Benjamin Lozovsky

​Antony & The Johnsons: Swanlights
Radio City Music Hall
Thursday, January 26

Better than: Weeping alone.

The line of people and umbrellas wrapped around Radio City, a noisy, quivering mass of top-flight fashion, boldfaced names, and irritation at the wind and rain and forced wait. Swanlights, the MoMA-commissioned retrospective of the work of Antony and the Johnsons, had sold out the music hall, and the number of people picking up their tickets on the way in was unusually high, according to an usher.

Outside might have been chaos, but inside the mood was the exact opposite; Antony, draped in a white gown and standing in the middle of Radio City's stage, was the only person uttering anything for most of the evening, his voice soaring and fluttering in concert with the 60-piece orchestra accompanying him. Lasers flashed and projected themselves onto the hall's magnificent ceiling and the jaggedly grand sculpture above him as he sang, simply, beautifully, achingly, of love and death, light and dark.

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​Swanlights, a "large-scale concert and performance event" showcasing the music of Antony & The Johnsons, will take place at Radio City Music Hall on January 26, 2012. (2012! Already!) The songs in Swanlights, which was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, are culled from Antony's four albums; the compositions have been arranged by Nico Muhly, Rob Moose, and Maxim Moston, and the results will be performed by a 60-piece orchestra that night. A hint at how elaborate the show will be is also dropped in the press release: "It is produced in collaboration with light artist Chris Levine, lighting designer Paul Normandale, and set designer Carl Robertshaw." Lights!

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​"A rough approximation of feeling good," is how NPR, one of the two outlets currently offering full streams of Antony and the Johnsons' Swanlights, describes the latest record from the heretofore dourly gorgeous NYC folk warbler, who at first blush does indeed appear to have cheered up immensely, even if song titles like "I'm in Love" and "Thank You for Your Love" are very possibly still traps of some sort. A guest-starring spot for Björk on "Fletta" could likewise go either way.

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Yes In My Backyard is a semiweekly column showcasing new and emerging MP3s from local talent.

Michael Sharkey

​New York's ever fragile, soul-purging cabaret genius Antony and his crack team of Johnsons are returning with fourth album, Swanlights (out October 12 via Secretly Canadian). The record, which will share a release date with a 144-page hardcover book of paintings, collages, photography, may be the most personal statement yet from an always personal band--described by Antony himself as one of his more volatile, improvisation heavy, and contradictory LPs yet. In the meantime, the teaser EP Thank You For Your Love is out today (also via SC) and leads with Swanlights' most rollicking song, the tender-to-tense emotional rollercoaster, "Thank You For Your Love." We caught up with Antony to dissect his haunting track, and found out what it's like laying down gibberish with Björk.

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​"The most exciting tunes are forays into completely new zones," wrote Simon Reynolds in last month's Voice profile of Daniel Lopatin, a/k/a Brooklyn noise/drone/ambient/experimental wunderkind Oneohtrix Point Never, whose new full-length, Returnal, is one of the year's best. Courtesy Pitchfork, here we have an entirely unrecognizable piano + Antony remix of the title track, frail and devastating as per usual. Resonant line: "Internet is a self-atomizing machine." Especially in August.

Photo by Marco Anelli

9 min. Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present

The most engrossing Flickr Photostream since the official White House account started posting pics of Obama fist-pumping the world is MOMA's portrait collection of everyone who's sat across from Marina Abramović. Taken by photographer Marco Anelli as each person was with the artist, the individual images are a fascinating range of enrapt expressions, nonplussed faces, even tears--the latter so captivating they inspired their own spin-off "Marina Abramović Made Me Cry" Tumblr. Co-sign the Daily Beast's suggestion that you can lose hours clicking through this: there's Isabella Rossellini, Dexter sister/Michael C. Hall's real-life partner Jennifer Carpenter, far-flung news correspondent Christiane Amanpour, Sharon Stone, Princess Diaries's Hector Elizondo (but no Lady Gaga)--and three minutes turns into thirty.

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Antony and the Johnsons
Town Hall
February 20

For Antony and the Johnsons' second sold-out night at the venerated Town Hall, the moment that got the loudest audience laughs was when the broad-bodied and bellow-lunged singer and pianist Antony Hegarty mewled a plea of "hoping you'll page me right now." It was from the night's lone cover, of Beyoncé's 2004 smash hit "Crazy In Love," stripped of all its Chi-Lites' sampled brass fanfare, Jay-Z barked bars, and red carpet flashbursts, Hegarty's vocal quiver diving deep to the manic bundle of nerves at the song's core.

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