Marisa Anderson is a wanderer at heart, creatively as curious as she is proficient. On Cloud Corner, Anderson’s music is boundless. Rooted in American folk music, her pieces are inspired by 20th century classical and West African guitar techniques. The results are revelatory. Written and recorded in a period of political and personal upheaval, the album was created as a refuge, an ode to stillness in an era of ceaseless noise. Marisa Anderson’s Cloud Corner is an album of remarkably intimate beauty, tranquility in times of turmoil.
Anderson’s composing is indelibly tied to her process of recording. As her own engineer, Anderson is able to develop her pieces while recording, shifting from song to song as inspiration strikes. After at times months of ruminating on musical and conceptual ideas, she improvises hours of material which then is often whittled into the concise, richly textured compositions. As the pieces of Cloud Corner developed, a distinct mood began to settle over the album, with long reverb tails, cleaner tones, and lightly bouncing rhythms evoking air, wind, breath, and the sky. Themes continued evolving as she recorded, as Anderson began embellishing pieces with varied instrumentation, from the warble of her Wurtlitzer keyboard to the staccato plucks of the requinto jarocho.
