Ballroom Marfa welcomed Autre Ne Veut for a special performance on October 9th, 2013 debuting their new album Anxiety. 

“Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love” – Sigmund Freud

Anxiety was the full-length follow up to Autre Ne Veut’s 2010 self-titled debut, which was for many the definitive post-millennial Failure Pop statement outside of time and style. Born April 20th, 1982 Arthur Ashin is the first of two children and the only son of American ex-patriots living in rural Kenya. He’s struggled with minor bouts of depression throughout his life, but a year of intensive psychoanalysis helped Arthur to realize that anxiety was at the crux of his problems.

Anxiety is in some sense Ashin closing a chapter on his adolescence through song-form depictions of his own relationship struggles and ecstasies. Like a collection of photographs, each featuring our anti-hero surrounded by lovers, friends, and family and, ultimately, the world, Ashin himself is peripheral to the action. He is always a little too aware of the joke, laughing at the wrong time.

The influences on Anxiety range from David Byrne to Lee “Scratch” Perry, Laurie Anderson and Annie Lennox to Katy Perry and Rihanna. But Arthur’s primary influence – and the influence most evident in his music – is of karaoke – the solitary person singing along with their favorite song. In karaoke we get to be someone bigger than who we usually are. When we sing karaoke or when we sing in the shower, we get to be gods; gods with bars of soap, gods with plastic cups in our hands.

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