer’ – an affectionate tribute to friend and musical collaborator, Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flür that its author describes as: “a simple waltz of coffee, food, friends and music”– paint vivid aural pictures. The roiling waters of the river and it’s deep blues undertow, the dancing patterns of sunlight on waves, clouds scudding across luminous estuary skies and the calls of birds on the wing around Studio Blue, where it was recorded last spring as the country first went into lockdown. For Hogan, like all of us entering this strange new reality, it was a time of reflection and solace in nature during that long, warm, sunny season.

“I was immensely inspired by my local natural world,” she says, “and took very long dog walks, making many field recordings and just feeling the atmospheres. The fog on the docks really inspired the piece ‘Funeral Cargo’ and I actually use a tiny bit of foghorn at the beginning.” Intuiting the ancient past, Hogan suggests the imagery of the title track might echo the symbolism of a Viking funeral. “It might symbolise death – I had images of bodies on boats. But then I felt more it was about the symbolism of fire; burning everything and moving forward.”

Big thanks to The Quietus!