Marisa Anderson will carry wordless conversations to Columbia Experimental Music Festival

Wordless conversations carry on, deliberately but naturally, across Marisa Anderson's 2022 album "Still, Here."

A solo guitar opens the exchange, sounding kindhearted signals into the atmosphere, seeking understanding and significance. When a second guitar enters, they share secrets, confess their affections, swap stories of the West as it once was. And, on occasion, a piano clears its throat, reminding us all of what matters, of what is beautiful.

Much of this dialogue revealed itself in a time of serious solitude. While the material represented here stretches out, conceived over a period of about four years, Anderson recorded much of the album during the most isolated days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Without the constant call of touring, the guitarist-composer enjoyed a distraction-free environment. With time to spare, like so many of us, she fell into natural rhythms.

"We learned, left to our own devices — who are we, what do we do?" Anderson said.

Her Oregon idyll involved days spent in lovely, looping strides: taking walks, gardening, playing guitar and cooking. With the outside world seemingly miles away, her instrument once again asserted itself as a true conversation partner.

"The way the world was — playing music is always how I deal. There was plenty of trying to deal," she said.

Anderson will bring the sound of those conversations to Columbia next Sunday, playing two shows as part of the Columbia Experimental Music Festival. By afternoon, she will appear solo in an intimate listening-room setting; by night, she will ascend a rock stage, joining percussionist Thom Nguyen and guitarist Tashi Dorji in MANAS.

More:Meet the artists at next month's Columbia Experimental Music Festival

'Locking into place'

Anderson approached past records with something like an auteur's cinematic vision; the guitarist described 2016's "Into the Light" as "the soundtrack to an imaginary science-fiction Western film." On "Still, Here," no single narrative arc prevails, but AllMusic writer Timothy Monger heard another kind of soundtrack, the accompaniment "to a long, solitary walk."

"At turns dusty, humid, hilly, narrow, and gaping, it is sensory music for wayfinding and idea catching," Monger wrote.

To borrow Monger's language, ideas crystallize and paths reveal themselves throughout. Lead track "In Dark Water" grows from ambient origins, expressing all the weathered mystery and momentum inherent to one of Cormac McCarthy's opening sentences.

Lyrical slide guitar overlays "The Fire This Time," supplying faithful lament on a song written as an aching response to the killing of George Floyd. "The Low Country" is a true conversation piece, guitars yielding to one another, then creating something resembling harmonic accord.

"The Crack Where the Light Gets In" nods to Leonard Cohen in name only; Anderson's attempt at creating a vocal gospel-music track without words, the song honors the horizon ("the actual crack where the light gets in," she said) and its countenance in cycles of morning and night.

While an arrangement of "La Llorona" explicitly evokes ghosts of Old Mexico, all of "Still, Here" tethers itself to the wildness and big-sky wonder of the West. As someone who has lived — or "received mail," as Anderson put it — in more Western states than she hasn't, those sounds and colors come honest and natural.

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Instincts always chart the course, whether deciding which guitars to pair or which countermelodies to pursue. Both the creative process and the emergent songs won't let themselves be limited by words — the sound is the speech and the story.

When Anderson's finely tuned instincts bend into the shape of a finished composition, the sense of place listeners experience occurs somewhere much closer to her.

"I don’t think it comes like an epiphany; I think it’s more gradual," she said. "Fragments and parts start to add up to whole, and then those whole pieces add up to something that makes sense. Perhaps it’s a feeling of locking into place."

Anderson will play a free show at 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 6 at Columbia Public Library. She joins MANAS later that night, supporting Godspeed! You Black Emperor at The Blue Note; that show starts at 8 p.m., and tickets are $30-$45.

For a fuller look at the festival, visit https://cargocollective.com/dismalniche/2022-CEMF.

Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. Find him on Twitter @aarikdanielsen.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: How guitarist Marisa Anderson created wordless conversations on new album