Culture Prairie Pop
‘The Musical Notebooks of Free Anna’ Nebraska’s Anna Gebhardt turned a church-music background into a career in ambient sound and filmmaking. BY KEMBREW MCLEOD
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ebraska native Anna Gebhardt is the mastermind behind Annalibera—a decade-long recording project that is synonymous with herself, and which also performs as a band. She came across the name via Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera, the title of a piano piece by Italian 12-note serial composer Luigi Dallapiccola, which translates as “The Musical Notebooks of Free Anna.” “Indeed,” Gebhardt told me, “all of my ideas—whether words, music or film—start in a notebook.” This polymath is bursting with ideas that find expression in her music, literary writing, and filmmaking—such as loveil. Shot in and around the now-abandoned farmhouse where Gebhardt grew up, loveil is an impressionistic companion piece to Annalibera’s 2015 album of the same title. “All of my music would be visualized into films if I had the budget,” she said. “I write films for them because it comes to me. I see and hear my ideas. And I write them all down. They are one.” Gebhardt read a lot and loved playing with words from an early age while growing up in relative isolation on a farm in the North Loup River Valley, near the center of Nebraska, where her family has lived since the latter half of the 19th century. As a girl, she’d commune with nature by walking the countryside while feeling in tune with the tall trees, yucca plants and whooshing wind—sometimes settling under a stand of trees to read, or wandering the rolling hills that allowed her to see for miles and miles. The Methodist church that Gebhardt’s family attended introduced her to traditional American songs such as “Shenandoah” and “Simple Gifts,” along with the hymns that were popular with
Stages: Annalibera Emma Colman
Englert Theatre (englert. org), Wednesday, May 19 at
American Christians who immigrated from Europe. She sang every week in church, where the elderly members of the congregation brought treats after the service or made delicious chicken noodle soup from scratch. “I really don’t know if it was there, or if it was my piano education, or my mom or my school,” Gebhardt said, “but I seem to know
collage and pure pop to blissed-out melancholic shoegaze for the soul. Gebhardt picked up electronic influences from all the ’90s Madonna, Eiffel 65 and Savage Garden songs she heard on the radio in that farmhouse, echoes of which can be heard on Annalibera’s most recent album, Moon Bath, released in 2020. She also learned a thing or two from Enya’s melodic ambient
7 p.m., $5-10
released on cassette. “My friends and I still made mixtapes for each other until the downloading started,” she said. “My cassette collection grows mostly now with ambient and experimental releases, and Enya is still in the
“ALL OF MY MUSIC WOULD BE VISUALIZED INTO FILMS IF I HAD THE BUDGET. I WRITE FILMS FOR THEM BECAUSE IT COMES TO ME. I SEE AND HEAR MY IDEAS. AND I WRITE THEM ALL DOWN. THEY ARE ONE.” a lot of traditional American music that people generally don’t.” Some of those influences can be heard in songs such as “Mountain,” from Annalibera’s 2015 album Nevermind I Love You, but that just scratches the surface of a musical range as expansive as the sky—encompassing everything from sound
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soundscapes that she listened to on cassette tape while lying on the floor of her childhood bedroom. Born in 1990, Gebhardt used to make mixtapes during the last days of that dying format—though it actually never really did quite expire, which is one reason why Annalibera’s albums are regularly
rotation. I release on tapes because I prefer them to CDs as the cheap option. Cassettes are a better object than CDs, all around.” Gebhardt had one foot in the analog world and the other planted in digital culture, which feels like a good metaphor for this retrofuturist artist. As an adolescent, she began
