Lewis, Susanne

In a less ridiculous world, Susanne Lewis would need no introduction. For more than 40 years, she has been releasing brilliant, fearless, kaleidoscopic albums with various collaborators and under various names, including Corpses As Bedmates, Thinking Plague, Kissyfur and Hail. No two of them sound alike, none of them sound like anyone else, and all of them have moments that remain startling even after decades of listening. She's an offhandedly inventive musician who makes complex, disjunctive song structures sound perfectly natural, as if they couldn’t and shouldn’t have turned out any other way. A volatile singer who can shift from serenity to delirium in the space between two heartbeats, she's capable of making the most abstruse dream-language feel immediate or, conversely, of making the most mundane experiences seem otherworldly. Her songs do not belong to a genre; they create their own genres as they go, and they typically bristle with more ideas than most of her alleged peers stumble across in an entire career. All this being the case, the persistent neglect of her work by people who ought to know better has something pathological about it. Interesting yourself to any extent in 20th-century underground music while remaining unfamiliar with Susanne Lewis is like being a geologist who has never heard of volcanoes. Had she gotten the full attention and acclaim her accomplishments deserve, generations of lesser talents might never have managed to emerge from her shadow. If she gets it now—finally!—it will be a welcome and very timely triumph of personal vision and artistic autonomy over their increasingly ugly counterfeits. Taken collectively, her albums constitute a parallel universe in which the early eighties post-punk avant-garde never ran out of surprises, and this reissue of her eponymous 2000 solo release—lovingly remastered from the original DAT tapes and released on LP for the first time by Concentric Circles—is as inviting a portal to that strange place as any. It’s an accessible and deceptively straightforward album with musical and emotional strata that increase in complexity and depth over repeated listenings.

- Brandan Kearney (author of “On Cinema At the Cinema”)