ELIZA BEGG, the vocalist and composer who guises as Lisel musically, and electronica creator and percussionist Booker Stardrum, have been friends a long time, in each other’s musical orbit; and have spent recent time wisely with a six-week, remote collaboration eliciting an album, their first together: it’s to be called Mycelial Echo, and it’ll be out on April 9th on Luminelle Records.
A single, the arch, space-age and Broadcast-like torch song of “I Am Not Ready To Go” is the first revealed fruits of these sessions, with a video directed by Lisel herself; that’s down below right now, should you care to amble in. You should, you know.
What begins as a noir torchsong in the Lamb mould builds through detached and otherly vocals into a miasmic swirl of backwards masked guitars, a mantric sustain, bound for a sweet retro-future. It’s beguiling.
Mycelial Echo promises more fine ethereal singing and fractured future pop: we’re told that manipulated vocal samples and processed vocal improvisations are combined with complex polyrhythmic sequences, organic percussion, and synths “to create a portrayal of our relationship to the natural world that is both tactile, sensorial, and seen from a distance.
“The album dives into the anxious euphoria of our time, grappling with the chaos of cyberspace and the physical destruction of the oceans, atmosphere, and trees.”
Indeed, half of the music was written as songs for an opera about trees – a collaboration with experimental theatre and visual artists that will be presented in a virtual reality installation later this year. The other half is the score for a larger work called The Vanishing Point, a piece of music and dance made with a choreographer, conceived as video art and premiering through National Sawdust in Brooklyn on February 18th.
Lisel + Booker Stardrum’s Mycelial Echo will be released digitally on April 9th; you can pre-save your copy over at their Bandcamp page now.
