Angels on the Slope

“I always find myself seeking out art that’s totally immersive,” says Eliza Bagg, the singer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who records as Lisel. “Things that transport you to a place where our everyday, familiar thoughts about the world don't quite fit exactly.” With her self-produced album Angels on the Slope, Bagg achieves exactly this. Each song is grounded in specific, strange vocal sounds, creating a diverse, otherworldly landscape that moves between gauzy, ethereal moments and distorted, beat-driven pop.

Bagg has built a prolific career as a classical singer over the last few years, crediting her performances of Bach and Renaissance composers as crucial to developing her pure, ethereal vocal style. Currently, she explores experimental classical music, performing avant-garde operas by Meredith Monk with the LA Philharmonic, as well as the works of John Zorn and Caroline Shaw. She has also collaborated with indie and electronic acts like Helado Negro and Julianna Barwick and spent three years as one-half of the band Pavo Pavo.

Lisel emerged from Bagg’s desire to turn inward and reconnect with her authenticity. “I had found space in the classical world that made sense for me,” she explains, “but I realized I needed to make something that was truly mine, that sprang from my own voice. It suddenly became an urgent priority.” This urgency led to a year-long writing and recording process, with Bagg spending each morning alone with a microphone and her computer.

“My main instrument is my voice, not a keyboard or a guitar,” she says, “so I wanted it to be the genesis of every song.” She meticulously constructed each track, using her voice as the foundation—either singing notes in a particular style or manipulating them through Ableton software to create unique vocal colors. “I wanted each song to be literally made out of me,” she reflects. “It felt true to the way we live our lives now, in 2019.”

Bagg’s voice—intimate and warm yet impossibly crystalline and heavenly—has drawn comparisons to "a lovelorn alien reaching out from the farthest reaches of the galaxy," as described by Pitchfork. It’s a fitting instrument to construct the world she creates on Angels on the Slope.

Album standout “HOLLOWMAKER” is built almost entirely out of vocal samples, with rising synthesizers and percussion adding shape and movement. “I am not a hollow maker, and I am not the cycle breaker for you,” sings Bagg. The line is less a rebuke to a lover than a moment of self-actualization, capturing someone growing in confidence and becoming her own.

“DIGITAL LIGHT FIELD” sparkles like a dream, blending images of the natural and manufactured worlds: “a million plastic moonbeams” and people who “pixelate daily in the sunlight.” Meanwhile, “GENUiNE” feels like a frenetic stroll through a wild digital garden, mixing glitched-out vocal samples with manipulated percussion and saxophones. “This time it’s easier to say I’m changing every day/And every day I stay the same,” sings Bagg, reflecting on the challenge of evolving while holding on to one’s authentic self.

With themes of self-exploration and becoming, the songs on Angels on the Slope radiate with the joy of discovery, blurring the boundaries between organic and digital, ordinary and uncanny. It’s the sound of an artist building a personal ecosystem—vivid, dynamic, and entirely her own.