Bachelorette

Bachelorette on Myspace

By taking the name Bachelorette, Kiwi one-man-band Annabel Alpers isn’t outing herself as some sort of reality-television tragic. Rather, the Auckland-based, Christchurch-raised 28-year-old is a loner; a woman whose musical status is determinedly single. Her debut longplayer, as Bachelorette, is called Isolation Loops; such a title invoking not merely the looped keyboards and guitars that fill out her thickly, homely, bashful keytone-pop compositions, but also the fact that Alpers recorded it in isolation.

“I approached Isolation Loops as an album. It had a bit of a theme going on: the idea of isolation. True to that, I imposed isolation on myself. Not in a ’suffering artist’ kind of way, more seeing what the product was from spending time on my own,” Alpers explains, speaking in anticipation of her first-ever tour of the Australia.

That “imposed isolation” came in the form of a tiny, slightly rickety wooden hut, in the aptly-named village Rakaia Huts, a tiny fishing spot near the mouth of the Rakaia river, in the Canterbury plains on the coast south of Christchurch. Hand-built by Alpers’ great-grandfather, the hut allowed Alpers to function amidst isolation both actual and conceptual.

“I had a date in my mind that I wanted all the recording done by, so I thought that if I went and stayed by myself, somewhere far away from all distractions, that I’d be able to get things done more quickly,” she offers. “But I was also interested in how that isolation would influence my songs. It was quite an intense period. I was there about three months, all up. I was working on it pretty much the whole time. I’d have bursts of creativity, and then I’d hit a wall, and need a break. So I’d go into the nearest town, to be resocialised, then I’d go back to the hut.”

Given that Alpers confesses to being “very much the stereotypical teenaged outsider”, and given that she offers that her “favourite pastime as a teenager was shutting myself in my room in the dark, listening to records”, and given that those records were by The Smiths, Nick Cave, and The Jesus & Mary Chain, well, it’d be easy to portray Alpers as perpetual outsider, as antisocialist musician still functioning in teenaged isolation.

Except, Alpers has a whole history of wholly ’social’ performance; from her first band, Mouse, to a long-running Christchurch combo called Hawaii 5-0, in which she sang and played keyboards. “That band was such a matey, social sort of thing,” Alpers offers, deflating those ‘forever loner’ notions. “There were people in that band who weren’t really at all into the idea of success; for them it was about being with their friends, having fun.”

“Playing with other people has this simplicity to it: you share the fun of recording, touring, practicing. It’s about being together, about doing; not about being by yourself, thinking. But, at the same time, it’s limiting. If I had ideas for sound or vocal harmonies that I wasn’t able to communicate, to translate to the other members, that was frustrating; we couldn’t record or perform those ideas, so they’d just die.”

These days, in an era in which “people can record unlimited amounts of instruments and vocals at home, as opposed to needing a label to pay thousands of dollars for a 16-track studio”, Alpers has found her place, and her space. On her own, in isolation.

“I think there’s a lot more interesting, original ideas coming through in music right now,” she says. “If someone has something that they want to express in a really certain way, I think it’s only natural that they work on this themselves to try and communicate that. Does that make someone a control-freak? Maybe. But just because someone might be a control-freak with their art, doesn’t make them a control-freak with people, or with any other part of their life.”

by Anthony Carew