Many influential artists and characters once played at renowned and long-defunct clubs like CBGBs, Max’s Kansas City and others during the mid-to-late 1970s — including a now cult-favored local-born artist Annie Bandez, who known as Annie Anxiety (and later as Little Annie) was the frontperson of punk act Annie and the Asexuals. After several years of attempting a series of unsuccessful creative pursuits, Bandez relocated to the UK, where she would up joining the famed anarchist commune Dial House, led by activist Penny Rimbaud. And while a member of Dial House, Bandez quickly established herself as an artist with a singular voice with the release of her solo debut single “Barbed Wire Halo,” which was released through Crass Records.
Interestingly, when Bandez relocated to the UK, a number of punk rock artists including Bandez herself had begun shifting towards a much more diverse, multicultural approach, exploring dub, rocksteady, ska and other Caribbean genres. In the summer of 1983, Bandez along with legendary dub producer Adrian Sherwood and members of Crass, Family Fodder, African Head Charge, Flux of Pink Indians, London Underground and Art Interface went into the studio to record her stark, industrial dub-based solo debut Soul Possession, which would be released by Corpus Christi Records in 1984. And it resulted in a number of lengthy collaborations with Nurse With Wound, Coil, Current 93, Swans and Marc Almond.
33 years after its initial release, Dais Records will be re-issuing Soul Possession on January 6, 2017 and the re-issue’s first single “Burnt Offerings” is an ominously apocalyptic and minimalist bit of industrial dub featuring mechanical clang and clatter and twinkling keys paired with Bandez’s half-spoken vocals that manages to bring to mind Annika Henderson‘s solo work and her work with Exploded View — and in some way it wouldn’t be surprising if Bandez’s work influenced Henderson and producer/collaborator Geoff Barrow at some point.
Bandez will be on touring Europe throughout the Spring with Swans. Check out tour dates below:
Tour Dates, Spring 2017:
3/08 Rockefeller – Oslo, Norway
3/09 Kraken Sthlm – Stockholm, Sweden
3/11 Grey Hall – Copenhagen, Denmark
3/12 VoxHall – Aarhus, Denmark
3/14 Fleda Club – Brno, Czech Republic
3/15 Taba Ka Kulturfabrik – Kosice, Slovakia
3/17 Legendos Klubas – Vilnius, Lithuania
3/19 Sentrum – Kiev, Ukraine
3/22 FORM Space Club – Cluj-Napoca, Romania
3/23 Control Club – Bucharest, Romania
3/24 MKC – Skopje, Macedonia
3/25 Dom Omladine – Belgrade, Serbia
3/27 Pogon Kulture – Rijeka, Croatia
3/28 Rote Fabrik Ziegel oh Lac – Zürich, Switzerland
3/29 FZW – Dortmund, Germany
3/30 Kompass Klub – Ghent, Belgium
3/31 Paradiso Music Hall – Amsterdam, Netherland
