Produced by LA Timpa, Mega Mercy was inspired by the musician’s experience of abandoning city life for a Greek island
Many of us entertain fantasies about opting out of city living in favour of a slower, simpler, more intentional life in the countryside, but few of us can extricate ourselves from the grind. Any, a Vancouver-born musical artist and harpist of Greek descent, was suffering from urban fatigue after years of “unaffordable rents, sad pay checks, fighting for housing, fighting for work, no time or money to work on art”. In 2020, she moved to Crete, Greece’s southernmost island, finding a rundown house in a small village near the sea and the mountains. “A previous French resident had left their mid-century furniture, along with a Casablanca poster and some old books,” she tells AnOther. “After receiving blessings from the neighbours, we moved in and installed a solar-panel system, a solar boiler and wood stoves. And that’s where I made my home studio.”
From this idyll, Any began working on the songs that would become Mega Mercy – her inimitable debut EP. Ambient and electro-acoustic, sometimes thrillingly discordant, at other times deeply harmonious, Mega Mercy is a hypnotic response to the experience of transitioning from city life to village life, produced by her longtime friend and musical counterpart, LA Timpa, who came over to Crete to work on the record. In Any’s own words, it’s “playful and melancholic”, combining instrumental harp pieces and leftfield pop, incorporating haunting field recordings and audio artefacts.
The EP is born from the creative rituals Any established in Crete; its DNA is formed from the slower pace of life and a renewed connection with nature. “Most of the ideas came from walking down the same path every day and watching the changes of nature as they took place gradually through the seasons,” she tells us. “It was interesting to see how the experience of time informed the process of music. I would walk – usually with a goat or cat or some sheep following me – listening in my headphones to what I’d made, and that’s how I’d know if it was good or not.”
As idyllic as it sounds and surely is, Any soon discovered a shadow side to life on her Greek island. “I had moved to Crete to retreat to a place I thought would be more pure,” she explains, “but soon discovered that there is a massive NATO base on the island, strategically placed for its proximity to the Middle East. I was hearing warplanes five or six times a day,” she says, recalling the presence of military drones hovering above her garden and the occasional sight of warships on the Libyan Sea. Accordingly, there’s a spectral, slightly unsettling quality that drifts in and out of the tracks – a presence of something mysterious and threatening at times – the “all-consuming feeling of being surrounded by empire wherever you go, and that there is no escape.”
While the lure of the city is inevitable (she has some upcoming performances planned in London), Any has already begun working on her next album and the traces of her life in Crete are bound to influence the evolution of her future sound; she remains indebted to the wisdom of the natural world. “I am fascinated by mountains,” she says. “You can ask them any question and they always give you the right answer.”
Mega Mercy by Any is released by Sferic and is out now.
