"Que reste-t-il...?", or "What remains...?" are the opening words of a legendary song about resignation to lost love by the generation-spanning singer Charles Trenet, whom I was lucky enough to see on stage before he died. His style and dress were those of a long-gone era, but that night he was strutting and smiling with an almost childlike energy.
Apart from the childlike quality that must have been one of the reasons he lived for so long, since Trenet was the kind of wise elderly artist with an ear ever open to the new, he has little in common with one young woman I went on to discover recently, but I needed a change of air from reflecting on old loves.
Anna Oxygen can't be her real name.
It's certainly no household one and in her place at MySpace, Anna Oxygen is among thousands of new musicians with little to say apart from the barest details. Her music is electronic, experimental and made a big change from hearing half a dozen women presenting their own varied accounts of that Trenet standard, best known in English under the title "I Wish You Love".
I'm always interested in themes and variations but Oxygen, who comes from Oregon, has her own approach to something else close to my thoughts of late, which is a return to very basic building blocks of music. Her means are electronic, the kind of thing people can do in isolation nowadays, and at first hearing the sound can seem cold if you're fresh from warm instruments.
Anna Oxygen has released the fruits of recent endeavours on an album called 'This is An Exercise,' which needed three successive hearings to begin really to appreciate as a concept. It is one that tackles some themes of alienation and isolation in an interesting and outgoing way. Subsequently to learn that Anna likes teaching music technique and getting physical with it made sense after sounds like this.
No straightforward love songs here, silly or otherwise, though the words and especially the music are frequently sensual. Anna Oxygen has made a world of her own about a person living very much in their imagination and inviting us in, rather like the interlocuteur who interrupts her reveries on one track, 'Walk.' She knows her music is mechanical, explores robotic notions and can sing with an easy and natural voice about body and mind as organic machines, in colourful lyrics that are steeped in fantasy and the psychedelic ('RRN', 'Psychic Rainbow' and her 'Willow Song'). The childlike aspect is in the sharing of a playful solitude. She can equally draw on the music of ceremonial occasions (a strange, short 'March of Human').
 Musical reference points for ears accustomed to traditional instruments are as basic as Anna's voice, whispering, singing, chanting, and with ethereal choruses close to trance and the repeated patterns of physical exercise. The 14 tracks on the CD are short but almost always lead one into the next with no abrupt transitions of mood, until Anna Oxygen (a spartan home) decides on one by electronic means, bringing in new pulses and beats and playing around with a very broad sonic spectrum it takes a good hi-fi system to reproduce.
The album is one to hear repeatedly with open ears; like a lot of electronic music, which is far from a new genre though its popularity has grown greatly in the decades it got into disco and dance-floor, it is more complex than you'd imagine at a first, perhaps rather chilly, hearing if you're unfamiliar with this kind of stuff.
"I grew up recording on this eight-track karaoke machine I got from my parents when I was 6. (Later) I bought a drum machine for my band Jacqueline Bon Bon because we didn't have a drummer. I bought the keytar for this band, and on the side I would make up all of these stories and electronic songs by myself in my room. Olympia was really influential in that suddenly I was in a village where (the pop culture) gap could be meddled with. The idea of 'public' there sometimes just means that you are in a small room with other people from your small town, and you all have something to offer."
The "keytar" Anna talks about is a sort of portable synthesiser, named for its supposed resemblance to a guitar, but that definition says little about it when you actually look at the instrument born in the 1980s and see all its buttons. From self-taught beginnings at an early age, which Anna recounted to Laura Cassidy in the above-cited interview for the Seattle Weekly, Oxygen has herself gone on to become a teacher, telling Cassidy of youngsters aged 10 to 15.
She sounds like a loner, still making up stories with imaginary friends ('Mechanical Fish' being one such exercise in surrealism), but says, "I no longer condone the concept of DIY. My new motto is DIT: Do It Together." It happens also to be one of mine, but that's another story for the next entry, about an extremely well-established rock band whose long career helped me through a stage of accidentally drug-induted paranoia!
You can get an idea of the sound, the crystal voice and the beats she builds to sustain it, from Anna Oxygen's 'Fake Pajamas' .mp3 on her Kill Rock Stars page, but if you're interested in musicians who like to experiment and encourage others to do the same, you'd do better to sample several tracks from the album at the iTMS.
One review I read today, after discovering the music, makes clear that she is very much the performance artist. I wasn't compelled to a fit of aerobics while getting into 'This is An Exercise', but could very well have been so because Anna's obviously a pretty physical kind of nerd.
I'm not nerdish enough to understand fully how a decent stereo system with well-placed speakers, back to the wall, can send sounds flying right around the room you're in. As I hinted, 'This is An Exercise' puts your stereo to the test in doing so, while the feeling of being drawn into somebody else's sonic arena dissipates since Anna Oxygen's music soon seems partly to come from somewhere inside the listener as well.
It's sometimes a good idea simply to push buttons and see what happens, if you're sensible. That's how Anna started. Don't ask me how I found her; I don't recall more than just pushing buttons one day. At the iTunes Music Store. When the result is by a woman and I like it enough to know my ears could take more of it, she gets on to one list.
Every now and then I revisit that list, which is at the bottom of a self-imposed system of levels I built into in iTunes as a safeguard against impulse buying, and I push the buttons all over again, moving some things upwards a bit. Anna Oxygen is one of the girls who slowly but naturally bubbled her way to the top.
4:07:30 PM link 
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