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biography / portrait

As a musician and songwriter, Angu is in cultural terms a child of modern globalisation – an artistic hybrid. Born in 1976 in Julianehåb, Greenland, he lives and works as a singer and musician in Copenhagen, writing his lyrics and singing in English. Growing up in Greenland on the periphery of traditional Greendlandic culture – but never far from a guitar and record player – meant that Angu’s magnificent natural surroundings were accompanied by politically aware 1970s music and a wide range of pop and rock rhythms. Already in his early teens, Angu was fortunate enough to have his own keyboard and guitar – and he was soon writing songs, preferring English lyrics from the very start. After some initial “angry” years with long hair and heavy rock and grunge pounding in his ears, Angu turned his attention towards the classical singer-songwriter tradition. Here was a means of expression well suited to working with deep-felt inner conflicts – formulating them linguistically and musically, and thus creating a healthier distance to them. In 1996, Angu moved to Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, where he was soon caught up in the city’s very close-knit music scene, where everyone knows everyone. He began to write more intensely, sometimes collaborating with friend Jeppe Dorff, while trying in vain to finish his education in computer science. Angu gradually began working as a studio musician, while continuing to write his own material and write for a number of other artists as well. Angu was prompted by producer Michael Christensen to write a few songs for the Greenlandic singer Tupaarnaq Mathiassen. When Mathiassen’s voice gave out one day, however, Angu had to fill in for her. The producer was so pleased with the results that he and Angu secretly began recording a demo. Ejvind Elsner, the head of Atlantic Music in Nuuk, heard the demo and was so impressed that he offered Angu a contract on the spot with Atlantic – the biggest and most influential record company in Greenland. Angu and Christensen completed the pre-production work in Nuuk and then travelled to Copenhagen, where guitarist Mads Kamstrup helped them assemble a band to finish recording the album at Sweet Silence studios. The recording was going well, and there was a great chemistry among the people working on the project. With Troels Alsted producing, the band decided to record the last two cuts live in the studio, to capture the spirit and spontaneity that had evolved during the recording process. The album was a huge success in Greenland, selling more than 3,300 copies in just seven months – in a country with a population of only 55,000. So little wonder the newly formed Copenhagen Records is now releasing “Angu” in Denmark. For Angu, the songs work as small mental soundtracks – emotionally charged short narratives that aim to dramatise in music the critical junctures in life, moments of great emotional fascination, and heavy breaking points – situations that he writes his way both into and out of again. The songs comprise a musical language that can both capture memories and objectify them, keeping them at a distance, where they are easier to deal with and think about – yet in a form that never allows powerful emotions to become too sugar-sweet, but instead hidden away in nuances that need to be decoded by the listener. A collection of songs that are permeated with melancholic longing and an undercurrent of unfulfilled dreams. (source: www.angu.nu)