Name: Anna Jordan / The Allegorist
Nationality: Hungarian / German
Occupation: Music producer, artist, composer
Current release: The Allegorist's Hybrid Dimension II is out on Awaken Chronicles.

If this feature with Anna Jordan aka The Allegorist piqued your interest, visit her insightful website for more information.

You can also read our The Allegorist Interview from a while back, where Anna answers questions dealing with her creative process and beyond.



Anna Jordan / The Allegorist: "I can’t wait to find it out what happens when life ends! We don’t know really what the opposite of life actually is. There are many theories and beliefs, from non-existence and afterlife to reincarnation and many more. Personally I don’t head down one particular route and keep myself open to many theories. But I like to think that there is existence beyond the ones we know about or imagine on earth and that it is possible for us to continue our journey in other forms of presence.

I like to walk in graveyards as they are so quiet and loud at the same time. After one of those walks I’ve felt particularly connected to spirits and composed the track "Dark Forces" from my upcoming album Hybrid Dimension, part 2. The whole album is playing with the idea of life, death and rebirth.  

I write short stories in addition to my releases. The following is a short extract from the story of Hybrid Dimension II.:

"There is a sort of light, so small that it can only be seen in the deepest darkness. It wasn’t there at the boat or ruins, where everybody was looking for it. It was inside of all of them. When she realised the light was in herself, standing on the rocks, she tore her chest apart. Soon little spots started to light up. All over the black ocean the hearts of the floating dead, people of the past millennium started to shine.The ocean dried up and on its soil trees sprouted out of the wizened bodies. The ruins of the past empire broke open and seeds from the future were falling from the blue sky."

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One thing I believe in is that everything is connected. An element we can find at almost every spiritual tradition of humankind throughout all of history and also appears at the core of the science. It is true of the physical universe at every single level of organisation and every single manifestation of matter, energy and life. As we knew this long before we could actually scientifically prove it and all of us can feel in some way makes me think that we can rely on our intuitions and that they are not just abstract contemplations but the foundation of our consciousness and togetherness.

This holistic approach is also what I follow and express with my art project „The Allegorist“. Maybe the meaning of our lives are not within the scope of our understanding but it is worth thinking that we are all connected, part of one whole and trying our best will be enough.

Everything deals with life and death in a way on different scales. Even the smallest influences make a change. Thoughts and impulses turn into actions, form our character and so shape our destiny. Immersing into arts and music can give birth to new ideas, support thoughts, intensify emotions and help us bury the ones we must or want to move away from. So I would say, all the music I’ve deeply connected to influenced my view.

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Societies tend to create norms and easily label everything beyond that as abnormal. If you experience something that is considered unusual in the society in the age you're living in, you will most likely be trapped in the general perceptions and opinions of that era. Your uncommon experiences can be looked down on, fetishised or treated as a taboo and yourself seen as inferior, weird or someone who could never be anything else, beyond that person, who was branded by perhaps one sole occurrence. It can really silence you.

I’ve experienced some intense incidents in my life and so I have walked unusual pathways. Now I don’t think what happened to me was that unique that something similar never happened to others. But I was made to think that and I often felt lonely and mute. To talk about things outside of common subjects can be difficult in general. I’ve felt most often that what I wanted to say were too complex to express in words.

In addition I feel like human languages can be quite limited, adapt only slowly to new ideas and standards and can’t necessarily access a specific emotional layer. So very early on I was highly attracted to express myself and communicate in forms other than language. I’ve found that depth in arts and its many forms accompanied and taught me a lot. I feel attached to most of the art forms, but perhaps music is the one I feel like I have the most access actively.

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As a music listener I can relate very much to the idea that music is associated with phases of life which are particularly vivid, intense and important. There are tracks which accompany me for a shorter period of time and there are the ones to which I go back to on a regular basis. It is fascinating how the tracks you once listened to intensely can awake a former stage of yourself in a different time and how you can suddenly access to all those feelings, thoughts and the imagination of how things would be in the future perhaps at that same time when you are listening again, like multidimensional time travelling.

As a music creator it is very similar. Only that in addition I get the possibility to add my own thoughts and reality, shape the message and share it with others. These tracks will not only reflect my own journey but will outlive me and go their own independent way, probably meaning something different to every listener. I’m deeply aware of the fact that artworks go beyond the existence of their creators and see it as a possibility. For me it means that I can be part of the process of painting a future that can be better than our present.

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Art and music has always been my driving force when I felt weak, my soft, warm blanket when I was cold, and embraced and comforted me when I was lonely. Even if you don’t have anything material you can open and enter new worlds, create your own rules, take a journey of your choice and be free and rich in your imagination.

In my art I like to play with contrasts as I believe opposite elements cannot exist without the other and so they complement and compensate each other. There is no light without darkness, no improvement without error, no sunrise without sunset and no life without death. I believe these cycles of positive and negative energies stimulate and fuel themselves into existence. And so I understand existence as an interaction of different polarities and everything between them into a balanced state.

I see life and death, ancient and modern, fire and ice as equal elements, without attaching a quality to them. I think everything is neutral until they are put into a certain context and find their attribute and meaning through that lens, story or layers of stories. This is how I see the different elements in my art and musical expressions. Each sound only means something and can be understood and judged in the context of the full track and each track only means something as part of my whole artistic vision.

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I believe I’ve had the experience of being to death very close. I was in pain, unable to move and was alone. Naturally at the beginning of the process of leaving I was fighting against it very hard. I was very disappointed as I felt I hadn’t even started to really live. First there were all these thoughts about everything, what I wanted to achieve and experience and now I would lose and miss out. I was angry at the gods and battled them heavily demanding my right to finish what I have started. As time passed, my memories and thoughts stretched across areas that were shrinking like in a funnel until there was nothing left but peace. Only in the face of death could I finally see life for what it really was.

This is how I came to learn, that death is as beautiful as birth.
And I wouldn’t dare to ruin it with expectations.