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"From ballerina to electro-pop badass, Danish musician Nanna \u00D8land Fabricius (a.k.a. Oh Land) has captured the attention of the music world of late, nabbing a spot in Vevo's Lift program and playing stage shows replete with projections and other technological marvels.\nTwenty-five-year-old Oh Land, who now resides in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, recently came out with her first album [iTunes link] on her new label, Epic Records, also titled Oh Land (she released another album called Fauna in her native Denmark).\n\"I had just moved from Europe to America and it was a very overwhelming change,\" she says, explaining what motivated her to pen the songs on the disc. \"Being a stranger in a place forces you to open up and let things inspire that normally wouldn\u2019t.\"\nConsequently, the album is full of tracks that have an air of searching \u2014 a convergence of city and nature. Songs like \"Wolf &amp; I\" evoke an otherworldly mood \u2014 a feeling of entering a dreamy realm that exists outside the confines of concrete landscapes.\nOh Land recently had a New York City residency at the Charles Bank Gallery, where she played a week's worth of shows \u2014 performance pieces of sorts that mingled with the art of fellow Dane, Eske Kath (who also designed her album art). The shows included elements such as balloon projections designed by multimedia artists Rune Madsen and Paul Rothman The projections were controlled by custom c++ framework programmed using OpenFrameworks.\n\"The application receives MIDI messages from Ableton Live (programmed tracks and live instrument input), and use these messages to display images, video, text and custom animations on the balloons,\" the artists explain. \"Each balloon is mapped to a MIDI note, and when this note is triggered, the balloon animates.  By sending MIDI bank changes we switch between song templates, and MIDI program changes switch between animations within a song template.\"\n\"It's a natural thing for me to combine different art forms in order to give the full picture,\" Oh Land says. \"I grew up around creative people and that's why I see Oh Land as a land. It's my place where dreams are allowed to be taken seriously.\"\nA truly intimidating Renaissance woman, the former ballerina/current pop singer even studied electronic composition. \"I was the only girl in the school,\" she says. \"I learned how to build sequencers, program and stuff like that. But quickly I found out that I was more concerned about the stories and emotions and songwriting, more than making the perfect sine wave.\"\nStill, her live shows often include a techie element, hinting at her geeky past. \"I use tech all the time,\" she says. \"We have an incredibly advanced technical set up for playing live. Everything is triggered and live in the moment and nothing is playing on track. It gives a lot of freedom and make the music breathe.\"\nWe have an exclusive video from the up-and-coming singer above for your perusal. Check it out and let us know in the comments: Which artists do you think put on the best, most innovative live shows? Oh Land's picks? Bj\u00F6rk and Kraftwerk."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/04/18/music-monday-oh-land/>