Glasser's Artistic Agenda

By Veronica Murtagh in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 12, 2010 9:20PM

Music is a language of sounds producing connection through emotion. Musicians craft their work with the hope that a riff, a drum beat or a snippet of lyric will find its way into your ears and elicit a response of attachment. The most interesting musicians though are those who are able to utilize sound to create a bigger world wherein you connect with an artistic landscape. Recording as Glasser, Cameron Mesirow is complex and colorful, her music able to be at once both aural and visual art.

Like Björk or Karin Dreijer Andersson, Mesirow's music is one yarn in a hat knitted from many. Great attention is paid to aesthetics, her music used as a vehicle to showcase her own creativity alongside the artistry of others. Custom designed costumes by LA-based, Norwegian designer Ida Falck Øien wrap her small form in layers of billowing textures onstage. Your eyes dig through their intricate construction while your ears fall deeper into her sparkling voice, startled back to your surroundings via primal yelps over thudding drums. Glasser's recent debut album, Ring, boasts an assemblage of fractured glass, painted and formed into a vivid, jumbled pinwheel as album art. It is the perfect summary of the creative, organic compositions contained within. Earlier this year, Mesirow took to NYC's Deitch Projects with visual artist Tauba Auerbach for a series of live performances on a wooden pump organ built together over six years, symbolic of their bond of friendship.

Though Mesirow's sounds are elevated and her choice of collaborators sophisticated, under the polish there is an inherent DIY ethos. Her earliest tracks were composed in GarageBand and she has no shyness towards admitting she lacks formal musical training. As a project, Glasser feels in many ways like a theatre production, Mesirow manning the role of director and inviting in like-minded collaborators to fill the artistic spaces. Be it watching her flit across stage in a draped kimono in time to synth and drums, or seated in a gallery in focused silence, the affect of Glasser is something much bigger than music.

MP3: Glasser "Mirrorage"

Glasser plays with support from Twin Shadow and Yawn tomorrow, Saturday, November 13, at Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln Ave., 10:00 p.m., $12, 18+