Ana da Silva is a founding member and songwriter of the pioneering post-punk band The Raincoats. Across four daring full-length records, The Raincoats helped shape the timeless notion that punk is what you make it to be—an act of raw expression, not any one sound. The Raincoats have offered creative and spiritual inspiration for several generations of artists, cited as a formative influence by Kurt Cobain, Carrie Brownstein, Bikini Kill, and Sex Pistols’ John Lydon. They set a crucial precedent for feminist work within a DIY punk context, marked all the while by Ana’s poetic lyrical style and innovative noise guitar playing.
After The Raincoats’ hiatus in 1984, Ana collaborated with The Go-Betweens on their single Bachelor Kisses and she formed the band Roseland together with This Heat’s Charles Hayward. She wrote music and collaborated with choreographer/dancer Gaby Agis on Shouting out loud and Undine and the Still performed at Sadlers Wells, Riverside Studios, ICA and Almeida Theatre, London, and she wrote the music for Channel 4 film Freefall in 1988.
Ana returned to song writing and performing with The Raincoats after Kurt Cobain invited them to tour with Nirvana shortly before his untimely death in 1994, and they released an album Looking in the Shadows in 1995 on DGC and Rough Trade.
In 2005, Ana released her solo debut, The Lighthouse – a self-recorded collection of spare, elegant experiments in electronic indie-pop on Chicks on Speed’s label.
Ana’s recent appearances with The Raincoats include a 2016 collaboration with Angel Olsen for Rough Trade’s 40th anniversary, as well as a 2017 presentation at The Kitchen, New York of The Raincoats and Friends, a celebration of Jenn Pelly’s book The Raincoats, and in November 2019/February 2020 they performed a series of rare European dates including Le Guess Who?, Utrecht and Centre Pompidou, Paris in celebration of the 40th anniversary of their first album The Raincoats.
Island (2018) is the collaborative album from Ana and Japanese electronic musician Phew. A bracing odyssey in industrial noise, Island is full of absorbing textures, tactile beats, and a masterfully dynamic compositional style. Each cavernous track feels like a conversation, and out of the ominous dark comes a generative hope. Ana and Phew contribute pointillist bits of spoken word in each other’s native tongues of Portuguese and Japanese, reflecting on isolation, friendship, and nature. The quotidian is made profound. A gripping mood is set by the shared stoicism and subtle playfulness of these two cult punk icons. Each song was collectively composed by both Ana and Phew, who exchanged files via email. Island’s logic is one of wise minimalism. There is a feeling of discovery that will be familiar to Raincoats fans—a sense of poetry and inquisitiveness, of intuition and invention, of new languages taking shape. – Jenn Pelly
In October 2020, Ana composed a commissioned sound piece Abrigo for Semibreve 2020, Mosteiro de Tibães, Braga, Portugal and she made a collaborative commissioned sound piece Shelter together with Phew for ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn, USA.
https://issueprojectroom.org/video/distant-pairs-ana-da-silva-phew
Contact: Shirley O’Loughlin – email: shoutingoutloudllp@gmail.com – tel: +447958 250345
Discography
“In Awe of a Painting” / “Litany” (2004)
The Lighthouse (2005)
Island, com Phew (forthcoming)
