Lisel – “Ciphers” Video

Lisel – “Ciphers” Video

Pavo Pavo’s Eliza Bagg is setting out on the journey of a solo artist under the moniker Lisel. The project’s experimental pop has an ethereal quality similar to Pavo Pavo, but its touch is lighter, with more room to breathe and ruminate.

Today, the LA-based artist has released her first song and video as Lisel, “Ciphers,” which is a part of her forthcoming, self-produced debut album. Bagg inhabits a fantastical world in the Jing Niu-directed video for “Ciphers.” Accompanying Bagg’s levitating voice and lightly warping synths are pomegranates strewn in the sand, intricate dances in the dark, billowing blood-red fabric and some gorgeous outfits.

Here’s Bagg with some background:

The word cipher has two meanings — it can be a coded message, but it can also be an empty hole, a zero. The song is about the haunting uncertainty in the pathways that have been set out before you, and realizing these courses have become more ambiguous and disorienting than you thought — at best entangled, at worst empty. There’s also, however, the glimmer of trying to find authenticity within that reality — the background choir serving as the basis for the song is simultaneously pure and glitchy, faulty but still true.

The video is set in three surreal, manufactured landscapes: a celestial beach next to a reflection pool, a dark space where a shadow figure mimics and supports my movement, and a river of red silk. My identity is echoed in the pool and splintered in the shadow figure.

Watch “Ciphers” below.

Lisel’s debut album is out later this year via Luminelle. She’ll perform with Chromatics, Helena Deland, and DESIRE at the Granada Theater in Dallas on 5/9; get tickets here.

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