Cameron Mesirow aka Glasser, the daughter of a kazoo player and a performance artist, was destined to be different. She trumps all others in the electronic pop and vocal experimenation hinterland – and invents her own musical instruments to boot. And don't listen to her if she tries to tell you she's an iffy performer – she's wrong, writes JIM CARROLL
SOME PEOPLE are destined to reside in the limelight. In the case of Cameron Mesirow, the Los Angeles native who performs as Glasser and is fast becoming a bold-type name for her bewitching and beguiling electronic pop tunes, stagecraft was in her genes.
Her father is a member of the Blue Man Group performance-art company and her mother was involved in such cult musical acts as all-kazoo ensemble Kazoondheit and Rage Against the Machine favourites Human Sexual Response.
If she had decided to rebel she probably would have had to become an accountant or banker in order to shock her parents, but it was probably always on the cards that Mesirow would become an artist or performer of some stripe.
“I think they would have been okay, if a little freaked out, if I did that,” Mesirow laughs. “There was a share of rebellion, not that I was an accountant ever. I tried to be normal. I tried to be extremely conservative and polite as a child – not that my parents were impolite, but they were musicians and slightly unkempt at times.
“I was a bit of a prissy girlie-girl when I was a kid, but I quickly turned around when I got to puberty and realised that I wanted to be different. I had a lot of those genes and had a very good chance of being different if I wanted to show that off. And my parents are very excited and happy to see that this is where I feel comfortable.”
As her debut album, Ring, shows, Mesirow's sonic talents are something to behold. There are many artists ducking and diving around the electronic pop and vocal experimenation hinterland, but Miserow trumps them all with sassy ease. Her deceptively simple tunes are actually incredibly rich, detailed and mesmerising, as well as being infectious and easy on the ear.
She calls herself a “noodler”, and has been playing around with these songs for quite a while. “Some of the songs were written a year and a half or two years before I recorded the album, but others were just barely finished when I went in to the studio. One of them was written in the studio before I was supposed to finish.
“I don’t actually play any instrument myself, but I’m a decent noodler with many instruments. I can sit down at almost anything and can get something out of it, but my attention span is so short, unfortunately. I did take piano lessons as a kid, I also learned guitar from my dad, but neither of those stuck. I just wanted to sing.”
Joni Mitchell has been a major influence on Mesirow's approach to singing. She waxes lyrical about the enigmatic Canadian performer. "It was her voice which caught my attention first. When I first heard her, it was on the album Court and Spark,and I couldn't believe how seductive she sounded. I became completely obsessed with that record.
“I realised there were vocal parts that sounded instrumental, and that was very embarrassing and curious to me. I’m not sure I liked it immediately. I thought it was weird. But then I started really appreciating how she did that and how special it was because no one really did that – and why not? If you’ve got an instrument built inside of you, why wouldn’t you use it like that? It started me thinking differently about what ‘a cappella’ was – what it means to sing as opposed to the words you sing.
“There’s something powerful in how she creates instrumentation with her voice. Rather than playing the passive role her lyrics sometimes indicate, feeling sorry for herself with a very feminine feeling, there’s this other side which takes the power back which I really appreciate.”
While the songs and recordings are just how she wants them to be, Mesirow believes she still has a long way to go as a performer. “The show is constantly changing, but I’m not that happy with it. It’s okay, but I’m never happy. I’m a perfectionist, and I always think I’m a total failure in that regard, so I’m really glad when people say they liked the show.”
Are there any live performers she’s seeking to emulate? Mesirow sighs loudly. “I don’t even know what standard I am holding myself to! I don’t even think I’ve seen a show I can compare what I want to be like live with. I’m happy about a lot of aspects but I always wonder about myself as a performer. I love performing, but I wonder if I am capable of holding people’s attention. Sometimes yes, but sometimes, unfortunately, the answer is no.” It’s a surprising admission. At last year’s In the City in Manchester, Mesirow was one of the more magnetic performers on stage, with a degree of dynamism that other acts just didn’t possess.
“I always like to add things to the shows,” she says. “It’s an interesting criticism of other shows that you can have a performance where the actual performance takes over from the music you’re there to hear. Right now, the line-up is great, the musicians are superb and fun and easy to be with. They fit the bill. Finally, I’m doing something that feels right.”
Getting that mix right is important. Earlier in her career, Mesirow worked with New York duo Tanlines as her band, and that didn’t quite come together.
“It was fun but it was kind of complicated.They wanted to have more of a part in making the music, and I didn’t let them, so they decided to put in the minimum effort for the shows we did together. That’s fine, that’s their prerogative, and they have their own thing going on, but I kind of need people who are more willing to go on tours and stuff.”
There are other distractions that mean we mightn’t see too much of Mesirow as Glasser after this tour ends. There’s her Auerglass collaboration with artist Tauba Auerbach, for a start, on a new kind of pump organ.
“We designed a two-person pump organ. It’s a four-octave-scale organ split into two keyboards, each keyboard playing every other key. Then two sets of bellows, so the bellows I’m pumping go to Tauba’s keyboard and the bellows she’s pumping go to my keyboard.
“This year I’m going to tour and work on the next instalment of Auerglass. We’re just getting started on creating a new instrument and I’m brimming with excitement. It’s our very own! The collaboration is so inspirational. We both get so much out of it. I did it before I went into the studio to create Ring and it really inspired me and spurred me on to do other things, so I hope that will happen again.”
Glasser plays Dublin’s Crawdaddy on February 24
