Rocktropolis Allstar Magazine
April 29th, 1998
www.allstarmag.com

ANA VOOG REVEALS THE ORIGINS OF A CYBER QUEEN

It may appear that cyber queen/ Radioactive Records recording artist Ana Voog reached cult stardom out of nowhere with the success of her Anacam, the camera that shows continually updated photos of life in her apartment over her Web site at http://www.anacam.com (allstar, Dec. 12, 1997 and Jan. 9). Voog, however, is a veteran of the Minneapolis music scene who, under her birth name Rachael Olson, spent the past decade fronting the art/pop guitar band The Blue Up?. While the simultaneous breakup of her band, change of her name, and launch of her 'cam has been viewed by many as a marketing gimmick, it seems that the process was far less contrived. "I didn't decide to break up The Blue Up?" Voog explains. "I wanted to become electric. We were going to [rename] the band Ana, but there was already a band with that name on Epic." With "Ana" taken, she decided to give the band a person's name, and randomly chose "Voog." A Web search would later reveal that Voog meant "flow" in Estonian, a meaning that worked well for her. As all this was happening, however, the band that had been The Blue Up? began disintegrating around her, leaving Olson a solo artist by default. Bandless, she simply adopted the moniker for herself. When asked how it felt to suddenly achieve such notoriety through the Internet (and become Dave Navarro's favorite stop on the Web) before people had even heard a note of her forthcoming album, anavoog.com (which features Matt Fink, aka Dr. Fink of Prince's Revolution, on keyboards), Voog describes it simply as "weird and surreal." For those still doubting the sincerity of her transformations, Voog believes they should give her marketing skills a little more credit. "I'm like [the] Homer Simpson of the Internet," she laughs. "I sit on the couch, sleep a lot, and eat really bad food like Pringles and stuff. If I was trying to make a persona, I think I would make a better one than that." anavoog.com will be available on the Internet through allstar's sister site Music Boulevard at http://www.musicblvd.com on May 5 and should be in stores tentatively in July. She'll also be performing at the EAT'M music fest in Las Vegas on May 15 at the Luxor Hotel, and May 16 in Los Angeles at Sin-a-Matic. -Bill Snyder