Norrisette at Off The Square

This November, mercurial art pop artist Norrisette performs at Off The Square in Manchester, the city that inspires her new EP.

Norrisette is the alter ego of Anna Appleby, a Newcastle-born artist who, since moving to Manchester nearly 10 years ago, has carved out an impressive career as a composer working across contemporary classical and electroacoustic music. Her work has been performed all over the world, by everyone from the Netherland’s Ensemble Klang to Manchester’s own Manchester Camerata. She’s also been an artist in residence at East Sussex’s prestigious opera house Glyndebourne, and collaborated with a number of highly acclaimed arts companies including Rambert Dance and English Touring Opera.

All this while straddling a very different creative world as Norrisette, the moniker under which Appleby follows her pop instincts, while diving into electronic soundworlds. A lot of the tunes on her last EP, Weird Party, gaze towards haze-filled dancefloors, offering up hard-edged experimental productions full of unconventional sounds and incorporating her own haunting, feather-light vocals. It’s dreamy but abrasive, heady but unsettling.

Her new EP, called Manchester, feels different, stepping towards the light while dialling up the pop elements. Norrisette tells us it’s a love letter to the city that gave her a sense of home after moving from Newcastle as a teenager. It also draws on her experience of losing confidence to perform after being diagnosed with epilepsy, and finding it again with the help of a community that makes her feel part of something greater than herself.

It’s a beautiful collection of tunes, offering up the yin and yang to Norrisette’s output, sometimes within a single song. For fans of Kate Bush as well as more recent art pop revelations like Julia Holter, ‘All The Same’ opens with gorgeous, threadbare piano and sensual vocals before a handbrake turn takes us somewhere else entirely: pummelling, maximalist electronica that you’d have to be made out of stone to resist moving to.

Norrisette’s pop smarts deliver again on the chugging ‘Stranger’, while the more ruminative ‘Manchester’ and ‘Numbers’ yield to a softer side and feel more collaborative, with Norrisette writing and recording in lockstep with newly-recruited bandmates Jack March (guitar), Ashley Garrod (bass) and drummer Matthew Hill (though Imogen Shortall will be drumming live). A feeling of healing is written into these softer tunes, with Norrisette telling us she wants to “encourage others who’ve lost confidence to find their creative selves and look at the big picture”.

Don’t miss Norrisette’s full band show at Off The Square on 8 November, and head down early for the two support acts: a fresh and edgy young Mancunian post-punk 6-piece called Fruit, and a mesmerising steelpan and “witch-house” solo artist, Zolatec.