With six songs taken from a live-to-air session on some imaginably
obscure New York radio station, Illusions of the Sun finds a
little light illuminating the shadowy outsider-art craft of
bizarre/baroque Jersey girl Marianne Nowottny. Her previous solo
records have often been dank, dark efforts whose slathered-on layers
of wired-up Casios have descended into the carnivalesque depths of
some claustrophobic horror show. Here, with her unmistakable singing
pushed front-and-center as she accompanies herself on only piano,
harmonium, or keyboard, it's on this between-album effort that the
quality of Nowottny's idiosyncrasies is shown in the fairest of
light. The quality of this quality is on display as plain as day,
illuminating an artist whose previous perceived status as some sort
of teenaged curio did her a great disservice. In a time of such
saturated musical product as this, Nowottny actually stands alone, is
actually a lone figure, a unique voice whose iconoclastic voice box
— somewhere in the deep-and-murky range of demented-ingenue
types Nico and Danielle Dax — says only half the story. Totally
removed from anything approximating fashion (or style, notably), and
free from scholarly pretension, Nowottny's strange songforms evoke a
mutated wonderland in which the beautiful and the grotesque are one
and the same, her awkward melodies warping the notion of melody as
her voice moans and bewails all kinds of pained sentiments. In the
clarity of its simplicity, this disc is the best representative of
Nowottny, who is one of the more endearing outsider-art figures in
recent days. The desexualizing arabesque garments draped all over
"Afraid of Me" and the clattering metal machine accoutrements
hammered onto "Manmade Girl" are stripped away here, to show Nowottny
as, like, some kind of songwriter, at the same time as it razes the
very same notion; her singing-behind-the-ivories idiosyncrasy only
conjures some stomach-churning fantasia in which freedoms are taken
as given.
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