Spilling out over the landscape in a horizontal yawn of sleepy slide guitar, ambling fingerstyle patterns, buzzing Wurlitzer, and sun-baked requinto jarocho,
Marisa Anderson's
Cloud Corner feels like an old photograph come to life or a languorous, unhurried midday meal. As a guitarist and composer,
Anderson has wandered in and out of projects since the '90s, applying her intuition to the improvisatory
Evolutionary Jass Band, nimbly ornamenting records by
Sharon Van Etten and
the Dolly Ranchers, and exploring a wide range of folk, jazz, blues, avant-garde, and classical traditions on her own excellent solo records. Her first outing for the Thrill Jockey label,
Cloud Corner, follows 2016's expansive
Into the Light, which was themed as an imaginary soundtrack to an imaginary sci-fi western film. While it shares some of same dusty characteristics of its predecessor, this unthemed ten-song set moves with its own insouciant gait. Written, performed, and engineered entirely by
Anderson, these tracks were born of her preferred method of capturing lengthy improvisations and slowly revising and reshaping them into the more concise portraits heard here. Seeming to just begin without much preamble, tracks like "Pulse," "Sant Feliu de Guixols," and the cascading title cut arrive like chapters already in progress. Tones of American folk and blues mingle with West African Tuareg and Latin in the global village of
Anderson's fingertips, suggesting travels past, present, and future. Thanks to its wandering nature,
Cloud Corner is the kind of album that benefits from repeat listens, unspooling, shifting, and then settling a little more with each meditative revolution.