We’ve followed the work of Portland, Maine’s Liza Victoria, AKA Lisa/Liza, for over a decade, with releases like Deserts of Youth, Momentary Glance and Shelter of a Song establishing a thoughtful, reflective brand of folk music which draw on worlds both interior and exterior to better describe and process the present. “Deliberate, unhurried songs made in the image of nature’s patient rhythms,” as we wrote in a review of the latter album. “Songs that examine how surrounding landscapes are tied to our most intimate emotions and memories. How the past is coded into the world around us, and how the fact is both so beautiful and so sad.”
The style coalesced for most recent full-length, 2023’s Breaking and Mending, an exploration of chronic illness which used songs as a mechanism to preserve moments of peace and resolution within a wider experience of suffering. To offer a more hopeful picture of living with pain without omitting the inevitable frustrations and tensions which accompany it. “Breaking and Mending emerges from this understanding,” as we put it, “underlining its importance and imperfection in order to (re)construct an authentic sense of self within an otherwise alienating period.”
Now Lisa/Liza is back with Ocean Path, a brand new EP released on cassette with Orindal Records which sees her reengaging with some of her oldest material. “Ocean Path is a look back at the first songs I made in my teens and early twenties, including some of my very first recordings,” as Victoria explains. “For me, it is a letter from my younger self.” But more than an exercise in nostalgia, the release becomes a meditation on memory and personal change. The ways in which we shift over time, the ways we stay the same, and how we are constantly settling into who we are. “I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to share my inner world with others. And now I see where that lead me and feel gratitude for the path set out before me,” Victoria continues:
Each song holds time between it, at least a year between each, love and memory, and different worlds of view, threads between them. As much as I hope this cassette shares a small piece of me with others, it is also a little sign on the road that says “keep going.” Knowing all there is that encourages the path to roll forward, friends, different lives, and loves met along the way, encouraging me to hit record and to sing a little louder. It feels hopeful and is a feeling of being held.
Opening track and lead single ‘Summer’s Dust’ introduces the release’s homespun tone, unfolding with the slow patience and compassion which would come to mark the project. “Corn crops / Summer’s dust / Fall into your backyard tune,” Victoria sings with a wistfulness only deepened in the new context of the record. “Love for you, becoming / Love for yourself is finally running through you.” What results is the sense of witnessing Lisa/Liza form in real time, this early song already offering that magic, almost contradictory blend of the past, present and future Victoria has since mastered, able to offer sanctuary from the world without ever sacrificing the hope intrinsic to the act of looking forward.
Watch the video with photography by Keith J Nelson below:
Ocean Path will be released on the 27th June via Orindal Records and you can pre-order it now from the Lisa/Liza Bandcamp page.
