MARISA ANDERSON

Marisa Anderson is a composer, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist living in Portland Oregon. She works solo and with others. Anderson’s second solo record, The Golden Hour, was released January 2011 on Mississippi Records. The Golden Hour features 12 improvisations for guitar and lap steel inspired by Delta blues, West African guitar, country and western radio from the 60′s and 70′s, gospel, noise, rhythms, cycles, mortality, and praise. Anderson’s past projects include the Evolutionary Jass Bands and the Dolly Ranchers.She has collaborated with Mirah, Beth Ditto, Tara Jane O'Neil, The Devil Makes Three, Cynthia Nelson, Kaia Wilson, Sarah Dougher and many others. Anderson’s music has been featured on soundtracks including, ‘For the Love of Dolly’, ‘Girls Rock’, and ‘Gift To Winter’.

Her debut solo recording ‘Holiday Motel’ was a 2006 Outmusic nominee for Best Female Debut Record. Anderson has spent the past seven years working for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls. Before arriving in Portland in 1999, Marisa walked across the US, toured Mexico with Circo De Manos, helped launch the One Railroad Circus in Santa Fe, New Mexico and was a founding member of the Chaos Collective.

"While the world is not exactly under-populated with solo guitar records from the post-Delta blues, post-Takoma gene-pool, Anderson stands tall and proud. Her approach to playing her instrument hovers somewhere between extreme confidence and a kind of poetic tentativeness, coupled with an eager sense of the microtonal exploits you can uncover when a slide meets six strings. Her melodic sense is rustic, earthen, and deep, as though she has been playing these tunes for the better part of her life, but The Golden Hour really takes off when she combines this knowledge with a rambling, almost aleatory zeal for experimentation, most powerfully heard on the strung-out lights of “Electricity”, or the buzzing swarms of feedback that descend upon “Nebulae”." Jon Dale, SIGNAL TO NOISE



Marisa Anderson website