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Nowottny sighting :
Marianne Nowottny
Manmade Girl
Abaton Book Co
You can't judge a book by its cover, but usually you can judge a compact disc by its. Or, more explicitly, a sage shopper can usually expertly discern internal audio quality by the typeface a record's artwork chooses to sport. In this case, this rule of thumb doesn't apply. And not because our blessed Jersey girl Marianne Nowottny is an exception to the rule, but because she's beyond any of the standard devices one uses to measure the pop music. Nowottny makes total outsider art, and, thus, she's in an anchoritic artistic world abstracted from what's-hot-lists and self-consciousness and careful composition and, like, fontal fashions. So, she need not concern herself with such social notions as taste and refinement; she need only lose herself in the dirty floors and spun webs and spidery melodies of her awkwardly arachnid art; need only grind her cheap keyboards through a slew of silly effects; need only affect gothic seriousness in a situation in which she surely must be joking. Nowottny is the queen of caprice, can't commit to a notion as notional as "song," has a natural aversion for the less-is-more ethos, and has a voice deeper than a news anchor. Her expressionist impressions, as slaves to capriciousness, evoke churlish childhood tales in their poetic petulance. Singing songs for children, Nowottny could conform to expectation and make out like a musical Mother Goose, but from the shadowy safety of her own little outsider enclave she's more like the bastard-child Grimm sister, authoring tales for only the child-within with a wilful sense of the grotesque.
Musically, Manmade Girl forsakes the absurd Arabic arabesques and sinewy synth-preset snake-charmings that colored her Afraid of Me debut in fearful shades of a desert's palette; instead, it's deeper and darker, somewhat dapper. It comes with a second disc of instrumentals, but without the sound of her voice, Nowottny's stumbling un-songs lack the forward progression abstrusely afforded by her sung narratives. This second disc does allow her a chance to test her hand at non-keyboard instruments — ranging from guitars to wooden flute — but Nowottny is at her best when she's destroying the artful artifice of the songwriter behind the piano; even finding, by ways of her wandering way, the time to moan over the drone of a harmonium. This, of course, could lead to comparisons with Nico, but comparisons be best left aside. Nowottny is beyond such standard devices used to measure the pop music, off in a world in which OCR-A is perfectly pretty.
by Anthony Carew
Neumu