What follows is one of the many articles in the Mercury‘s 2026 Queer Issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds.
In 2022, Portland experimental guitarist Marisa Anderson visited the bohemian musicologist Harry Smith’s archives at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Already familiar with Smith’s 1952 compilation Anthology of American Folk Music, Anderson thought she knew what to expect from the collection: “Southern gospel, country blues, Native American ceremonial music; genres well-documented and known to be of deep interest to Smith,” she explains in the liner notes of her new album, The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music. But Smith’s archive surprised her.
Anderson recalls encountering a Tuareg recording there, Niger: La Musique Des Griots (1964), which sparked a deeper fascination. “I remember that ‘aha’ moment,” she says over the phone. “I was only in [the archive] for 15 minutes, but that made me very curious.” Supported by the Tulsa Arts Fellowship, Anderson later returned to Oklahoma after her initial exploration to dig more fully into Smith’s collection. While there, her project came into focus: Anderson’s Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music—a project with the same name as her new album, but with a much broader scope—would collect songs from places shaped by United States military conflict, from 1970 (her birth year) to the present. “The wars of my lifetime,” she says.
That project comprises roughly 900 tracks from Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union, and Islamic and Arabic regions, totaling nearly 45 hours of music. On the newly released The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music, Anderson absorbs and reinterprets nine of those songs using guitar, keyboard, accordion, requinto jarocho, and tres cubano. The pieces are full of drones and unresolved longing, echoing across deserts and mountain ranges. Anderson draws from musical traditions tied to mysticism, ritual, and nomadic life.
The album opens with “Quodlibet,” her interpretation of an Afghan piece with roots in teahouse performance, originally played on a dambura—a long-necked lute. Anderson’s research process, and its frustrations, become clear in the liner notes. “When I searched for [original performer] Bābā Qerān, no musician by that name was found…. I ran the name through an online translation tool, and learned that Bābā Qerān means ‘old man’ in Kurdish. Another search for the song called ‘Alpaqadar Tulari’ led nowhere. We have what is possibly a medley of three unknown songs played by an unknown old man,” she writes.
Anderson navigated mistranslations and conflicting documentation throughout the album’s creation, and had to devise ways to interpret musical systems outside of Western notation and instrumentation. “Trying to uncover information about the songs in this collection is like searching through a house of mirrors where everything is slightly distorted,” she writes.
She’s careful to mention that she’s a musician, not an ethnomusicologist or anthropologist. Still, Anderson is interested in the webs connecting people, place, and sound, and how borders and wars reweave those relationships. And she works well under pressure.
“There were discrepancies between liner notes, YouTube videos, and published research. I didn’t try to solve it,” Anderson explains. “The limitations became a slightly comedic story… kind of like how a record collection is a whole bunch of small points of information put together.”
Anthology’s strength lies in Anderson’s ability to interpret source material without flattening it. On her guitar-and-accordion rendition of “Quodlibet,” she adapts quarter tones through a technique she describes as “bluegrassy.” Her translation of the sorrowful, mysterious “Sarvi Simin,” interpreted from a 1977 recording released by the Soviet state-run record label Melodiya, braids together cumbia-inspired accordion and violin contributions from Gisela Rodríguez Fernández. On “Zar,” inspired by Yemeni music associated with spirit exorcism, Anderson builds a magnetic sonic form with just five notes.
The album’s effect mirrors Anderson’s experience in Smith’s archive—it’s somehow both familiar and surprising. Her fingerpicking style is as urgent, weathered, and devoted as ever, tethered to American folk traditions, yet not at all confined to them. Anthology sometimesevokes the dusty static of a far-off transmission. Elsewhere, it’s warm and energetic. The music always seems to be searching for something just out of reach.
Before she began arranging the material, Anderson spent eight months immersed exclusively in the anthology’s source recordings. It changed her as a musician. “I just listened deeply, hoping that these songs might enter my bloodstream and start to become part of my natural vocabulary,” she writes in the liner notes.
On the phone, Anderson reflects further on the process. “My senses around phrasing and tonality have definitely expanded,” she muses. “And I’ve grown more patient with long form. There’s been an expansion of thought around theoretical systems, how music can be expressed or organized. I find that fascinating on a nerdy, intellectual level.”
But the project feels as politically grounded as it does technical. “I was born in the United States and I am subject, like anybody with a similar history, to the narrative that the country presents of itself,” Anderson says. “When that narrative starts to unravel, and when the information that we receive counters what we observe, that’s a personal thing.”
Asked whether music can achieve something politically or socially that other forms of discourse cannot, Anderson thinks for a moment.
“Music is one of the best art forms that we experience in community,” she responds. “It’s something that we make together. We enjoy experiencing it together. That’s a really unique and special attribute.”
With community in mind, this release is the first of three Anthology installments Anderson has planned. Future volumes, she says, “won’t be me tackling it alone.”
“My goal is to make it as available and accessible as possible,” she explains. “The next releases will be in service of more people hearing more of the music.”
That sentiment lies at the core of her desire for The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music. Above all, Anderson hopes listeners will be curious.
“Seek out information about the world,” she advises. “Look beyond all that which is presented on the surface of things.”
The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music is out now on Thrill Jockey and available through Anderson’s Bandcamp on vinyl, compact disc, and as a digital download. Anderson will play at Homie Fest, Aug 14-16, at Camp Colton.
