“You probably have at least one friend who is completely obsessed with Marnie Weber. Her dark, punk-infused humor and fearless embrace of eccentric feminine power archetypes combine with gut-punch viscerality and a strange beauty that is anything but pretty.”
Village Voice

“This neo-gothic fairytale wavers between happiness and sadness, amusement and tragedy, attraction and repulsion.”
The White Review

“Weber reaches a new scale for her work…The sentimentality and romance at its root fearlessly sets it apart.”
BOMB

“Wild multimedia works that often dwell on the ghostly and the monstrous. Think: Fairy tales gone seriously awry.”
LA Times

Acclaimed LA multidisciplinary artist and musician Marnie Weber collects highlights from a long and storied career on Returning Home: The Music of Marnie Weber, a collection of neo-goth art-pop that steers between kankyō ongaku pop songs, noise-rock, and haunted fairytale darkness.

The career of Marnie Weber (b. 1959) began with gigs paid in beer at an LA trucker bar in 1977. Her band, Party Boys, formed when Weber was then 19 and had just left home. By the early 80’s, the band began regularly performing at LA’s fabled Al’s Bar, sharing the stage with generational talents that passed over its beer-drenched floors. L7, Beck, Arto Lindsay, Ry Cooder, The Fall, Fear, Hole, Hüsker Dü, Social Distortion, Nirvana, The Residents, Sonic Youth, Urge Overkill, Jesus Lizard, the Misfits, among plenty more, played to audiences that included Bret Easton Ellis, Steve Buscemi, Tommy Lee, Bill Murray, Al Pacino, Sean Penn, and Chloe Sevigny.

After the breakup of Party Boys, Weber began performing alone, booking early shows under her own name with no adornment save for her instrumentation. But, finding the accompanying stage fright overwhelming and distracting, Weber opted to restart, beginning her solo career again in a new guise. In this second iteration, Weber would perform in character, each new composition written as and for a new physical manifestation. “I performed as an old woman, animals, a bunny, a faux pop star, a circus girl, and many more.” As these shows became more elaborate, she remembers having to transport two trucks’ worth of props, sets, and costumes to every performance. “My musicians would have to dress up as monkeys, clowns, aliens, and all kinds of characters. Sometimes the musicianship was compromised by their costumes or fake hands, but I didn’t care.”

In late 1987, now working at Bruce Licher’s legendary Independent Project Records and Press, Weber was persuaded into the recording studio by another UCLA art student, Phil Drucker of influential LA post-punk acts 17 Pygmies and Savage Republic. With this encouragement, Weber sewed her experience in visual arts and her theatrical characterisations into 1989’s Songs Hurt Me, an astonishingly confident debut record.

Next came 1991’s Woman With Bass album, on which “Tiger, Tiger” and “Nude in Solitude” from our compilation originated. Weber’s songwriting had become stronger still, keenly feminist, its imagery bolder and sharper. But it is still no less earworming, landing like a promised vengeance despite its lamenting, yearning sheen of melancholia.

In the mid 90’s came a turning point for Weber. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore attended a New York exhibition of Weber’s visual work. Introduced through a mutual friend - the late artist Mike Kelley - Gordon and Moore fell in love with Weber’s work, and a new kinship was born. Weber’s 1996 album Cry For Happy (represented here in “Moans” and “In The Meadow”) was released on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! label and shot Weber into the awareness of not only Sonic Youth fans, but also the wider ecosystem offered by a label with significant backing. Becoming yet more closely creatively aligned, Sonic Youth invited Weber to create the artwork to their next album, 1998’s A Thousand Leaves. Weber’s relationship with Sonic Youth confirmed what her fanbase already knew: Weber was already capable of marrying beguiling and instantaneous songcraft with dissonance and exploratory sonics, and now the torchbearers of that school had taken notice.

Returning Home is a collection of material from that era, a gateway into those fully formed imaginary worlds conjured from instrumentation and voice by Marnie Weber. It follows the early performative works, the formation of Weber’s conceptual art band The Spirit Girls, and the decades of worldwide exhibition of Weber’s visual art, film works, installations, and countless more stories to add to an already eclectic tome. “Together with my history in performance, this record has a very unique resonance,” Weber writes. She is right.