AGF

Antye Greie's work as AGF converts poetry into glitchy electronic music, sound installations, audio-visual performances, and other forms of media. First known as half of the experimental electro-pop duo Laub during the late '90s, she began releasing challenging, fragmentary electronic music as AGF with early-2000s releases such as Head Slash Bauch (2002). Greie established her own AGF Producktion label in 2004, releasing solo works including 2008's Words Are Missing as well as collaborations like 2011's Orlando with Craig Armstrong. Some of her most accessible ventures include the experimental techno duos AGF/Delay (with Vladislav Delay) and Greie Gut Fraktion (with Gudrun Gut), while solo releases such as Beatnadel (2011) and Dissidentova (2018) are challenging works of avant-garde sound poetry. Born in September 1969 and raised in East Germany in the city of Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, she moved to Berlin in 1996 and formed the downtempo electronic music duo Laub with Jotka (an alias of producer Jürgen Kühn). Greie was the vocalist of Laub, which released a series of acclaimed albums on the Kitty-Yo label: Kopflastig (1997), Unter Anderen Bedingungen als Liebe (1999), Intuition (1999), and Filesharing (2002). In 2001, Greie made her solo debut as AGF with a few tracks on the Neue Berliner Initiative release Constant Variable. Subsequently signed to Kit Clayton's Orthlorng Musork label, she made her full-length album debut with Head Slash Bauch (2002), followed by her second album, Westernization Completed (2003). The albums were both musically experimental and artistic in orientation (Head Slash Bauch based on software code, Westernization Completed on personal information), a departure from her work in Laub, which had been fairly melodic and song-based whereas her solo work as AGF is abstract and often spoken rather than sung. In 2004, Greie founded her own label, AGF Producktion, on which she released a 12" EP by Quio (which she produced) and reissued her second album. Subsequent releases on the label included a new album by Laub, Deinetwegen (2007), and the third AGF album, Words Are Missing (2008). In addition to her releases on AGF Producktion, Greie's work throughout the 2000s involved many side projects, including the Dolls (The Dolls, 2005), the Lappetites (Before the Libretto, 2005), AGF/Delay (a collaboration with Sasu Ripatti [aka Vladislav Delay] that yielded 2005's Explode and 2009's Symptoms), and AGF.3 (Mini Movies, 2006). The following decade, Greie founded an arts organization based on the Finnish island of Hailuoto, where she based herself with partner Ripatti (the two were wed in 2012). The producer continued to split her studio work between solo and collaborative endeavors. Beside Gudrun Gut, she formed Greie Gut Fraktion for a pair of albums on Monika Enterprise. 2011's Orlando, made with Craig Armstrong, was scored for a stage adaptation of the Virginia Woolf biography of the same title. Among the most notable AGF-proper recordings issued on AGF Producktion were Beatnadel (2011), Kuuntele (2013), and Kon​:​3p>UTION to: e​[​VOL​]​ution (2016). For the most part, Greie favored shared creative input. In 2018, AGF released a split LP with Kommissar Hjuler und Frau and Marc Hurtado as well as Dissidentova, a collaboration-heavy work dedicated to several iconic Russian women throughout history. ~ Jason Birchmeier