Illusions of the Sun, Marianne Nowottny

Marianne Nowottnys (camera Obscura) /> Permit me to cream. I’ll be brief. It’s Marianne Nowottny’s moment. And we’re lucky enough to have a record of it. Her new disc is just her voice accompanied by a simple instrument. Gone are the more elaborate productions and overworked arrangements of her earlier recordings that obscured her magnificent voice. Stripped down to the essentials, Illusions of the Sun is a chillingly powerful document of a singer-songwriter in full bloom.

Clocking in at a mere 28 minutes, there’s not a dead moment on the disc. The breadth she accomplishes with such simple means is astonishing. Her voice jumps in and out of keys, sawing cross-grain through chords, splintering notes into shards, before stitching them back together into pop choruses. Comfortably dipping in and out of atonality, her songs never lose a sense of progression, each retaining a beginning, middle and end. Imagine the songwriting chops of a Stephen Sondheim mixed with the swagger of Arnold Schoenberg and you’ll begin to get the idea.

"Rainy Days and Vinyl," the strongest cut on Illusions, showcases Nowottny’s piano, hesitating and stumbling around her voice, which is by turns breathy, warbly, vulnerable and strong. Nowottny is not afraid of modernism. Dodecaphonic nuggets are seamlessly welded with pop tunes in ways that are shockingly unfamiliar (the only other pop artist I’ve heard incorporate high modernism into his work was Frank Zappa: particularly the shards of 12-tones on Absolutely Free as well as the numerous nods to Varese). "Grey City," Nowottny’s oblique 9/11 song, also owes a lot to Schoenberg, in this case his sprechstimme-laden Pierrot Lunaire, which is, in hindsight, a perfect soundtrack for that day’s events.

Nowottny grew up watching Bollywood films on the local public-access channels in suburban New Jersey. "Sweet and Low" is her attempt at Indian raga. It’s an odd thing to hear: I don’t imagine that these days—unlike in the 1960s—there’re too many young singers interested in ragas. I’ve got some great 60s recordings of La Monte Young singing wobbly ragas having studied after singer Pandit Pran Nath. It’s obvious from the recordings that Young really can’t sing properly but instead does something very much his own with it. Same here. Accompanied by an harmonium, it’s the most incorrect attempt at world music I’ve ever heard. Instead, she takes a rather tired and cliched genre and makes it her own. Nowottny’s gravelly mezzo slides up and down scales, eventually going far off the charts into new microtonal territorty.

File this one with Jeff Buckley’s seminal Live at Sin-é, Bob Dylan’s acoustic appearances in 1966, Annette Peacock’s hauntingly twisted masterpiece I’m the One and Neil Young’s junked-out heart-wrenching acoustic work on Time Fades Away. I used to think that Nowottny was headed into Marianne Faithful territory; now it’s clear that she’s closer to the avant model of Patty Waters.

Several years ago, upon the release of her first CD, I wrote the following in this paper: "In the best-case scenario, Nowottny will hook up with a sympathetic producer, one who will realize all her remarkable ideas into some extraordinary music, the likes of which we’ve never heard before. In the worst, she’ll go blazing into mainstream rock history the way of Smashing Pumpkins and Led Zeppelin." I was wrong. Neither has happened. Instead, like any other artist, she’s following her own path, slowly honing her vision to perfection. And this disc is about as close to perfection as we’re going to see.