Amanda Ray

One listen to Amanda Ray’s debut CD, Mirrored Images, and you’d swear she was from another planet. With brooding vocal intensity and lyrical whimsy, she takes listeners on an ethereal, otherworldly journey. But her personal voyage of the past year and a half actually sent her crashing down to Earth—and d*mn near 6-feet beneath it.
It all started when she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease (a chronic disorder that causes inflammation of the digestive system) after months of ignoring extreme stomach pain, she eventually was admitted to the hospital and forced to undergo surgery. Years passed and just as she was adapting to her new, healthier lifestyle—sans the dairy and processed foods that had once been such a big part of her diet—sudden complications from her previous surgery caused her to fall ill again. More surgery followed. But this time, recovery wasn’t forthcoming.
“It was a scary time,” says Ray, recalling her month-long hospital stay which lasted through Thanksgiving. “I kept getting sicker and sicker and I had another infection that popped up after the surgery. It was just one thing after another and I started to lose my confidence. I started to lose my positive outlook on the whole situation. I lost my foundation. I lost my rock. They had me drugged up on morphine all the time. I had some really trippy dreams that literally scared the sh*t out of me. I woke up sweating. I was frightened out of my mind.”
To make matters worse, Ray was hundreds of miles away from her adopted hometown of Atlanta, where most of her friends and supporters lived. She had returned to her birthplace of New York seeking collaborators in an environment more akin to her edgy, alternative style of music. So, not only was she sick and frightened, but she was also alone.
But, as they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger—hence, the title of Ray’s song “Stronger,” which came to her during the worst of times. “‘You’re not stronger than me.’ Those are the words that I created to help me get out of this [negative] frame of mind I was in. I just pictured myself onstage,” she recalls. “I just focused on the words.”
With her faith refocused, Ray returned to herself. She went on to complete her 10-song album in New York before returning to Atlanta. The sonic fruit of her labor reflects the dark, dissonant, eerie-like quality she’s always sought out in artists like Bjork and Radiohead. But for Ray, it’s not about depression as much as it is resurrection. “There are a lot of sounds that bring out a lot of emotion in you, and the same could be said for what I do,” she explains. “I started getting into darker types of music [because], even though it sounds more horror movie-ish to most, I see the beauty in it.”
-rodney carmichael

To sample Amada Ray’s music, visit www.myspace.com/amandaraymusic. A portion of the proceeds from sales of Mirrored Images will be donated to the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA) - Rolling Out

To listen to a Podcast interview on Amanda Ray on www.audiofloss.com - Creative Loafing - Audiofloss Podcast

The must have Herman “obscure artist CD pick” of the week is the Atlanta based Amanda Ray’s debut album “Mirrored Images” available on iTunes and myspace.com/amandraymusic . Imagine the sultry voice of Sade and Esthero in an acid jazz, electro-ambient trip-hop of Portishead, Massive Attack and Tricky. With influences from Prince to Bjork, Lamb and Roni Size, Amanda Ray is something to savor the night, in the arms of a lover. Enjoy.

Herman Snell


Posted by: Herman Snell on Aug 09, 06 | 9:45 am | Profile



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Reading the bio for this Atlanta-based artist I found out that she was a fan of Bjork, Lamb, and Massive Attack and that she spent several months of 1999 working with producers in London during college. Add up all those influences in your head and you will have a remarkably accurate mental picture of what Amanda Ray's album sounds like. Mirrored Images is all about atmosphere. If you miss Portishead, this is a subtle reminder that there are people still working in that same sonic lane.

Worldfamousmag.com
- World Famous Magazine

Cream of Atlanta's Current Crop -
Rodney Carmichael's Top 5 Albums

5) Amanda Ray - Mirrored Images - Creative Loafing

Malena Perez, Amanda Ray - Two singers cut from the same creative cloth, but with an entirely different sense of style, will make for a crucial cool-out session. Blending influences such as Flora Purim and Sade, Malena Perez composes her own melodies and lyrics. Imagine a subtle mix of Bjork and Sade and there you have Amanda Ray, who fuses her vocals with electronic production. Consider them two sides of the same coin flipping Atlanta's soul idiom on its head.

-Rodney Carmichael - Creative Loafing - Sound Menu

"Stronger" the first release off Amanda Ray's new album will be in the new movie, "Juncture" coming out fall 2006.

Click here for movie clip

www.myspace.com/juncturemovie

- Front Range Films

"Best of Me" one of the songs from Amanda Ray's EP aired on the Today Show May 2002.

- NBC Today Show

"How many black electro sci-fi chicks do you got going on out there?" asks Atlanta-based ambient singer/songwriter Amanda Ray. "I want to be the first."

Truth be told, the number of black female artists in America that stary from the current pop-music formula that pairs hip hop beats with R&B vocals adn boy-crazy lyrics can seem depressingly low. But Amanda admits her style is always a little different. "I hate writing from one perspective," she says, "I want people to grow. Anytime I write, even if it's a love song, it's with a different twist."

Amanda's debut album Mirrored Images is chock full of "different twists." With a deliberate progression that drops the listener off in various far off fantasies, her voice sounds like that of a flickering pixie blowing into your ear, one syllable at time. Her appreciation for electronica came during her college years where she started devouring records from underground trip hop and experimental musicians in Europe, particularly the UK. She decided she had to go there. "I started listening to Mono, Lamb, Bjork, Tricky, Goldie and definately a lot of Portishead and because a lot of those groups came from the UK that naturally made me want to go. I talked my professors into letting me do an independent research in London...I felt like I needed to be there in order to break into the genre."

She was disappointed to learn that kids in the UK were listing to the same pop music that saturated top 40 lists in the States. After a six-month stay in London and a few recordings she headed back to Atlanta to finish her 2001 EP, "What's On Your Mind." Self-promoted, with the help of her local Tower Records, the EP was a big local success, even reaching the hands of an NBC producer who featured one of the tracks on the Today Show.

Fast foward a few years, to a major move from the ATL to NYC to work with Brooklyn-based production team Super Buddha and a month-long hospital stay due to scar tissue from a previous surgery that almost stopped production altogether, and we have Ray's first full-length album, Mirrored Images. She's not trying to break down any musical walls with this record, she says, but she does want to show the world that it can't pigeonhole this black female artist. "It's been hard because there's no other black women out there for me to follow," she says. "I had no blueprint. But I had a vision about who Amanda Ray is and I stuck to it." - Trace Magazine

Amanda Ray — Mirrored Images
Co-produced by Amanda Ray
Produced by Charlie Nieland and Barbara Morrison of Super Buddha Productions
Amanda Ray is a musician in the tradition of Brian Eno: a sonic connoisseur with an ear for the past and an eye on the horizon. Throughout her latest release, Mirrored Images, moody synths and sequenced percussion merge with Ray’s sultry vocals to create a sound that is at once ultra-modern and timeless. Transplanted from New York to Atlanta, Ray attended Georgia State as part of the University’s Music Industry program. Somewhere amidst tedious lectures on copyright law, she discovered artists like Massive Attack, Portishead and Bjork. These mavericks of emotional electronica ushered in a new era of future-primitive soundscapes with their classically informed, mechanically obedient masterpieces. Mirrored Images is in keeping with the finest of these trip-hop opuses.
Ray’s approach to composition is a formidable soulfulness expressed both through her remarkable singing and the dark resonance of her music. As co-producer, she was able to sculpt the brooding midnight atmospheres that surround her ethereal vocals. Rather than wallowing as a half-realized collaboration project, Mirrored Images developed through Ray’s inspired relationship with Charlie Nieland and Barbara Morrison of New York’s Super Buddha Productions.
Opening with the breakbeat shuffle of “Ripple Junction,” Ray flaunts her disarming vocal prowess over growling saw-tooth leads and bristly pads. “The wrong side of the pond,” she croons, illumining a deep-seated attraction to the British origins of this somber genre. The album’s title track steps up with cinematic tension, as stacked layers of strings, bass stabs and soaring vocals build to a crescendo.
At times, the parallels between Mirrored Images and Ray’s avowed influences can be drawn uncomfortably close. The droning intonations in “Hang On,” for example, sound like an alternate take of Massive Attack’s “Future Proof.” But it is to Amanda Ray’s credit — and to her advantage — that these similarities merely draw the initiated listener further into her enthralling world. (Self-released)
www.amandaray.net
-S. Corey Thomas - Performer Magazine (www.performermag.com/seprecrevs.php)