APLR Presents: Marisa Anderson<\/p>\n
Sunday, June 14th, 2026<\/p>\n
AyurPrana Listening Room – 312 Haywood Rd, Asheville, NC 28806<\/p>\n
Doors 6PM || Event 7PM<\/p>\n
Marisa Anderson<\/p>\n
Marisa Anderson\u2019s music transcends borders. The topography of her work interrogates the intersections of artistry and expression with form and tradition. A singular guitarist and voracious musical collaborator, Anderson crafts pieces bursting with equal parts reverence and curiosity, contouring familiar shapes into work that is wholly her own. Anderson has spent decades mining the veins of the complicated, interconnected American folk traditions she was steeped in from a young age, stretching beyond those traditions and incorporating the vocabulary and techniques of vernacular and folk musics from across time and beyond boundary into her work. Eschewing replication or revival, Anderson\u2019s music lives in conversation with tradition. \u201cMy approach to tradition is with the hands that I have and the history that I have,\u201d notes Anderson. \u201cIn that way it\u2019s a collaboration\u2014you don\u2019t go into collaboration trying to play like the other person, you go in trying to find out how to play together.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music is a collection of nearly one thousand songs culled from the private record collection of the late Harry Smith. Assembled by Anderson after a chance encounter led to an opportunity to study and explore this treasure trove of music, the Anthology focuses on music from places that the United States has been in conflict with since 1970: Southeast Asia, the USSR, and the Arabic and Islamic regions of the world. In Volume 1, Anderson presents her own deeply personal iterations of nine songs from the Anthology. Composed, transcribed, and arranged through a process of trial and error, deep listening, and research, Anderson charts a musical course from Afghanistan to Vietnam via Yemen, Cambodia, and Turkmenistan. Interpretations of compositions ranging from Pakistani qawwali to Syrian taqsim are played with Anderson\u2019s deft and practiced hands. Each piece on the album stands as a dialogue between Anderson and the original source recording, refracted through the prism of her own unique musical lens. Anderson\u2019s contribution to this dialogue ultimately invites the listener to join her in asking: \u201cWho are the people we\u2019ve been told in our lifetimes are \u2018unamerican\u2019? What have we lost or been denied access to in the fallout from that label?\u201d<\/p>\n
The ongoing project of the Anthology centers curiosity and a commitment to deep listening as it seeks to build bridges with communities and cultural practices from across the globe. Anderson openly acknowledges the limitations she was working with, which include an historic lack of access to traditions outside of US markets and frames of reference, improper documentation within the source material, and the need to operate within a finite amount of time for explorations of vast cultural traditions. For Anderson, these are key pieces to the dialogue. \u201cI am a musician, not an ethnomusicologist or an anthropologist,\u201d Anderson notes. \u201cI\u2019m curious about how music is made, organized, and shared. I am interested in how people and music move across the world, how war, migration, nomadism, colonization, and contemporary and historical economic dynamics affect music and musicians. What is the musical relationship of people to place? How is that relationship altered when shifting borders or global conflicts curtail movement or force migration into or away from a place? What do we carry with us when we leave home, and what do we bring home from faraway places?\u201d<\/p>\n
The instrumentation Anderson employs here is largely familiar to her: electric and acoustic guitars, electric keyboards, requinto jarocho, accordion, and tres cubano. The record also features key performances by violinist\/violist Gisela Rodr\u00edguez Fern\u00e1ndez. Aiming to stay true to the essence of the source material, Anderson pushes her tools past the edges of their traditional territories, despite knowing that her interpretations will never entirely replicate sounds and phrases built around non-Western musical systems and instruments. Accordion drones bely the flickering tendrils of acoustic guitar on pieces like \u201cQuodlibet,\u201d while approximating the original\u2019s use of quarter-tones. \u201cTaqsim for Guitar\u201d forgoes a taqsim\u2019s usual use of improvisation in favor of interpreting the source piece\u2019s melodic phrasing more accurately. Considered arrangements of layered keyboards emulate droning flutes on \u201cPair of Duduk,\u201d and intertwining guitars take on the winding vocal melodies of \u201cHamd.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Anderson, there are no easy answers. The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music is as much a celebration of music from beyond borders as it is an examination of those borders, real and imagined, that restrict movement and curtail the natural flow of music across the globe. Filtered through decades of experience as a singular artist and interpreter of feeling and sound, the Anthology\u2019s first volume demonstrates Anderson\u2019s reverence for those practices unfamiliar to and largely excluded from the American lexicon while capturing the core humanity behind a diversity of musical expressions.<\/p>\n
All ages<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
APLR Presents: Marisa Anderson Sunday, June 14th, 2026 AyurPrana Listening Room – 312 Haywood Rd, Asheville, NC 28806 Doors 6PM || Event 7PM Marisa Anderson Marisa Anderson\u2019s music transcends borders. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":93362,"template":"","meta":{"_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[],"class_list":["post-93360","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n