GLASSER

“It was born out of real frustration,” explains New York-based musician Cameron Mesirow about her second album Interiors, which was released last week on True Panther. “I’ve always had fraught relationships with space. I’m either too connected to it—like I’m desperately clinging to it—or I feel sort of alienated in it. And when I’m in New York, I really want to be in my home, not even out in the area near where I live. I guess that was on my mind so much that that became what I was writing about.”

The thirty-year-old singer-songwriter, whose swirling, avant-electro début Rings as Glasser in 2010 has lent her comparisons to everyone from Bat for Lashes to Björk and Joni Mitchell, has never backed away from addressing personal matters in her work. She sang about the singularity of her relationship with her closest friend, the artist Tauba Auerbach, and in frequently veiled terms, what it means to feel unstable on Rings. The sense of instability was longstanding and raw.

It’s not a surprise after spending time with her releases to hear that Mesirow grew up splitting time between parents on both coasts after they separated and took her away from her native Boston at age ten. That her parents were both musicians too—her mother founded the New Wave group Human Sexual Response while her father was a member of the Blue Man Group in Berlin—is also not a shock.

“I was sort of always traveling,” Mesirow explains in reference to her nomadic childhood. She also always loved music, taking up piano as a kid and later playing alongside college boyfriend and Foreign Born frontman Matt Popieluch.

Interiors, with its all-too-vulnerable focus, picks up where Rings left off.

It’s an unusual sentiment—an assertion of creative effort built out of anxiety and admitted phobia—and, on listening to the album, a compelling one. Interiors is about this struggle to gain control over the boundaries between the interior and the exterior, and the worlds we create to abate our own space-based fears, feelings that originated early on for Mesirow (“When I was thirteen, I literally fell down in a public place because of anxiety,” the artist told Pitchfork last month) and were pixilated with post-Rings touring and a subsequent move from California to New York.

The conversation develops lushly and seamlessly as the record progresses, with soaring anthems like the opener “Space,” a song about the psychological beach that keeps her “safe from imagined pain,” and the slow-building “Dissect,” a skyrocketing rumination on choosing to feel “shackled to a window.” Visual artist Jonathan Turner, a member of the collective Yemenwed, made the accompanying graphics (including the album’s cover and the portrait above). As in the case of Rings, Mesirow uses strangely purposed sounds (her own winding voice as a base line in “Design,” for example) to blur the lines between environmental and natural tones and electronic elements. It’s a smokier, more cohesive vision this time around, though—something that she acknowledges herself: “I feel like the sound of it is a little more crystalized in a way,” Mesirow muses, mentioning that she listened to “lots of Warp Record records” and female vocalists like Mitchell and Laurie Anderson while making the album. “I started writing it two years ago or two-and-a-half years ago. It took so long—like anything that you really, really care about. I wanted to take every decision really seriously. So, I did. I think that I’m more decidedly me.”

Interiors is out now from True Panther.

Ashley Simpson writes about art, culture, and fashion for Interview, V, Style.com, and W. She grew up in Hawaii and the South and is currently based in Brooklyn.

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