City Pages
May 1998

City Pages Best of 1998 "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll"
BEST VOCALIST (FEMALE)

Ana Voog www.anavoog.com Music and media artiste Ana Voog (a.k.a. Rachael Olson) is best known, here and around the world, as the star of www.anacam.com, a 24-hour Web site that lets the viewer watch everything in her weird yet workaday home life (yes, everything). The problem with this new medium is that it ignores Ana's most exceptional, versatile asset: her voice. On songs such as "Flying" and "Where Is Day?" by Ana's defunct psychedelic pop band the Blue Up?, the diminutive singer's clear, enormous alto would alternately soar with fantasy and ambition and plummet with vulnerability and regret. And she's the most harrowing, convincing screamer since Babes in Toyland's Kat Bjelland, especially now that she's been engaging in some genuinely creepy primal-scream performances. How all this will play in her current techno-pop solo project remains to be seen; her big-label release, anavoog.com, is due soon.