Ani Even’s Album, “SKINWALKER”: A Sonic Rite of Transformation and Identity
Copenhagen-based experimental artist Ani Even, the alter ego of Bror Lynge, explores the complexities of transformation, identity, and coexistence in humanity with SKINWALKER, his debut album. The first album is a truly exhilarating listening experience that plays with the boundaries of electronic music, folk, and ritual, resulting in an 11-song record that builds a sonic experience while transforming and identifying the listeners' experience.
Skinwalker is born of Ani Even's heritage, woven with Danish, Faroese, and Greenlandic lineages. A world where ancient prayers and futuristic references become equally resonating. SKINWALKER is equal parts sonic cathedral, complete with primal rhythm and repetitious meditative chanting, all wrapped within a modern soundscape, that can appeal to the contemporary industrial perspective without missing a beat. This tension and release playfully inscribe a compositional characteristic to each of the album's tracks, signaling the central trope of the Native American myth of the Skinwalker as a shapeshifter able to occupy many forms of being. In Ani Even's depiction of the Skinwalker, identity is a shapeshifting collective consciousness for him: “We are never just one thing. Masculinity, softness, queerness, chaos, responsibility – they coexist. Ani Even is where I can be all of them at once."
“SKINWALKER” moves through a staggering spectrum of sounds. Its soundscape combines darkwave and industrial electronics with Nordic chants, mournful piano lines, and disjointed choirs, creating what Ani Even calls chantcore or caverave. “Run to the core” and “It’s a great deal” sound prophetic and ceremonial, with a heartbeat-like pulse and layered, atmospheric synths. “I know that line” and “Not my friend” pivot from this more ritualistic soundscape to more intimate personal reflection on addiction, being a father, and trying to belong in a broken world.
The evolution of the album’s sound design is sonically crisp and fluid, balancing the stark precision of electronic production with the human warmth of voice and breath. In a sense, it occupies both time, as though recalling an ancient history refracted through a digital prism.
“SKINWALKER” builds to a memorable cathartic climax, not one of resolution but of acceptance. Ani Even, confident in his contradictions, transpires vulnerability into a source of power. The concert in which the album was released calls attention to the album's design, situated in Brønshøj Vandtårn, a former water tower in Copenhagen, an enduring myth within machinery and sound. With SKINWALKER, Ani Even asserts himself as one of the most compelling avant-garde voices in Denmark, a sonic alchemist ever so attached to the polysemic meaning of art through identity, emotion, and myth.
