Rosenvinge, Christina / Frozen Pool

Smells Like Records

Plenty of pop personae have begun by making probing, personal music, only to regress into feeding the machine as the need to sustain a "career" begins to take precedent over purely artistic aims. Since her stint as a bona fide pop-star in the Latin-speaking world in the '80s, Madrid-born, Danish-descended Christina Rosenvinge (pron. ROSE-en-VENG-uh) has done just the opposite. After numerous hit singles as part of the duo Alex and Christina landed the singer firmly in the media maelstrom of endless TV and magazine covers she began a solo career recording a trio of albums for Warner Latin America. These albums, written primarily by Christina, became successively more sophisticated and culminating with 1996's Cerrado, whose sessions baptized Sonic Youth's just-completed Manhattan studios and were produced by SY guitarist Lee Ranaldo. Rosenvinge stayed in touch with the SY family, and on a 1999 visit to NYC contributed vocals to Two Dollar Guitar's Weak Beats and Lame-ass Rhymes. Smitten with the city and the possibility of working with a clean artistic late, she moved to New York and began performing locally with Two Dollar Guitar as her backing group. Since then she's opened for folk-rock-messiah-of-the-moment Elliot Smith at the Knitting Factory, put in an appearance as part of the Sunday Night Songwriter Series at NYC's Tonic in October, and performed at the Smells Like Records showcase at South By Southwest in Austin, TX in March 2000. Rosenvinge's rare and astonishing emotional range in her singing matches the subtle sophistication, expansive range of musical motifs and lyrical themes of her songwriting. She has absorbed the cream of the Continental pop crop, particularly the work of '60s chanteuse Françoise Hardy, and wedded those ideals to a sublimely somnambulant folk-based sound.

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