Glasser is the musical project of LA-based Cameron Mesirow, who’s debut LP Ring is a spooky, synthy, wintry whisper of joy. Totally Dublin spoke to her about musical past and future and experiences of bring her album to life on tour:
I was wondering what your musical background is because the Glasser project seems to have been birthed fully formed almost, the first record sound like a finished article rather than being a tentative first step.
Yeah, I know what you mean. That’s how it happened for me though. I was a strong consumer of music for a long time without making anything and I think, I was never brave enough to try anything until I was really sure of what kind of product I was going to have. I was pretty self-conscious I would say. And that was something that held me back and kept me from making music but I think it was also something that when I stopped being so self-conscious, self-conscious in the bad way I would say, when I stopped being so nervous about what people would think of me and so forth, I had this very rich background of knowing about all kinds of different music
Did you study classically before as well?
No, never! I took piano lessons when I was a kid, but I never really learned how to read music or anything about music theory or anything like that.
So was this the first batch of songs you’d ever finished writing?
It’s Plane Temp. The first Glasser song I finished writing was Plane Temp. Oh actually, that’s not true, I have a couple of other songs that are not on the record but I think I’m actually going to rework them a little bit, that I made back in 2006 when I moved to LA.
Was one of them Save Me? Is that you?
[Laughs] Yeah that’s me, but that’s not a Glasser song!
No, its not, its very much not!
That was a job that I had imitating popular singers for commercial music
Ah, that’s like something Lou Reed used to do
He did?
Yeah, he used to write songs for a company that ripped off the hits of the day before he was in the Velvet Underground.
Yeah, that’s exactly what it was!
I thought it seemed out of character with Glasser, it was a lot less subtle
It is so weird. That song got used in some X-Games video and people went crazy for it on youtube the next thing I knew my name was on it, which was never supposed to be on it and it was a kind of a nightmare coincidence. I mean, it wasn’t that terrible but its just nothing like Glasser. Occasionally I still get emails from jock guys that like “How come this music doesn’t sound anything like that one song?! [Laughs]
I can imagine… I wasn’t even sure it was the same person, but you’re name is sort of unique, so then I had to ask.
Only a fragment of it was used in that whole X-Games thing and then someone found the whole song somehow and put it up on youtube with a photo of me and the words. So… I don’t know why, people are so weird, the internet is such a weird place.
I wanted to ask you about how easy or hard it’s been to adapt what I think essentially a laptop record into a live performance and whether it was important for you to have people performing the parts on stage rather than you triggering samples?
Well actually the songs in their demo were all on the laptop. The record itself has real instrument, a combination of synthesized and real instruments on it. And then the live show is all synthesized, well mostly synthesized. And to be honest, it’s been really difficult. It wasn’t something that I considered when writing the record, how I was going to pull it off. It’s not where I want it to be at, to be honest. First of al I feel like I really need is a lot more of the real stuff happening. I mean I love having the MIDI band. I think the MIDI band is a really wonderful, exciting, its definitely the closest I’ve come to making this music happen live that I feel really happy about but you know its really nice to have singers… its very complicated. It keeps changing.
I think I know what you mean about always wanting more musicians to have available to you
Yeah!
I thought the video we were talking about earlier on where some of your band mates are explaining how the MIDI guitar pick-up works and how he’s controlling it with Ableton, I thought that was really interesting. It sounded amazing to have the saxophone guitar and marimba riff played on guitar as well.
Thanks. I feel like that is a really Glasser way of dealing with the problem of having all these sounds that we don’t have the means to create by having all the different musicians and different instruments on stage.
Have you ever had any plans to do a one-off show, rather than a tour, with lots more live musicians playing with you?
I have done, actually, I did it one time in LA. The whole thing was without prerecorded sounds. With every set up you a million different problems – with the MIDI set up, there’s unique MIDI problems; with acoustic instruments, there are unique acoustic instrument problems. I would love to do more of that, but it was a little tense for me since I was used to doing everything in a totally different way.
I can imagine having more musicians, it’s more headaches as well and not just the problem you can solve by turning them on and off like a computer.
Exactly. And the computer never talks back to me.
In future, would you like to work more with a live band when you’re making records or do you still enjoy masterminding the whole process yourself?
Hmm… I like both. Like I said, with my demos I did them all by myself, but after that I was able to hand over the laptop demos to people who could actually play those things, like a saxophone player or a violin player and make what I created into more of a moving statement instead of an idea. They were just sketches before. But I really do like to be in control of the whole thing.
Understandable.
It’s hard to be in control of everything though. There are all kinds of things that I never considered would happen. Things people say and people’s reactions to you and how that effects you… But on the whole, it’s been a totally positive experience, doing all this stuff and realizing that I could do all of it on my own.
I wanted to ask you, and maybe you could give some examples, about art outside of the sphere of music that influences Glasser music. Anything that is particularly informative of the atmosphere that you create in the music.
Film definitely plays a film role because its visual and audio together. I’m not necessarily composing to a certain visual idea but I’m definitely inspired by them, particularly Woody Allen and in particular one of his less talked about films, Interiors, which is a drama from 1979 that a really minimal look to it with a maximal emotional landscape and that is something that I’ve returned to again and again. I would definitely say that in books that I’ve read, I’m definitely interested in recreating some sort of real magic feel that I’ve read in books like [Mikhail Bulgatov’s] The Master and Marguerita. I actually refer pretty often to Haruki Murakami’s novels like Kafka on the Shore. And then I am really inspired by visual art but there’s a lot of it out there and there’re a lot of different thing that from day-to-day that enter my consciousness because I look at blogs and websites and so on. And for a while I was really into sculpture, and I’m still a fan of sculptural and I started to think of my music as a some kind of sculptural thing instead of a linear thing, if that makes sense – instead of start to finish, more of a pile of something.
Can you tell me something about one of the projects you are involved in, the Auerglas [a specially build tandem pump organ built with artist Tauba Auerbach]? It looks like a lot of fun, but also pretty tiring to play. Are you going to do any more work with Tauba?
We’re actually planning another instrument right now. We’re planning the next installment of Auerglas. Its sort of an ongoing thing. We’ve been talking about it for years and we feel like its just gotten going on it. So I think in the next year you’ll see, I hope anyway, another Auerglas piece.
Glasser plays Crawdaddy on Tursday 24th February, tickets are €14.
Words: Ian Lamont
