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In a Copenhagen kindergarten twenty years ago, the class would take walks but one student would veer off course.  She would travel the opposite way, because something in another direction -- or something alive in her mind -- would seize her attention.  Several seasons ago, when Denmark was as cold and dark as it usually is, the same girl, now a teenage ballet student entered a travel agency in search of a cheap ticket to a warm climate.  Her first option, provided she could leave within days, was Bangkok.  "Yes, that's great," she said without hesitation --  "Is that Thailand?"  And so for a month, as she remembers, she "just went away."

Oh Land has made those kinds of unclouded decisions all her life.   "I'm a very passionate, determined person who does everything fully," she says. " I'm also a very optimistic person.  I believe in things that some people are afraid to believe in.  If I want to do something, I just go for it one hundred percent. I have always been confident about what I wanted."

Today Oh Land, who was born Nanna Øland Fabricius twenty-four years ago in Copenhagen, is in New York talking about 'Fauna', her 2008 independent debut in music, as well as anticipating that album's Epic Records follow-up, for which she is now writing songs. All of this is, in most outward ways, new for her. "I was a very active child," she says, 'very wild, so I wanted to do something where I could express myself physically"

"I was a dancer my whole life," she says, "all my dreams were in dance since I was ten years old and admitted to the Royal Ballet School in Denmark.  Then, after a decade of dancing, I got a back injury.  I had to reinvent myself."

With melodies as instantly atmospheric as "Frostbite" and "Heavy Eyes" alongside other pieces that take more tentative routes, 'Fauna' is the soundtrack of Oh Land's particular unclouded decision to pursue music straight up.  Previously, she had never worked on music directly.  Throughout twelve experimental yet bracingly soulful pieces that she terms "soundscapes," Oh Land programs beats, plays piano and guitar and violin, and sings beautifully as though her very life depended on making specific emotional impressions.  The music is lavish, crunchy, symphonic, brute, fascinated with rhythms that both fly and fly apart; her naturally flowing soprano streams them all together with a will as determined as it is sweet.

She grew up in a musical family, the youngest of three children born to a mother who sings opera and a father who composes and plays organ; becoming a musician up to that point, she'd always thought, had seemed a little too obvious.  Instead, she danced -- "I was a very active child," she says, 'very wild, so I wanted to do something where I could express myself physically" -- and other times dreamed up, as she recalls, her own languages.  "I was always creating my own universes.  It wasn't like one day one game and another day another game: It was like complete universes that I would build and make my friends understand."

Her dancing ceased after her back injury, though, which happened near the end of three years she lived in Sweden attending the Stockholm Ballet School. Eventually she engaged directly with the music behind the dance.  "It always meant so much to me," Oh Land says. "That was why I loved dance: to express music.  When I stopped dancing I just started, almost as a diary, to handle my thoughts about the injury and everything by writing melodies.  My diary was sort of like a music book.  Those songs on 'Fauna' are the first I ever made, and everything about them is searching, because I was in a very searching place in my life.  I was like Alice in Wonderland, going around trying to find things out.  I was exploring the music world, really fascinated with all sounds and all recorded sound."

She sampled the sounds of walking, of walking in the rain, of pots and pans banging together, of flies buzzing.  It facilitated music full of sharp articulation yet music that still struggles with the hard work of pinning emotions down.  She describes the album as "a picture, a painting," both abstract and concrete.  And she doesn't think that the music turned out in the elegantly jarring way it did coincidentally:  "That music," Oh Land says, "was a clear choice to make a record like that.  At the time I made it I wasn't sure about anything, yet at the same time I knew exactly what I wanted and didn't want.  I had no rules.  I wanted to find -- or make -- some place where there wasn't any rules, any regular rules.  It wasn't music where there was a verse, then a chorus, then a verse, then a chorus again.  I wanted to create more like a place in your mind, like the place where you're between being awake and being asleep."

She put three songs up on her MySpace page and after a month Kasper Bjørk, a well-known Danish producer and DJ, heard it and offered to sign her to the independent Fake Diamond label for which he was then was working; eventually they finished what became 'Fauna'.  "Even though it was a small indie label," Oh Land says, "it was perfect for me at the time.  They let me experiment and be exactly what I am, and do what I wanted to do, just embrace every crazy idea I had.  And there were many of those."

She was back home in Copenhagen at the time.  "The pop scene there is like being in your own little pop-music world.  I think that the music scene in Denmark is pretty small, but still I think there's a lot of interesting things happening.  People are there to experiment, with less of an emphasis on commercial success."  She compares the city to Sweden.  "I also think there's a lot of great rock and pop coming out of Sweden.  This is especially true of the female artists, who are very strong right now.  There's definitely something happening there with the females.  Sweden is a very feministic country, and I think that they are very concerned, very confident about the way they choose to do everything themselves, because they have something to prove."

Not only did Oh Land never write or perform music before making her debut, she also had scant experience with hearing pop radio.  "I never listened to the radio until I was played on the radio," she says, "and that's like a year ago.  The only pop thing I listened to as child -- because I was raised with classical music, which was the biggest influence in my life -- was The Beatles.  That was one of the things I was kind of allowed to listen to."  But, when she was 11, she bought her first pop record.  It was 1997"s 'Homogenic' by Björk, the Icelandic woman who last century almost single-handedly invented über-creative global girldom.

"She is a very important artist to me," Oh Land says.  "I was completely in love with that record.  There were elements from the classical world, which made me safe and which I could understand, but it was still in a way that was different and experimental.  I loved the contrast between what was very beautiful to me, from the classical music, with what is very ugly.  It made me curious about hip-hop.  The next record I got was The Fugees." 

Around this time, English artists like Portishead, Massive Attack, and Tricky were forging the cinematic beat music that became tagged as "trip-hop."  Oh Land went to her local library and checked out every example of the genre she could find -- although she is quick to say that genre per se is of no concern to her.  "It doesn't matter what genre music is," she says.  "It just needs to be something I can hear where people are expressing themselves and not trying to live up to some kind of pre-existing model of what some star or particular music is thought to be.  It's when I can hear people making music personally." 

Indeed, a glance at a list of the music On Land has loved -- from The Bulgarian State Radio and Television Choir's masterly '80s "Le mystère des voix bulgares" collections to the great soundtrack the French composer Gabriel Yarid wrote for the 1986 film 'Betty Blue' -- indicates that she is no genre-hound.  Yet film music makes particular sense to her, given the similarities between how movie music and she work:  "I could certainly describe 'Fauna' as a soundtrack," she says.  "I love movies.  A lot of music from films makes a great impression on me.  The way I make lyrics and music is like from a picture I get in my head.  It's like describing this place that I see and then try to depict with the noises and the colors and the smells and everything." 

Now Oh Land is signed to a big U.S. recording company that saw her first in Denmark and later when she performed in Austin, Texas at the South By Southwest music festival.  She has left the Copenhagen bubble.  Her current brief is to write, as she puts it, "a lot of songs."  They have a definite sound, she thinks, but she can't think quite how to describe it.  One thing she does say is that her new songs could be played by themselves on a piano.  She is interested in moving into the realm of the perfectly constructed song.  "They're so clean," she says, "and the message just gets to you immediately."   Oh Land has begun, for the first time, to collaborate with other songwriters.  At first this made her nervous. 

"I'd never written with anyone else before," she says.  "I'd been sitting alone, doing my own thoughts and things.  It was actually a big surprise that it was so easy for me to collaborate with others.  I feel that all the songs that I've been writing the last couple of months are one-hundred percent mine.  All the people I've collaborated with are making me perform better."

Recently, Oh Land took a song into the studio to play for one of her new collaborators.  By this point, she expected comments, as she says, like "Oh, can you do a little of this here, or cut this piece out, or put that in later…"  But this time she was presenting a song that she thought was the best song she ever had written.  "I was really happy and excited about it," she says.  Her collaborator's response was: "Yeah, it's good, but I think you can do better."

"It was very provoking," she says.  "I was thinking, 'How can you say that I can do better when this is my very best?'  But it was also very encouraging because he believed in me and I felt like, 'Ok, if he's right about this and it really can be better than this, then I want to find out."  She found that she was, suddenly, up for the search.  And, in the end, Oh Land says, the song was improved.

Oh Land's music is also, in a circular way, a return to the dance that she grew up with and continues to contemplate.  "I mostly listen to things that are not club music," she says.  "I've not been a clubgoer at all.  But now, because I've been a dancer, I feel like what I want to do is something that I want to dance to.  I've never felt like that before; it's like a big love in me, the dance, and I want to make people dance to my music.  That would make me very happy."  

Her arresting move from dancing to music, she thinks, happened because of her desire to go as far as she can go, always, at whatever she does.  "Maybe," Oh Land says, "that's why I stopped dancing completely, because maybe I felt like if I couldn't be the best I didn't want to do it.  I am always trying to outdo myself." 

Written by James Hunter