The sweet escape of Ani Glass

In Didion’s eyes, our stories are essentially lines of best fit. Not in the mathematical sense, but in the sense that they form a narrative by which we can pin things down, shaping the motley events of our lives into something tamer and more sensical, at least to ourselves. Didion likened this very human habit to freezing what she called “the shifting phantasmagoria” of our bewilderingly real existence. We live not as mirrors but through snapshots of moments that stick, tacked up on a timeline that looks close enough to truth, and can sometimes replace it.

An ancient Greek word, by way of 18th century French, phantasmagoria started out in the realm of magic and illusion, but has come to mean, more broadly, a state where fantasy and reality braid into one capricious whole. Neither good nor bad, necessarily, but certainly strange. For Welsh–Cornish electro-pop artist Ani Glass, the word came to her via another 20th century radical, Peggy Guggenheim, who transformed the art world just as Didion changed the art of the essay. Rocked by a brain tumour diagnosis, and rocked again soon after by the nation being cast into lockdown, Glass escaped into tales of Guggenheim’s world of New York society, watching and reading all she could about the self-confessed art addict.

“I think we all tried to escape into certain worlds during the pandemic, and, even though I know it’s really obvious and cliché, I was drawn to New York, one of my favourite places,” she tells BEST FIT over coffee, and it’s easy to imagine her there, a former fashion student and photographer turned popstar with a PhD. Fans of noughties retro-pop collective The Pipettes may recognise her as one of the last two members standing, alongside her sister Gwenno, but a lot has happened since then. “I always describe The Pipettes as both the best and the worst thing ever,” she says. “What was really good about it, aside from meeting loads of fantastic, creative people, was that it showed me I’d been kind of coasting through life up to that point. It just made life more exciting.”

When the band ended in 2011 – playing one of their final shows at NYC’s Mercury Lounge – Glass knew she wanted to continue in music but wasn’t sure how to keep chasing the highs while dodging the crushing knockbacks of the lows. Quitting the London scene she returned to Cardiff, planning for just a few months away (“That was over 10 years ago now, so I think I’m staying”), and ended up forming a new band, The Lovely Wars, with a bunch of old school friends. Dabbling in post-punk–flavoured indie-pop, they released just one EP and one single (“Brân i Frân” b/w “Future is Cancelled”) before disbanding. “People had other responsibilities and I didn’t want to enforce my enthusiasm on them,” Glass explains. “That’s part of the reason I went solo, so I can just be overbearingly enthusiastic by myself.”

Between the summer of 2015 and late 2018, Glass released a string of brightly produced synth-pop singles under her own name (sort of; her real name is Ani Saunders), gearing up to debut album Mirores, which dropped the first week of March 2020. That would have been fateful enough, given what was waiting in the wings for public health, but, as Leonard Cohen used to love to say, “the devil laughs when we make plans.” In the run up to the album release, a routine scan revealed a tumour nestled deep inside her brain, thankfully benign, but too dangerous to operate on until it becomes absolutely necessary. “To have something like that turn up as an incidental finding was quite strange,” she says. “Everything felt quite surreal, as if I was in some sort of bubble, watching the world move around me but not being able to see or hear it clearly. Like I wasn’t quite in the real world but also wanting to escape from all that.”

Trapped at home and trying to come terms with her diagnosis, her dreams of New York began to coalesce into a new creative reality, finding inspiration in the late 1970s, early ‘80s art scene of the city’s East Village. She lists Arthur Russell, Laurie Anderson, and Philip Glass among her favourite musicians of that time, though insists she wouldn’t have been cool enough to move in their same circles. “I like to think I could have been at least somewhere vaguely in the vicinity, watching them work,” she says. “I just love the energy they had, and I tried to escape into that, in a creative sense, and the term ‘phantasmagoria’ felt like summed up that feeling quite well, alongside the life-altering diagnosis I had.”

Where Mirores cast her in the role of observer (both a nod to the Cornish word 'miras', which means to observe, and to Joan Miró, her favourite artist), Phantasmagoria at first turns that observation inwards before it rushes back out like a tide. We begin with the title track, which opens into a hazy scene of the morning after her diagnosis, “trying to wake up but you’re not fully able to.” While the song started out and almost finished as an upbeat synth-pop tune, very much in the mould of her earlier work, Glass couldn’t seem to put it down. “As the weeks went by the tempo started to get slower and slower, and I thought that was quite interesting because I tend to just leave the songs as they are once they get to a certain point,” she explains, recalling how the work set the tone for the rest of the album in terms of wanting to show a range of dynamics, not just bubbly, wholesome pop.

Though it’s pretty inviting to look at Phantasmagoria as concept album-lite, Glass prefers to see it as a journey, from retreat to re-emergence, and setting a lot of things straight along the way. “In hindsight, I feel a bit dramatic saying that this album is about my diagnosis,” she says, laughing. “Having had time to digest everything and come to terms with it, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just one of those things that can happen. It’s just life. The songs meant something specific at a certain time, but I can feel differently about them now and I think that’s good. It’s been a long process, making this album, and I feel a bit lighter about things now.”

Leaving the morning haze of “Phantasmagoria”, Glass leads us through various stages of the pipeline to acceptance of her new reality, from renegotiating her view of the world (“Arnofio”, “Now You Know”), through the softening of the shock (“Y Bore”, “The Dust Settled”), to plugging away and regaining control (“Kosel Yw’n Mor”, “O’r Diwedd”), with the final stretch saved for reflection and renewed self-belief (“Acwariwm”, “Rhwng Yr Ynysoedd”, and “Like Waves”). As if to reinforce that healing is cyclical, “Like Waves” returns us to the bilingual refrain of “Phantasmagoria”, with Glass singing “Like waves unchecked by land / Cerddoriaeth y cefnfor,” the Welsh part of which translates to “music of the ocean.”

As Joan Didion pointed out in her tragedy-wracked memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, “virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of ‘waves,’” and I think that goes for other life-changing challenges too. As Glass describes it, having spoken with a friend who’d lost her husband, grief can feel like you’re on one side of a river, needing to get to the other side but not knowing how to do it. “In a sense, what I felt was also a kind of grief,” she says. “A grief for the life I had, which was full of such naivety, just sort of floating through the world pretty carefree, with no real concerns.”

As it turns out, everything Glass learned in dealing with her diagnosis has proven useful when talking about her daughter’s journey. Melyn, who’s a little over 18 months old now, was born profoundly deaf, but conversations around it have been easier to navigate because Glass knows now how to set expectations and put people at ease. “It’s helpful, because you don’t get sidelined as much, and you don’t get shocked or surprised by people’s reactions,” she says. Although Melyn had cochlear implants and is learning to hear, discovering her baby’s deafness made Glass realise that she couldn’t present the music in the same way as she used to, because she wants Melyn to be able to engage with it. “She doesn’t have to like it, of course,” she adds, laughing. “But I just want to make sure I’m doing everything I can to make my music accessible for her, and for other deaf people as well. It's really important to me.”

Catch an Ani Glass live show and you’ll see that she has started to build in British Sign Language to her performances and captioning in the visuals. You might also catch her performing with a cellist, bringing to life songs like latest single “O’r Diwedd” (At Last), with its soaring, hopeful chorus and cheekily irregular rhythm. The cello is an instrument that Glass has taken more of a shine to in recent years. As a primarily electronic musician, the sensation of the wood body, with its resonant vibrations, feels exciting and organic, like a world of new possibilities. Inspired by Arthur Russell’s manner of playing, which could be deliciously off-kilter and oddly percussive, she says she had a naïve confidence to think that she could do it too. “I love the sound of it, but, honestly, I am not very good,” she says, laughing. “But it’s been a really good influence on how I write.”

Released in late September, on the 25th anniversary of the European Day of Languages, Phantasmagoria feels like a major step forward for Glass. Working with co-producer Iwan Morgan, she builds on her core affection for hooky synth-pop with a more developed curiosity for ambient layers and fluctuating mood, heaviness and light. There’s a real sense of grounding to songs like “The Dust Settled” (an all-too-brief folk dance of sorts, where repetitive bowed cello meets layered synth) and “Like Waves”, which calls back to the Welsh and Irish folk songs of her parents’ record collection, given an eerie, cinematic twist.

“I do feel pressure to write pop songs, because we’re always told that’s just what people want,” she says. “But when you’re on a creative journey, I think it’s important to push yourself, to dare to feel uncomfortable, and feel a sense of jeopardy. I think once I accepted that, I could feel in control and confident enough in what I’ve created that I can stand by every element and hopefully withstand any commentary on it without feeling like it’s too personal.”

I recall she said much the same thing about Mirores, but if, as Didion suggests, “time is the school in which we learn,” the lessons of these past 5 years have plainly made a difference. “It’s all just life, it’s all a journey,” says Glass, shrugging her jacket back on as we get up to leave. “People and situations come and go, and they can come and go around again too. It may not make it easier, but, for me, just knowing that I came through this hard time once is helpful. If I retreat again, I don’t have to worry that I won’t come back up. I can let the world spin on without me for a while and then rejoin it when I’m ready.”