Album Review: Into The Light by Marisa Anderson

On 2013’s Traditional & Public Domain Songs, guitarist Marisa Anderson took tunes from the American songbook—“The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Pretty Polly”—and warped them to her own liking. The results dropped relics from the past into sometimes harsh, but always interesting, new environments. On her new album Into the Light, she bends American guitar traditions for a completely different, but no less captivating, conceit: They soundtrack a theoretical sci-fi Western of Anderson’s own invention, where it’s up to the listener to fill in the cinematic details.

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The September 1978 issue of Art Forum included an essay by the American monochrome painter Marcia Hafif, titled “Beginning Again. ” In it, Hafif writes: Hafif felt the looming question of irrelevance upon herself and her contemporaries who had theretofore accessed art by means of the brush: “painting appeared to be no longer relevant, not quite right, and yet the only possible activity for one who has been or is a painter — an artist deriving satisfaction from painting, drawings, the ordering of space, with a sensibility directed to paint, to pencil, to materials in general. But there was no dialogue, no discourse.

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Summer playlists usually teem with high-energy party music, but nights spent camping under the stars at Joshua Tree or amid the Big Sur redwoods call for sounds more contemplative, organic, earthen. This month has seen the arrival of a few remarkable guitar-based instrumental albums that fit the ….

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Marisa Anderson — Into the Light (Chaos Kitchen)<a href="http://marisaanderson. bandcamp. com/album/into-the-light">Into the Light by Marisa Anderson</a>Photo by Jodi DarbyWith her fourth full-length, solo electric guitarist Marisa Anderson breaks with her previous recordings — this time out, she’s not solo.

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