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LP
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BING 209LP
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"Fables of the future fuel the present. Lisel (Eliza Bagg) draws from this tradition on The Vanishing Point, a daring musical odyssey of altered singing, experimental pop, broken melodies, and striking electronics. A culmination of her continual dissemblance of genre, Lisel's new album is an epic composed of allegorical tales, forming a dystopian storybook of life in the shadow of impending catastrophe. It's a high-concept work of contemporary pop sounds, hyperpop motifs and tropes. Every song reflects the shared psycho-emotional experience of moving towards unsettling futures and looking beyond these outcomes, to the point where the horizons vanish. Evolving the sonic toolkit she employed on Patterns For Auto-tuned Voices And Delay (2023), Lisel transforms pop into a canvas for operatic storytelling. Along with making her own work, Bagg is a classical singer working in baroque and contemporary experimental opera, and with her project Lisel, she seeks to develop new, expressive qualities out of ancient vocal techniques from the Baroque and Renaissance periods. Her opera experience has infused her with a desire for a big, cinematic sound and holistic world-building, creating a 'total artwork,' and she fits that medium into the form of a solo project. From haunting whispers to soaring melodies, she reaches back towards ancient musical traditions while incorporating futuristic sounds in order to imagine how a possible future might look back at contemporary existence. Dystopic stories melt into pop songs, hammered to ruin. Both through sonics and lyrics, the album recounts urgent narratives as ancient mythological fables, chronicling in operatic density the deepening awareness of the world's looming, inevitable vanishing point. Photographer Carla Rossi further builds Lisel's world through a series of photographs that similarly draw on Renaissance and Medieval painting, while placing them aesthetically in a digital realm. In these dramatic, hyper-stylized photos, Lisel takes up classical poses and yields iconographic symbols, further exploring the dissonance in her work as these manufactured 'paintings' recall storytelling of the past while depicting images from an imagined future."
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CD
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BING 178CD
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"Eliza Bagg leads a complex musical life: working as a classical opera singer, she has soloed with the New York Philharmonic, performed in Meredith Monk's opera at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and toured Europe with the legendary John Zorn. While making her own music under the guise of art-pop solo act Lisel, she's also collaborated as a vocalist with some of the most renowned experimental artists, including Ben Frost, Julianna Barwick, Daniel Wohl, and many others, all while playing indie rock venues and lovably dingy basements. One day, it's Lincoln Center or The Kitchen, the next it's an outdoor LA ambient series. She was always torn between her two worlds, and it wasn't until she began work on Patterns For Auto-Tuned Voices And Delay that she discovered a way to merge them together. Patterns comes out of Bagg's experience as a vocalist singing Renaissance and Baroque music along with the work of modern-day minimalists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. 'I developed a vocal processing system that allowed me to change the idea of what my instrument is,' Bagg says of the album's genesis, a system that combines her virtuosic singing with autotune and delay effects to create a melding of human and machine. Sure, she'll admit it. 'I'm a sci-fi nerd,' she says, with a laugh. 'I'm a Blade Runner and Battlestar person. I love things that explore how society interacts with machines.' While making Patterns, she dove first into Renaissance polyphony and chant. The music of Hildegard von Bingen, Thomas Tallis, and Carlo Gesualdo is a familiar world to her. Starting with Renaissance and Medieval singing styles and idioms, she added processing and electronic world-building to bring out new, expressive qualities of those styles. From there, she improvised in these styles, fed the performances into Ableton, and incorporated modern day hyperpop (like SOPHIE) and ambient electric sounds and aesthetics. From Philip Glass to Charli XCX, Carl Stone to Grimes, Patterns makes radical connections. Yet, it was important for Bagg to maintain the spiritual origins of these vocal techniques. Patterns For Auto-Tuned Voices And Delay stands within those traditions, using voices to transcend the cerebral and overwhelm the listener, all while evoking a unique set of references that span five hundred years."
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LP
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BING 178LP
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LP version. "Eliza Bagg leads a complex musical life: working as a classical opera singer, she has soloed with the New York Philharmonic, performed in Meredith Monk's opera at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and toured Europe with the legendary John Zorn. While making her own music under the guise of art-pop solo act Lisel, she's also collaborated as a vocalist with some of the most renowned experimental artists, including Ben Frost, Julianna Barwick, Daniel Wohl, and many others, all while playing indie rock venues and lovably dingy basements. One day, it's Lincoln Center or The Kitchen, the next it's an outdoor LA ambient series. She was always torn between her two worlds, and it wasn't until she began work on Patterns For Auto-Tuned Voices And Delay that she discovered a way to merge them together. Patterns comes out of Bagg's experience as a vocalist singing Renaissance and Baroque music along with the work of modern-day minimalists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. 'I developed a vocal processing system that allowed me to change the idea of what my instrument is,' Bagg says of the album's genesis, a system that combines her virtuosic singing with autotune and delay effects to create a melding of human and machine. Sure, she'll admit it. 'I'm a sci-fi nerd,' she says, with a laugh. 'I'm a Blade Runner and Battlestar person. I love things that explore how society interacts with machines.' While making Patterns, she dove first into Renaissance polyphony and chant. The music of Hildegard von Bingen, Thomas Tallis, and Carlo Gesualdo is a familiar world to her. Starting with Renaissance and Medieval singing styles and idioms, she added processing and electronic world-building to bring out new, expressive qualities of those styles. From there, she improvised in these styles, fed the performances into Ableton, and incorporated modern day hyperpop (like SOPHIE) and ambient electric sounds and aesthetics. From Philip Glass to Charli XCX, Carl Stone to Grimes, Patterns makes radical connections. Yet, it was important for Bagg to maintain the spiritual origins of these vocal techniques. Patterns For Auto-Tuned Voices And Delay stands within those traditions, using voices to transcend the cerebral and overwhelm the listener, all while evoking a unique set of references that span five hundred years."
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