ANE BRUN - LONEY DEAR

Imagine a combo of Annie Di Franco, Bjork and Joni Mitchell – and maybe throw a little Florence and the Machine in for good measure and you may get a sense of the unique sound of Ane Brun.

With her lilting vocals, theatrical arrangements, and delicate indie folk craft, Norwegian singer/songwriter Ane Brun (pronounced Ah-na Broon) remained a regional secret until 2003, when she made her European debut with the release of Spending Time with Morgan. Released on the DetErMine label, a company that Brun co-founded the previous year with the Tiny's Ellekari Larsson, Spending Time with Morgan won local praise for its cinematic sound and was later championed at the Swedish Independent Music Awards.

One year later, Brun released the My Lover Will Go EP, as well as the romantic songbook A Temporary Dive. The latter album featured collaborations with Canadian artist Ron Sexsmith, Teitur, and Syd Matters, while its sound drew comparisons to early Neko Case, Feist, and Nick Drake. Three weeks after its release, A Temporary Dive went platinum in Brun's native country. A slew of awards followed, including the country's Grammy equivalent -- the Norwegian Spellemannsprisen -- for Best Female Artist and Hit of the Year in 2005. Brun closed out the year with yet another release, Duets, which found her collaborating with ten different songwriters. A remixed/remastered version of A Temporary Dive arrived in America via the V2 label in May 2006. Brun followed its release with Live in Scandinavia, her first live album, before setting to work on a new studio effort. Released in 2008, Changing of the Seasons dealt with shifting climates and evolving relationships, while Sketches (also released in 2008) compiled Brun's home recordings in an attractive package of demos. She appeared on Peter Gabriel's 2011 album New Blood, and later that year released her sixth album, It All Starts with One, produced by Tobias Fröberg.

In 2013, Brun celebrated her first decade of music with a 32-track compilation simply titled Songs 2003-2013 as well as a collection of rarities and covers. For her next studio release, the singer applied her distinctive approach to an eclectic selection of cover songs ranging from Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is" to Nick Cave's "Into My Arms." The album, Leave Me Breathless, appeared in October 2017. ~ MacKenzie Wilson & Andrew Leahey, Rovi

LONEY DEAR

Swedish singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emil Svanängen makes records and plays shows under the enigmatic name of Loney dear. In the early 2000s, in his Stockholm apartment studio, Svanängen made a name for himself by creating homemade CDrs with a minidisk microphone and a home computer, self-releasing albums which by 2007 had pricked Sub Pop's ears and they released Loney Noir. Two more albums - Dear John and Hall Music - followed, as did glowing reviews in The Guardian, BBC, Drowned in Sound, Pitchfork and earlier this year the Line of Best Fit went as far as calling him a "brilliant genius”.Loney dear has consistently crafted elegant, deeply stirring music, described by The Quietus as "…the obsessive work of one man, albeit one that can sing with the vulnerable delicacy of an angel and makes bedroom recordings that sound like God's own orchestra”.Multi-layered with instrumentation and Svanängen's fragile yet irrepressible vocals, Loney dear's songs bloom with a sense of both intimacy and openness, at once uplifting and heartbreaking, tenacious yet tender.Since his 2017 album, live concerts in unique spaces have become a primary forum for creative exploration, and his next recordings will mirror this. Emil says, “It’s such an interesting evolution... these possibilities for subtracting rather than adding. Intricate music written for just one instrument and a voice is, for me now, a way of merging worlds.”