Lisel

Very few vocalists can claim to live at the edges of modern classical music and avant-garde pop like Lisel, or Eliza Bagg. The daughter of an acclaimed North Carolina violist in an ultra-musical family, Bagg studied violin and modern dance in Durham. She rapidly rose through the classical ranks, though, as a vocalist, her operatic flair and experimental pizzazz leading to work with the likes of Wayne Shorter, Michael Gordon, and Ash Fure. She toured in Roomful of Teeth, sang the works of John Zorn and Meredith Monk, and worked closely with Ted Hearne and the Attacca String Quartet. Bagg is a star of new classical music, but she has never been content to stay there. Working under the name Lisel, she has also long made audacious and uncanny pop, warping her supreme instrument through processing that’s meant to augment the stories she shares, much like Laurie Anderson. She named her 2023 album Patterns for Auto-Tuned Voices and Delay, indicative of the risks she was taking.

On 2024’s grand The Vanishing Point, Lisel combined her fields like never before, pairing opera’s song-cycle structure to explosive electronics that not only transmogrified her voice but also reframed it. These are apocalyptic songs, transmissions from the edge of history, but Lisel’s voice feels forever like the dawn, proffering a renewed horizon. During “Ship Is Sailing,” over modular synth sequences that move with nervous urgency, she lets her voice curl like a siren, sounding an existential alarm. After she builds a hocket of one on “Canyons,” with drums moving between the vocal ping-pong, she explodes into a chorus that suggests a call to action in order to fend off “the closing of doors.” The Vanishing Point originated as a show of video, dance, and music; Lisel brings that same level of theatricality to the resulting album and performances.