Bachelorette’s music radiates to us through a universe of unconquered pop music, where long beams of sunlight extend to infinity, and blue moons rise wistfully in the deep purple expanse. She stands in the cradle of modern songwriting, that of psychedelic pop music. The sense of infinite possibility felt in those songs, the desire to manipulate a collective sensation to become anything at all, informs Bachelorette’s journey. The psych vibe shimmers in an acousto-synthetic haze, not really overt, so completely are those long-ago verses absorbed in her DNA. Her impulses are fed into a format that rhymes couplets over dancing beats, voices, keyboards, and a variety of guitars and percussions to create the melodic constructs we know so well, and delight in, and sing along with, and imagine to. Tasty candy-like approximations, sweet and sour, billowing and knife-like, here for our pleasure.

My Electric Family may be your introduction to Bachelorette but this the third Bachelorette record (the EP “The End of Things” and the Isolation Loops album) and also the most topically focused. Her song structures are traditionally examinations of love and longing, the exploration of self versus self and in relation to the surrounding, silent universe. The songs of My Electric Family emphasize a particular fascination: the meeting of man and machine. We built them in our image, they’re the more perfect us. Now we look to them looking at us. This is another kind of relationship.

This is what Bachelorette does to make her sci-folk sounds – she relates to machines, expressing her feelings in union with their electric/electronic function. This is imagination, soaring and expansive yet rigidly composed – the firmament as viewed from the ground, an arc in the ageless sky where the light glows for us all. Bachelorette is a musical psychedelic space-folk pop adventure: it is the creation of Annabel Alpers, her instruments and her band of computers. Oft-understated beginnings give way to soaring harmonic crescendo, incorporating multi-tracked sounds, backing vocals, brass, string and tympanic instruments, encompassing listeners in the dream-like capsule Alpers has painstakingly crafted, moment by moment.

Annabel played keys, guitars, sang and co-wrote the tunes for Christchurch cult hipsters Hawaii Five-O, who were popular for their psychedelic surf sounds and country tinged old school rock ‘n’ roll. Annabel then traveled around Asia, living for some time in Shanghai, China, where she decided to shift to Auckland to spend time making music. At Auckland University she gained access to recording studios, and, in combination with her own home studio and another band’s recording studio, she pieced together the tracks for ‘The End of Things’ EP, released on Arch Hill (NZ) in 2005.

Bachelorette’s first full-length album, ‘Isolation Loops’, was released in New Zealand (Electroplate) and Australia (Mistletone) in 2007, and in the United States (Electroplate) in 2008.

2009 saw Bachelorette’s breakthrough into the United States, with Drag City releasing her first global album, ‘My Electric Family’. Incorporating themes and styles from both previous albums, Bachelorette employed the skills and talents of local New Zealand musicians: the Royal New Zealand Air Force Brass Band for backing instrumentals, New Zealand famous Craig Terris (drums), Dino Karliss (drums), Tom Watson (Guitar), Lee Prebble (pedal steel). The album flows seamlessly from psychedelic pop to dance grooves to sci-folk lullaby.

Over a year of writing, recording and mixing is evident in ‘My Electric Family’: Chosen as one of ten artists to watch in 2009, Chicago-based online rag Dusted Magazine jump-started an international buzz – six months before its release. (www.dustedmagazine.com/features/801).

After a bang 2009 closing tour with Animal Collective, 2010 will see a few European tours, a US tour supporting Beach House, and other tour adventures with Joanna Newsom and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

www.myspace.com/bachelorettepop
www.dragcity.com
www.particletracks.com
Windish Agency
www.bachelorettepop.blogspot.com/