The Vanishing Point

After playing in the indie bands Plume Giant and Pavo Pavo and racking up stage credits for the likes of Meredith Monk and John Zorn, singer and violinist Eliza Bagg made her indie solo debut as Lisel with 2019s Angels on the Slope. An otherworldly, experimental album also populated with synthesizers, rock and orchestral instruments, and glints of noise and effects, most memorably in the foreground were manipulated voice samples alongside and within operatic pop melodies. In the five years to follow, Bagg sang in productions at the vanguard of opera, premiered her own compositions, continued to surface on classical and indie rock recordings (Roomful of Teeth, Vampire Weekend), and developed her voice-recording techniques on the 2023 album Patterns for Auto-Tuned Voices and Delay. Arriving a year later, the thematically dystopic The Vanishing Point ups the ante on Lisels indie electronic art song. An even more alien-sounding set than the debut, it reflects an attempt to blend pop and hyperpop tropes with the avant-garde. Perhaps the most salient example of this here is "Time&Money (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying)," a song that opens with rhythmic, pounding blurts of synthy bass in unison with what sounds something like a snared concert bass drum. Airy atmospheric noise and glitchy voices that could be garbled talk radio flesh out the backdrop before Baggs soft and lyrical voice enters, seeming like the only human element until its altered by digital pitch correction (most noticeable on vocal leaps). The juxtaposition of the songs junkyard percussion, mechanical tones, and warm, irrepressible melodicism are the stuff of a hypothetical steampunk opera. ("Time&Money" was reportedly about an engineer resetting "the simulation" of our existence.) Things get even more clattery and chaotic on the next track, "On the Road To," which sounds like a ramshackle spaceship falling apart around an elegant, structured vocal, an impression encouraged by lyrics like "Rising planet looms/Ultraviolet plume/Vanish the seams/Oceanic dreams." Auto-Tuned and otherwise processed vocals are much more conspicuous on tracks such as the opener, "The Past Is a Tiger," which has some full-on humanoid moments. This palette and setting are somewhat softened on occasion, including on "Rings," which employs Baroque-inspired synth timbres (clavier, strings, flute), on twinkling album highlight "The Vanishing Point," and on the more fully harmonized "Canyons." Elsewhere, "Failure!" could almost pass for an 80s synth pop track. Taken together, The Vanishing Point is an allegory very much anchored in the real-world anxieties of its time, as well as an achievement in composing, producing, arranging, and performing that could potentially find appreciative audiences in both the pop and art song worlds. ~ Marcy Donelson