Cosmic pop

One-woman Christchurch act Bachelorette is winning over Australian audiences with her “beautifully odd, inter-planetary pop”. Annabel Alpers is currently touring Australia with her new album, Isolation Loops, which she recorded in a remote wooden hut near the mouth of Canterbury’s Rakaia River. A review in the Melbourne Age describes the album as “lovingly kitsch space-pop”, and likens Bachelorette to indie electro acts Stereolab and Broadcast. Alpers studied composition and computer-based sound design at Canterbury and Auckland universities after a brief stint in NZ psych-pop band Hawaii Five-O. “I had been playing more psychedelic rock/pop kind of music in bands,” she says. “But once I was able to access computers with multi-tracking and electronic instrumentation, the more my solo stuff developed and the more fascinating it became. Bachelorette was really born out of computers.”