Geometry And Theology

"My room has no shape/nothing to upset me, but it keeps me safe,” sings Mesirow in Shape, track one of Interiors. Glasser is the Kafkaesque solo project of Mesirow; she openly admits her being besotted by the shapes of the modern world and their strange revelations. “Each decision made on the record was one that was taken very seriously. I took a really long time to make it, because of having to spend a night thinking about each decision,” says Mesirow.

It's a preoccupation that informs her work, but our conversation begins with the banal logistics of the wining hour in Western Australia. “Are you sipping wine out there in Perth? On the beach?” she asks. I don't get time to reply. “No, Perth isn't wine country, I'm wrong now…” Mesirow sighs, sounding defeated.

“My apologies, I didn't realise you weren't in the cocktail hour. You could have been sipping on wine. I wouldn't have known. Oh gosh, I've been rolling around the city of New York, taking in the sights. Taking my shoes to get repaired, stuff like that. Loads of interviews. I've just finished a pizza. This is wonderful, because as you can tell, I'm already getting a little loopy. I've answered the 'what are your influences' question so many times now I'm going to start telling you about pizza.”

New York means more to Mesirow than pizza, naturally. “I've been to lots of galleries. One thing I'd definitely put on my list is the Dream House, a gallery-type situation, but it's very droney… a drone space, all loud, low, drone sounds. It's a project by the Miller Foundation. It's all purple inside, like a sound and light exhibition. It's been around for a really long time, since the '70s or something, maybe the '90s, the early '90s perhaps.”

Cameron Mesirow, Glasser. A ferocious intellectual, an inheritor of the New Wave preoccupation with the manifesto, and attempting the migration of the political (or at least, the philosophical) into pop music. 2010's Ring was one of the year's strongest records; Interiors looks to be one of 2013's, but, tragically, it'll probably just escape that myopia of mainstream breakthrough. Ring had a frustrated, thwarted sensibility, with all the flamboyance and megalomania of a villain comforted that even in defeat she outshone the hero. Faux timpani drums, gloriously synthetic Muscat plucks and fifths – Mesirow relishes in the simulation of the import, in creating fake fakes. Electronica, experimental, but defensively democratic – infamously, Glasser's first EP was conceived on a Macbook's Garageband.

There is architecture in her songwriting. Mesirow cites architect Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York as a major influence on her recent work. Flirting with Kafka, Koolhaas declared “The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape” in his manifesto. Mesirow feels this persuasion in the modern object; the video for Design (Interior's debut single) witnesses Mesirow yielding to an amorphous metallic object - a lover made of mercury, the metal of sex and hunger. At Mesirow's whim, the object mutates, but she never escapes its orbit.

“I sort of think of it as being a mating dance that I'm doing with that object,” explains Mesirow of the video. “The object of my desire. And I'm trying to woo it, and eventually getting a little less… no more Mr. Nice Guy. What inspired it was just everyday moments of titillation.

“For when we have moments that are so wonderful and precious, where you get to experience pure joy. Before, you know the joy is coming, and the joyful experience is knowing you're going to experience something good. You just run towards it, rather than trying to savour the moment. It's a different, more humorous take on that curiousness, a housewife, played by me, chasing after the refined object of her desire.

“The object was sort-of conceived by Jonathan Turner, the guy who made all of the visual stuff for the record. He's a very talented animator. I basically just said to him that the record's about structures; when I first approached him about doing this, it was about architecture. And we're talking about how with people, a certain niche clings to a home in a way that consumes the whole space, really, whereas a home is just as malleable space as a street really. That's sort of where that material substance comes into play, reflective liquid that signifies you're not in control. It's chaos.

“I love listening to music through headphones,” she confesses, “and I suppose the fact the experience that I incurred with my music is like… although I do think it's wonderful that music brings people together, I think that the subject matter in my music is almost a little private stress that I'm carrying. Just making this record sort of consumed me.”