Watch Austra Play A Beautiful Solo-Piano Cover Of FKA twigs’ “Mirrored Heart”
Last year, after a seven-year quiet stretch, Katie Stelmanis, the Toronto artist who records as Austra, released her album HiRUDiN. Last week, to celebrate the album’s first birthday, Stelmanis played a solo-acoustic livestream concert. At Toronto’s empty Roy Thompson Hall, Stelmanis played piano and sang, doing everything herself. Austra’s songs are generally gothy and electronic, but Stelmanis is an opera-trained singer with a serious sense of presence, and she found ways to make those songs work in that setting. She also covered an FKA twigs song, and she made that work, too.
During her show, Stelmanis played a truly gorgeous cover of “Mirrored Heart,” a reflective hymn from FKA twigs’ 2019 album MAGDALENE. The twigs original was already a pretty spare song, and Stelmanis made it even more spare, turning its beat into minimal piano chords. She also sang the absolute hell out of it, and her performance really shows what a titanic singer she is.
Tomorrow, for Bandcamp Friday, Stelmanis will release a recording of that livestream show; it’ll only be available until Sunday. Today, Stelmanis has shared the video of that FKA twigs cover, and you can watch it below.
HiRUDiN is out now on Domino. The live album I Feel You Everywhere will be up on Bandcamp tomorrow.