Annie Anxiety - Soul Posession (1984)

Many influential characters graced the stage of Max’s Kansas City within the creative zeitgeist of New York City during the late 1970’s, but one local native named Annie Bandez thrust herself into the downtown scene with her punk ensemble Annie and the Asexuals, establishing her nom de plume Annie Anxiety (later known as “Little Annie”) and colliding head-on with the social norms of contemporary punk culture entangling the city at that time.

After a couple years of disintegrated pursuits in New York, Annie relocated to England, finding herself at the doorstep of the famed anarchro-commune Dial House headed by activist Penny Rimbaud. It was here that Annie Anxiety established herself as a singular artist and voice with her debut 1981 single “Barbed Wire Halo” on seminal Crass Records and forging a creative alliance with Crass members Penny Rimbaud and Eve Libertine. As the landscape of punk in the United Kingdom was shifting towards a more diverse, multicultural focal point, artists such as Annie Anxiety found themselves exploring musical signatures in styles such as dub reggae and rocksteady.

In the summer of 1983, Annie began work at Southern Studios on what would be her first full length endeavor which encompassed all of her creative assets at that time. Employing the expertise of legendary dub producer Adrian Sherwood to realize this vision, Annie pulled together members of Crass, Flux of Pink Indians, Family Fodder, African Head Charge, London Underground and Art Interface to record her groundbreaking dub industrial masterpiece. Upon its initial release by the unofficial Crass off-shoot label Corpus Christi in 1984, "Soul Possession" started the avalanche of activity that would include dozens of releases and collaborations with Nurse With Wound, Coil, Current 93, Swans and Marc Almond.

According to Anxiety, the album sessions were conducted in sleepless bursts of two or three days at a time, "living on Guinness and cheese sandwiches." She continues, "There'd be different people coming in, they'd leave, and we'd take one multi-track off and then we'd work on a Prince Far I multi-track...." The musicians on the album itself were drawn from the ranks of Crass, but the overall mood of the record is not too far removed from that conjured by Sherwood alongside Ari Up and Judy Nylon, ensuring that it has remained a firm favorite: one of the most abrasively delicious albums of the age, the stinking Southern blues-fired jungle-dub of "Soul Possession". 

Tracklist:

A1 Closet Love
A2 Third Gear
A3 Turkey Girl
A4 Burnt Offerings
B1 To Know Evil
B2 Sad Shadows
B3 Viet Not Mine, El Salvador Yours
B4 Waiting For The Fun

Annie Anxiety - Soul Posession (1984)

(192 kbps, cover art included)