Orenda Fink

by Tammy La Gorce
Orenda Fink, born in Alabama in the mid-'70s, comes by her unusual name honestly, judging by the songs on her 2005 debut album, Invisible Ones. Unlike her former bandmate Maria Taylor, the other half of the successful sulk-pop band Azure Ray, Fink focuses less on standard girl group fare such as heartache and melancholy in favor of exploring the mystical, the mind-bending, and the murky. It's a mélange that, for listeners accustomed to the milky musings of her former band, offers its challenges. Voodoo music, for example, surfaces as part of Fink's post-Azure sound -- an homage to the Haitian people, whom she came to love during a spiritually awakening trip to the island -- and lyrically she is not above cribbing the rantings of a mentally unstable woman she once shared a Greyhound bus ride with. But Fink's music is as direct as it is adventurous, her voice a lozenge in a land mine of neo-new wave, electronica, and worldbeat, and listeners who have followed her career since she and Taylor first started making music together as students at the Alabama School of Fine Arts at age 15 won't want to distance themselves from it. Still, most of the twists along Fink's artistic road have not been quite as eccentric. When Little Red Rocket, the band Fink and Taylor formed in Birmingham in the '90s, disbanded after two albums -- 1997's Who Did You Pay and 2000's It's in the Sound -- due to the dust-up of Geffen Records' merging with Universal Music Group, the two decamped to Athens, GA, where Azure Ray were born. There, the Saddle Creek label act Now It's Overhead invited them to be part of their band, and they accepted, which brought them to the attention of Conor Oberst. In 2001, both Azure Ray and Now It's Overhead released scantly received self-titled debuts, Azure's on longtime label Warm Records. A year later, Taylor and Fink took up full-time residence in Omaha -- Saddle Creek's home base -- and released Burn and Shiver. The pair's third full-length, 2003's Hold on Love, released on Saddle Creek, brought indie scene raves on the merits of the singles "The Drinks We Drank Last Night" and "New Resolution." Fall Back Open, a Now It's Overhead set, was released in 2004 amid heavy touring. Fink, who has also collaborated with Moby, Oberst's Bright Eyes, and the band Japancakes, does not dismiss a reunion with Taylor, but wrote in the liner notes to Invisible Ones that "after traveling extensively in India, Cambodia, and Haiti, I began to focus more on the external world than the internal. I was drawn to issues like spirituality, oppression, and the interminable spirit that underlies the human condition. I was ready to take a different approach to songwriting than I had previously with Azure Ray."