Lisel

Today, LA-based singer and experimental musician Lisel shares a new video and single from her upcoming album Patterns For Auto-tuned Voices and Delay, released February 17th on Ba Da Bing Records.

"Immature" features Bagg's operatic voice, layered, cut up, and warped, while the video straddles the experimental and pop realms, combining minimalist dance references to Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas Danst Rosas with pop culture aesthetics that reference Beyoncé and Charli XCX. Lisel and two dancers strut in high-heels on treadmills, enacting something both bizarre and pedestrian. 

Speaking on the video Eliza Bagg and director Kate Watson-Wallace add; 

 “It’s the repetitive movements that only develop minimally, as well as the small, pedestrian, everyday nature of the gestures and set design. Interacting with everyday objects and gestures but in a repetitive way that changes the nature of their meaning" Eliza Bagg aka Lisel 

“Conceptually, I am interested in the complications of what it means to be looked at inside a femme body. The material of this video plays with both the interesting/exciting parts of the gaze, as well as the problematic parts.  I wanted to make something that explored those tensions. The use of the treadmills had to do with repetition, endurance, the ability to physically challenging tasks (walking on a treadmill in heels), while maintaining poise, grace, and beauty— not so much as a statement, but rather as a series of images that slowly wash over the viewer as a way to contemplate these tensions/questions.” Kate Watson-Wallace (director)

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. She’s also collaborated with renowned artists including Lorde, Lyra Pramuk, Julianna Barwick, Tim Hecker, Ben Frost, esperanza spalding, Nico Muhly, David Lang, Daniel Wohl and Bryce Dessner - 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. After years of using her voice in highly specialized ways (as in singing the music of Caroline Shaw with Roomful of Teeth), Bagg wanted to explore what that level of vocal technicality can do when combined with technology. What results is a full spectrum sound journey through the potential of the human voice; the new Lisel album explores a world of singing that maintains melody as it pushes boundaries. “I rely on my body as an object and resonant instrument,” she says. “Now, what begins inside my body and continues on the computer is one process, and the ideas that result from it are my instrument.”

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 - as she says, “I am going for a maximalist sound, but my sources of inspiration also include minimalists.” From Philip Glass to Charli XCX, Carl Stone to Grimes, Patterns makes radical connections.