Marianne Nowottny

Marianne (pronounced Mah-ri-ah-na) Wilhelmine Nowottny forged some of the most daring and eccentric sounds of her era; her rich, sensual delivery and smoldering cabaret songcraft stood worlds apart from the bland, mall-pop uniformity that MTV pushed on most contemporaries. While still in eighth grade and already absorbed in poetry, Nowottny encountered Donna Bailey, a classically trained pianist who shared her sensibilities. The pair quickly formed the duo Shell, spending bedroom hours with a cassette recorder and a Radio Shack keyboard to capture extended stretches of wildly psychedelic material. In 1998 Nowottny relocated to Sparta, a town in northern New Jersey, to live with her father; there she acquired the Concertmate 990 keyboard that would shape her solo aesthetic. Her mother had introduced her to basic piano technique years earlier. With Bailey no longer nearby, Nowottny began recreating Shell keyboard lines by ear and gradually wove eastern modes and pentatonic scales into her own work. The two musicians continued occasional collaborations, yet the distance across the state afforded Nowottny extra space to develop and document independent pieces. Later that same year the sixteen-year-old crossed paths by chance with playwright Lori Bortz and her husband Mark Dagley on a Newton, NJ street. The meeting sparked an immediate rapport; Nowottny showed them her poetry and soon played the Shell recordings. Impressed, the couple decided to issue a cassette-only edition of Shell vs. Neu! limited to 150 copies as the inaugural release on their new Abaton Book Company label. Dagley constructed the tape, later described as a “post-modern battle of the bands,” by interleaving Shell elements with a Neu! album. Right after that cassette, Abaton put out Nowottny’s first solo effort, Afraid of Me, also in a restricted CDR run. Once the seven-track set and her infrequent, enigmatic live appearances stirred interest within Manhattan’s art and underground circles, the imprint issued a fuller, officially pressed version of the album, published a volume of her poetry, distributed multiple videotapes of performances, and sold an array of other singular Nowottny items through its site. The gifted teenager finished Sparta High School in 2001 at eighteen and then unveiled the expansive double album Manmade Girl — Songs and Instrumentals, which drew modest underground acclaim. After supporting shows in New York and New Jersey that summer, she headed west for the first time, performing a Halloween concert in Cupertino, CA.