Lisel

Fables of our future fuel our 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 our contemporary existence.

“Time & Money” takes an engineer’s POV as they reset the simulation that makes up our perceived existence. “The Vanishing Point” morphs the alienating ecstasy of apocalypse into a queasy lullaby, with the lyrics, “Rising planet looms / Ultraviolet plume / Vanish the seams / Oceanic dreams / Horizon line / A vanishing sight / Gleaming and bright."

“Rings” combines a baroque-inspired clavier-esque staccato-ed synth with the desire to head off futurist fears using ancient magical techniques, like card reading and coincidence. “The Past Is A Tiger” pleads an acknowledgment of our culpability, our shared past mistakes, while “On The Road To” stares straight at the futile road ahead, incorporating both harsh, metallic and plastic sounds with electronically fabricated harpsichords. Together, these diverse perspectives are parables, relating together by their hold on what life may come to resemble..

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 our 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.