Late Night Tales: Agnes Obel (2LP)

Format: 2x12".

"For me, sounds have always been more interesting than words," says Agnes Obel. "I love it when the voice becomes an instrument, and you almost forget it's a human voice." This idea is never more accurate than in this selection of music, as carefully curated as it is enchanting.

Agnes's debut album, Philharmonics (2010), went platinum in France and Belgium, and—unsurprisingly—quintruple platinum in her native Denmark, where she also won five Danish Music Awards (the equivalent of the Brit Awards) in 2011. Her second album, Aventine, released in late 2013, maintained the same measured calm as her debut. It achieved platinum in Belgium and gold in Denmark and France.

For the mix you hold in your hands, it feels as if Agnes traveled the world in search of kindred spirits—or kindred songs. Everything about it conveys a stillness, like the antithesis of rush hour, like a frozen lake on a Sunday morning. That atmosphere is enhanced by a true cornucopia of new material from Obel, including a ghostly rendition of the Danish song Glemmer Du, Inger Christensen's Poem about Death with original music, and an Agnes's own track titled Bee Dance.

Among the selected pieces are the enigmatic Jamaican singer Nora Dean, with Duke Reid's hypnotic and sensual production, Ay Ay Ay Ay (Angie-Lala), and Michelle Gurevich's terse and sarcastic Party Girl, so good that it inspired the French film of the same name. Also featured are poignant voices such as the Bulgarian Folk Choir, Nina Simone, Ray Davies, and Agnes herself, sounding sincere and penetrating. Somehow, Agnes manages to make even electronic pieces bend to her sensibility, such as Yello's Great Mission, which feels closer to Martin Denny than to Underworld, or cult Greek composer Lena Platonos's Bloody Shadows From A Distance, which gently pulses instead of pounds, and Obscura Primavera, a recently rediscovered, unusually restrained piece by Can.

"I was surprised how much time I ended up dedicating to this. I collected all the songs with my partner Alex, and we spent hours listening to records, trying to see what fit with what. Some of the music I included here was on mixtapes we made when we were just teenage friends. Each of these songs brings stories to my mind."
—Agnes Obel, February 2018