CULTURE

Glasser’s Interiors

The singer goes to a cold, sexy place for her new album.

by Fan Zhong

Glasser-General-3-hi-res

When Cameron Mesirow, who is better known as the art-pop singer Glasser, decided to move from Los Angeles to New York three years ago, she was more or less broke. “I had stopped touring”—she had been on the road with The xx—“so I wasn’t making any money,” recalls Mesirow, whose sophomore album Interiors is out October 8 (True Panther). She did, however, have a membership to MoMA. “I spent a lot of time in midtown Manhattan,” says Mesirow, who is also half of the performance art duo Auerglass (with her best friend, artist Tauba Auerbach). “I found a ton of inspiration in all that glass and austerity. I told Jonathan Turner, who created the visuals for Interiors, that I think the new album is about architecture.”

Although some critics find her dreamy electronic sound a bit cold, Mesirow finds cold spaces—whether it’s glass towers or the gleaming, stripped-down soundscapes on Interiors—to be fertile territory for a stimulating sex life. “When I’m in midtown, I can’t help but think of, you know, Fatal Attraction,” she says. “In my mind, everyone in those office buildings is having affairs because they feel so confined.”

In fact, the album’s lead single, “Design,” is actually about orgasm. Or rather, it asks: Which is better—the orgasm or the build-up? “It’s about how that moment is fleeting, and how you can’t really possess it. It’s gone right away,” Mesirow explains. She laughs, sounding slightly embarrassed. “I don’t know, it came from my weird brain.”