ARTIST FEATURE | Wake Up Dreamland

Got Magic?

At 15 she was performing Bach fugues and studying the works of the great classical masters. Then she moved to Hollywood and made a name for herself -- for better or for worse -- while playing the piano in her panties. Today the former child prodigy turned Los Angeles Music Award winner merges her visionary creativity with a timeless pop sensibility to reveal an inspired new creative voice that is truly one of a kind. Meet the self-produced artist who grew up as a weird home schooled girl in Oregon, taught herself to record in a studio she built with weed money, and says her song ideas come to her from "some invisible radio in the sky."

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Galaxy Girl

Gleaming in the neon glow of her electronic wonderland, Christine Anderson is standing, quite literally, in a studio once struck by lightning. Encased up to her thighs in shiny silver boots and shrink wrapped in an iridescent bodysuit that catches the shimmering greens and purples of her lighting rig, her hands move effortlessly across a twinkling console of keys and knobs and switches. Swirling scintillations of disco ball light dance across piano keys and the shiny faces of sleek analog synthesizers. Beneath her fingertips a sweet melody is stirred to life, crying its way across the room.

Through the adjoining hall, people stop what they are doing and stretch their necks to see this otherworldly creature summoning emotions from the bellies of futuristic looking pianos. Slowly a small crowd begins to form. A teenager pulls out a cell phone. A woman inches closer, watching intently. There is a shared sense that something magical is unfolding, and although it's hard to say exactly what it is, everyone can feel it. This is her power. Anderson has that little bit of magic that is both strikingly modern yet utterly timeless, and somehow when it hits it goes straight to the heart.

As much as it is a gift, she's also worked hard for it. The award winning pianist, singer-songwriter and composer spent the last 10 years squirreled away in what she calls her "hermit's ivory tower," teaching herself to record, and acquiring a small but powerful collection of high end analog machines, to give voice to the symphonic fireworks going off in her head.

"I had no idea how hard it would be to get the music out of my mind and onto a record without losing the magic it holds in my imagination," she says, shaking her head incredulously. "I didn't watch tutorials. I didn't try to learn from other artists, I just made the decision to figure it out myself, and I knew once I did it would take on a life of its own."

Did she expect it to take ten years? Not even close.

"I've always had the heart of a warrior, chasing that spirit of victory," she says. "Whatever it takes, I'll do it. I wanted to capture magic, mystery, emotions of triumph, the heights of the human spirit, somehow distilled into unforgettable ear worms, so when people hear my songs, the day isn't ordinary anymore. I wanted every recording I made to live up to that feeling, and I had to figure it out, no matter how long it took.”

Such lofty goals don’t come easy. Five years into her deep dive — after working her way through hundreds of tracks that had finally begun to bear her earmarks of success — Christine’s studio was struck by lightning during an enormous electrical storm, burning out her instruments and melting computers and hard drives with years worth of unreleased music. When she had finally rebuilt everything two years later, her entire neighborhood burned down in the Oregon wildfires, destroying her studio and instruments a second time, along with her life's work and her home with all her possessions and memories.

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"I've always had the heart of a warrior, chasing that spirit of victory."

A lesser mortal may have given up, but not Christine.

Under a childlike mop of goldilocks curls, her green eyes glint with purpose. "That's just the Universe asking me to prove how much I love my music," she says, theatrically feigning nonchalance. Her eyelashes meet in a single staccato blink. "Damn Universe is like an insecure, passive aggressive girlfriend."

She flings her eyes toward a pile of burnt-out electrocuted machinery stacked in a corner. Battle scars from a war she's winning.

"I've been carrying around this art inside me my whole life," she says. "I have to get it out. I put so much energy into all the songs I created and the music I lost. I still keep the burnt out corpses of some of my old synths because they're infused with a sort of mythical power. It's a symbol to me of never giving up."

Never giving up is something Christine is well versed in. "I started and failed at this so many times that some people stopped believing in me," she says. "But at a certain point, it doesn't matter who believes in me. It matters that I believe in myself.

"At a certain point, it doesn't matter who believes in me. It matters that I believe in myself."

It's easy to fall in love with the passionate way she delivers this sentence, wild hair flopped over one eye. It seems so natural, this air of confidence. To look at her, you would never guess she has been anything other than uncommonly badass and cool as hell her whole life. But she didn't start off that way. The super brainy former home schooler grew up in the rural mountains of southern Oregon where she collected insects and wrote nerdy treatises on non-linear time. A child prodigy, she discovered the piano at nine and somehow just knew how to play it. She's been "just playing" ever since.

“Yes, I was home-schooled for most of my childhood, but I wondered what life was like for everyone else," she says wistfully. "On my thirteenth birthday I asked my mom to let me try real school and I showed up at the junior high ready to have this amazing experience." She laughs at the memory. "I was beat up the very first day by a group of five or six girls who didn't like big words or ankle length skirts with red suspenders."

In those days, she explains, bullying was a normal thing that happened to certain kids, something everyone accepted as part of growing up. "I was used to being different, so I shrugged it off," she says. "I'd been different my whole life, and instead of upsetting me or undermining my creativity, it cemented my sense of unique identity and reinforced my drive toward self-expression. After a few weeks of this, I went back to being home-schooled with a new confidence that being weird was actually one of my superpowers."

"Being weird [is] actually one of my superpowers."

Dollhouse Dominatrix

(a dollhouse of personalities/energies/identities)

As Christine embraced her originality, she discovered what would become an enduring passion for songwriting, rooted, she says, in her inborn instinct for extracting information from the quantum field.

"I've heard music playing in my head for as long as I can remember," she says. "Beautiful haunting melodies floating into my ears from some invisible radio in the sky. I've always had the power to hear and see things that others couldn't, and at some point I realized I could bring that music into this dimension. Eventually I became obsessed with dialing in these energies, which later led to capturing and immortalizing them in the studio."

Some would call this channeling. Others might say it’s inspired creativity. But Christine Anderson calls it holding down the vibe.

"There's information around us all the time," she explains, sweeping her arms about the space in front of her, “—on all these different frequencies. I have some kind of radio tuner in my head, and it picks up signals from somewhere waaaayy out there. I lock in and just hold down that vibe. I do everything I can to stay tuned in to that frequency, because the degree of joy I experience when I'm connected to it blows away any happiness I’ve ever felt from otherwise normal life. It's something I constantly strive to attain with greater and greater levels of passion, precision and purity of heart."

"I've heard music playing in my head for as long as I can remember -- beautiful, haunting melodies floating into my ears from some invisible radio in the sky."

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This same peculiar talent that she insists is the secret behind her songwriting is also the force behind what she calls "personality channeling."

"I'm sure actors have a name for this, but I'll be sitting there and I'll just feel this energy, this personality. I let it come through and that is how I've written from so many points of view. In my dreams I've been told it's because I oscillate between multiple realities that are all overlapped but slightly out of phase with each other. I phase in and out and I get to be all these people."

When things are aligned a certain way, she is Magic Powers with a Beating Heart Machine and the frequency to wake up dreamland. Other times she is Aunt Acid, Whorable Adorable, the Dollhouse Dominatrix, MC Funky Madness and the Sci-Fi Thrillers. Then there's Christara, her personality from high school.

"I was somehow born with the ability to do this, to let these voices come through," she says. "Sometimes I feel like I'm hearing ghosts, and giving them a voice in this dimension. I've tried to explain it to myself a million different ways, and I'm still not sure the mechanism behind it all," she admits. "All I know for sure is that every one of these energies has something to say, and I have the power to give them a voice.""

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"Every one of these energies has something to say, and I have the power to give them a voice."

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Hollywood Trainwreck

(Christine goes to Hollywood)

Full of promise and optimism, a teenage Christine was just discovering these powers when she left Oregon and set her sights on Hollywood. It was here where her formidable talent at the piano and remarkable songwriting ability garnered her special features on MTV and MuchMusic, earned her a Los Angeles Music Award for Composer of the Year, and landed her in the studio with Grammy nominated record producer Derek Nakamoto and legendary sound giants Craig Burbidge and Steve Durkee.

Embracing a woman-child Lolita persona, she sang her songs perched atop a swirly piano stool, adorned in vintage petticoats and antique undergarments, fearlessly winning hearts with her audacious piano performances and emotional storytelling. Her live performances were hailed as "creative brilliance, as raw and real as music gets," and she inspired a flurry of articles with titles like "Can a beautiful woman be brilliant enough to save the world?"

While record labels sought to harness her brilliance and mold her in their image, Christine's hunger for autonomy and artistic freedom led her to embrace a different path. Guided by intuition that whispered of a higher calling, she chose to remain independent, eventually returning to her roots in Oregon and constructing a sanctuary where she could nurture her creative spirit and immerse herself in the art of recording and production.

"I didn't plan for it to be this hard or take this long, but the choice to do things my way is what steered my creative destiny," she says. “I could hear this amazing music in my head, and I could bring the house down live. But when I tried to record, I couldn't fully embody the energies trying to come through. And I couldn't communicate what I was hearing. Any producer I worked with could only guess. I knew I could just let collaborators create a sound for me, but it would rob me of the supernatural experience of truly finding my voice. I had to figure it out myself. I had to become the producer and the engineer. That’s been literally my reason for living for many, many years now.”

"I had to become the producer and the engineer. That's literally been my reason for living for many, many years now."

Life in the Hologram

life in the hologram.

(fully realized inter-dimensional superpower channeling creative powerhouse)

It’s been a long road, but years of sacrifice, hard work and repeated failures have earned Christine the keys to her own kingdom.

Magic Powers Studios -- which started as nothing more than a refurbished iMac and m-audio MIDI keyboard in 2011, paid for with money she earned growing weed (“that’s a story for a different day,” she laughs) -- has evolved to house a variety of high end synthesizers including some vintage analog originals.

"I am now the priestess of my own creative temple."

"My go-to synth these days is the Prophet 12," says Christine. "I also have an ARP 2600 and a collection of boutique mono synths from Analogue Solutions that I love... three nyborgs in fact."

Although she lost her original 1980s Juno 60 and Yamaha DX7 in the Oregon wildfires (along with many others), she has access to a huge collection of analog synths, both modern and vintage, through a long-term loan arrangement with Automatic Gainsay Studios and Recondite Media.

"If I want to play a minimoog, all I have to do is ask," she enthuses.

More-so than the gear, however, what has evolved is Anderson’s ability to create masterpieces from, quite literally, nothing. Or, as she insists, from nothing more than that “invisible radio in the sky.” From the vibe.

Ten years of fiddling around with compressors and equalizers has paid off. Christine has developed her production craft and honed a sound and style that is melodically brilliant and pop-sensible, yet somehow defies genres and stirs the imagination. The result is something unique and truly magical.

"I am now the priestess of my own creative temple," she whispers with reverence, seemingly fully aware, and immensely proud, of her ability to call down melodies from the ethers and execute indelibly-hooky and uniquely styled sonic gems that simply don't sound like anyone else.

“To get to this point, I had to play the long game. Something in me had to shift away from where I was in my Hollywood days. Instead of taking every opportunity to perform and be acknowledged, I locked myself away and began to see what I was really capable of. I expanded my skill set. I connected to a deeper part of myself. I searched for the core of my being, without guidance, praise or need for acknowledgement. I did this for years until I wound up where I am now. The hardest part now is transitioning away from being a hermit and once again putting myself out there. It feels foreign and awkward, but I'm ready to once again share what I've become."

Christine is currently hard at work in lightning-struck Magic Powers Studios, holding down the vibe. She enjoys exploring filmmaking by producing music videos of her creations. She is available to take on select production jobs, and is looking to place her music in films and TV. She also performs at boutique venues across the United States from Los Angeles to Jeckyll Island.

To hire Christine, arrange interviews or request press materials, send a message here.

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Where do your ideas come from?

I used to think I was possessed. Ever since I was a little girl, invisible lightening bolts have shot out of the sky and into my head, and I'm instantly filled with music or poetry or some kind of idea. What some would call moments of divine inspiration I called moments of remote infiltration, as my mind and body seemed to lend themselves over to an unseen force tapping in from Elsewhere. "Something writes though me, composes through me, thinks through me. And he's not alone. Method, style, content and even point of view depend on which ghost is holding the remote control," I said once in an interview. Over the years I have learned that's not actually the case. I have a receiver in my head, and I'm receptive to information that comes from these frequencies out there in the cosmos. I've learned to maintain a very pure channel so I can consistently access the frequency where everything beautiful is. I like to think of it as divine inspiration. Being filled with that is the ultimate state of bliss for me.

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What is Microwave Radio Station?

Microwave Radio Station has to do with where my music comes from. Since I like to think of my brain as a radio, tuning into frequencies, I also perceive various stations where I download my music. Sometimes I have to think about it, and other times it just comes to me complete or in chunks, like information packets. One day I asked the muse, "where is this coming from?" And the words echoed in my head: Microwave Radio Station. I thought to myself, ok, I'm going to use that name for my record label.

03/

What does it mean to be a synesthete?

To be a synesthate means I have synesthesia and experience my senses in a multidimensional way. I see colors and shapes for musical sounds and pitches... I taste words. Emotions yield incredibly bright colors (the good ones anyway), and likewise incredibly bright colors yield positive emotions. I thought everyone was like this, but it turns out to be somewhat unique. It shapes everything I do, sonically and aesthetically, because I'm constantly operating on an amalgamated level of perception. When I create my art, not only do I want it to sound a certain way in my ears, I want it to look a certain way in my head, taste a certain way. I want sweet ambrosia that unrolls its depths in my mouth to reveal itself as a morsel of deep sustenance, a fine balance between substance and echo, an inspired design with a sense of space and atmosphere. I've always envisioned my music videos as moving 3D viewmaster slides of the dancing rainbows I experience. I am fascinated with colors, prisms, light, shadow, refractions and all things quantum.

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