There is no doubt that Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows is one of the strangest musical acts today. Its style was described as Darkwav in an unique form, not to mention the fact that it has a lot of influnces. Sopor Aeternus was formed by Anna-Varney Cantodea around the year 1989, although nobody knows the real age of Anna.
Although Sopor Aeternus got very good media attention along the years, not much is known about the personal life of the musician. Cantodea does not share much about the personal life and it does seem that it was full of depression and grief. We can describe her as being a transcender or transsexual. One thing is for sure. Anna wants to be refered to as a she and does not want to get rid of the "he" aspect due to spiritual reasons. This basically means that she does not really want to go through surgery.
A lot of mistery sits around Sopor Aeternus. For instance, nobody really knows the age of Anna although fans do think that she was born around the fifities. What is know is that Anna spent around 30 years in depression, despair and extreme loneliness. It seems that these emotions ended up being caused by many reasons from beatings to childhood trauma. She was even suicidal at the age of 12, which is too much for anyone to handle. Anna was even close to becoming blind due to something that was cancer like or actually cancer.
It seems that these events ended up with Anna discovering the "Ensmble of Shadows", which can be described as the voices or presences that inspired her music. The musician does not talk a lot about the ensemble, except the fact that music inspiration appears in dreams. Sopor is one word that if linked to Latin relates to sleep. One other interesting fact about Anna-Varney is that she does not sing live.
The music of Sopor Aeternus has a lot of baroque and renaissance influences. Critics think that the instrumentation is very melancholic and a lot of brass instruments are used. The most common instruments noticed are drum machines, synthesizers, pipe organs, guitars, bells, violins, flutes, strink quartets and real percussion. Tempo is known to range and we can say that a lot of differences exist between tracks. Sopor Aeternus creates albums that are different from each other with a lot of musical influences from Gothic music to ambiental.
If you want to listen to Sopor Aeternus music make sure that you visit Devil Music. You will find everything from folk metal to music videos.
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