Lisel Announces Debut Album ANGELS ON THE SLOPE

By: May. 29, 2019
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Lisel Announces Debut Album ANGELS ON THE SLOPE

Singer, producer, multi-instrumentalist and artist Eliza Bagg recently launched her new solo project Lisel with its first single, the stunning "Ciphers." Today Lisel announces her remarkable self-produced debut album, Angels on the Slope, an exciting introduction to a solo artist who taps into her experience in classical, avant-garde, experimental and indie pop spheres on this incredible first effort. Always aiming to create immersive art that transports the listener "to a place where our everyday, familiar thoughts about the world don't quite fit exactly," Bagg has crafted a gorgeous record, grounded in specific, strange vocal sounds that form a diverse, otherwordly landscape where one wanders between the gauzy and ethereal and distorted, beat-driven pop. Pre-order Angels on the Slope, out July 26th on Luminelle, HERE.

Today Lisel also shares the album's lead single, "Digital Light Field" - a sparkling dream of a song, which Bagg explains is "about our attempts to make sure the things that happen around us are meaningful by capturing them electronically, affirming and insisting on their significance. We 'pixelate' each other in the light fields of our phones, and then shy away from the things in reality we, maybe, really need. The fact that on this record I was mainly processing my own voice -- something human, intuitive, elemental -- with the digital world of the computer, felt really significant. Each song on the album feels like it's own individual micro-biome built out of the different versions of how I might use or manipulate my voice in that way." Check out the track now via Clash HERE.

Known as one half of the band Pavo Pavo, Bagg has spent the last few years developing a prolific career in her own rite, from collaborating with indie and electronic acts like Helado Negro and Julianna Barwick, to honing her work as a classical singer, performing in avant-garde operas by Meredith Monk with the LA Philharmonic, to the work of John Zorn and Caroline Shaw. Lisel grew from Bagg's desire to turn inwards as a way to get in touch with her own sense of authenticity. "I had found space in the classical world that made sense for me," says Bagg, "but I realized I needed to make something that was truly mine, that sprung from my own voice." This led to a year-long writing and recording process, with Bagg waking up every morning to spend time alone with just a microphone and her computer.

"My main instrument is my voice, not a keyboard or a guitar, so I wanted it to be the genesis of every song," she says. Bagg meticulously constructed each track on Angels on the Slope, beginning with samples of her voice as the foundation, either by singing a note in a particular style or by manipulating them in order to create a vocal color that would be the defining feature of the song "I was trying to use the resources I had within me, within my body, to make something that feels true about the way we live our lives now, in 2019. That's why I wanted to focus on my voice-I wanted each song to be literally made out of me." And Bagg's voice is a true marvel: intimate and warm while also impossibly crystalline and heavenly, which Pitchfork once compared to "a lovelorn alien reaching out from the farthest reaches of the galaxy." It's a worthy instrument from which to construct a world.


With themes of self-exploration and becoming, the songs on Angels on the Slope vibrate with the joy of discovery, delighting in blurring together the organic and the digital, the ordinary and the uncanny. It's the sound of an artist looking to create a personal ecosystem, one teeming with color and movement, a place all her own.

Tracklisting

1. Ciphers

2. Digital Light Field

3. Hollowmaker

4. Vanity

5. Bloodletting

6. Hunker Down

7. GENUiNE

8. Sun and the Swarm

9. Mirage

10. This Time Tomorrow


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