Toys in the sandpit
Last week Liesa Van der Aa opened for Antony and the Johnsons at the Gent Jazz festival. The concert was the high point of a wonderful 2012 for the Flemish singer, musician and songwriter. At the beginning of the year she released her debut, Troops, one of the best albums I’ve heard this year.
Liesa Van der Aa is a promising new name on the Flemish music scene
Though music was her first love, up until Troops Van der Aa was mainly known as an actress. She was in Zingaburia, an absurdist television series for children. And you can still catch her in De man zonder eigenschappen (The Man without Qualities), the theatre adaptation of Robert Musil’s monumental novel.
But it all started with music. At five years old, she picked up the violin and at 18 she was ready to continue her violin studies at the Conservatory. She didn’t, though, and went to the Herman Teirlinck Institute instead, a famous school for actors that also has a musical section called kleinkunst, a mixture of cabaret, singing and song-writing.
As an adolescent, Van der Aa, born in 1986, was exposed to pop music and jazz. “By browsing in my parents’ record collection I discovered the Beatles and the Velvet Underground,” she remembers. “Not that it eclipsed my love for classical music, but practising eight hours a day on my violin wasn’t my cup of tea. Probably one day I’ll regret that I haven’t carried on. But not yet.”
Room to develop
Van der Aa, a torrent of words who grew up in Brussels but now lives in Antwerp, soon discovered that training at the actors’ institute wasn’t really what she wanted. Yet she persevered and doesn’t regret it. “I met loads of interesting people,” she explains. “More importantly, they let me have a room for myself. That’s where I started writing songs and singing. To do the latter, I had to learn to play the piano, since the violin isn’t an instrument you can accompany yourself with as a singer.”
“During the same period I learned to treat my violin with effects; for instance to lower the pitch a few octaves, which makes it sound like a cello or a double bass.” Laughing, she adds: “After a while I was sounding like an orchestra, all on my own.” It wasn’t exactly what her teachers expected. “The first year, they really tried to push me in another direction, but to no avail. And from the second year on they let me have it my way.”
Some even encouraged her knack for experimentation. Ghent rock musician Pieter-Jan De Smet, for example, who doesn’t shy away from some experimentation himself, told her: “You’re in a sandpit and there are loads of toys. Play with them!”
That’s what she did and it resulted, seven years on, in Troops. Listening to the album, I first had the impression I was hearing a full band. But in fact, barring a few guest musicians like the Antwerp chamber quartet DAAU, American trumpeter Jon Birdsong and a Berlin choir, Van der Aa played all the instruments herself – keyboards, melodica, percussion and, of course, violin. Loads of violin, even though it may not always sound like violin.
“It’s great to play with others, because that lifts you up, makes you a better musician. But I have a problem with it,” Van der Aa confesses. “I’m a poor communicator; I’ve difficulty telling people what I want. So I decided to make Troops on my own, because asking for help felt like a burden.”
Going it alone
“Sometimes I really feel bad for wanting to do everything by myself. During the recording of Troops, I often wondered what I had got myself into. But I didn’t want to give in.” She grins: “Don’t get me wrong: I don’t believe that I’m a better musician than all the ones I’ve played with... I’m not Prince!”
To record Troops, Van der Aa went to Berlin, where she worked in the studio of German avant-garde rock band Einstürzende Neubauten. For two months, their sound engineer Boris Wilsdorf was her partner in crime. “I knew I didn’t want to work with a producer who told me what to do because that would only end badly. I wanted to experiment, though, to try out loads of different things. Boris helped me with that. And I don’t think the album sounds like Neubauten.”
“I find Troops a highly romantic album,” she continues. “But friends often tell me I play sad music. ‘You’re a happy, joyful woman. Why does your music sound so depressed?’ Maybe because writing that kind of music is much easier than the sunny pop songs you’d associate with, let’s say, Paul Simon. I wouldn’t have been able to write such songs at the time of Troops.” With a big smile, she adds: “All in all, I actually think it’s quite a happy album.”
