ANGELS ON THE SLOPE

'I always find myself seeking out art that's totally immersive, says Eliza Bagg, the singer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who records as Lisel. Things that transport you to a place where our everyday, familiar thoughts about the world don't quite fit exactly. With her self-produced album Angels on the Slope, Bagg has done exactly this. Each song is grounded in specific, strange vocal sounds, and the resulting album forms a diverse, otherwordly landscape where one wanders between the gauzy and ethereal and distorted, beat-driven pop.?Ciphers?Digital Light Field?Hollowmaker?Vanity?Bloodletting?Hunker Down?GENUiNE?Sun and the Swarm?Mirage?This Time Tomorrow??Bagg has spent the last few years developing a prolific career as a classical singer, and she credits her experiences performing the music of Bach and Renaissance composers as crucial to developing her pure, ethereal vocal style. She currently spends her time singing new, experimental classical music, from avant-garde operas by Meredith Monk with the LA Philharmonic, to the work of John Zorn and Caroline Shaw, as well as working with indie and electronic acts like Helado Negro and Julianna Barwick. She has also collaborated as one half of the band Pavo Pavo for the last three years.??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. It suddenly became an urgent priority. 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 one, beginning with samples of her voice as the foundation, either by singing a note in a particular style or by manipulating them through the recording software Ableton, in order to create a vocal color that would be the defining feature of the song.??I was really looking at how the tools you have affect the things you see and the things you make she says, and I was trying 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.??Album standout HOLLOWMAKER is built almost entirely out of vocal samples, with rising synthesizers and percussion adding shape and movement. I am not a hollow maker, sings Bagg, and I am not the cycle breaker for you. Bagg delivers the line less as an angry rebuke to a lover than as a moment of self-actualization, the sound of a person growing in confidence, becoming her own. DIGITAL LIGHT FIELD is a sparkling dream of a song, with Bagg mixing images of the natural world and the manufactured, of a million plastic moon beams and people who pixelate daily in the sunlight.??The exploratory nature of Bagg's music is most evident on GENUiNE, a sort of frenetic stroll through a wild digital garden. This time it's easier to say I'm changing every day/And every day I stay the same, sings Bagg, over glitched-out vocal samples and a smattering of manipulated percussion and saxophones. It's a song about the struggle of trying to be the kind of person you imagine you could be without losing your authentic self in the process.??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.