“After the Magic is a beautifully ethereal affair”
“Smoky voiced songs of good bourbon and bad love affairs” – Time Out London
“....melancholic, Cat Power-like lyrics, a Billie Holiday-esque timbre and a touch of Norah Jones in her swooping croon, tumultuous emotions characterize Nerissa Campbell’s [music]”. – Xpress Magazine
"Brooklyn-based singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist, Nerissa Campbell has released four records as a leader, showcasing her distinct and worldly musical personality. Her 2016 album After the Magic (Crooked Mouth Music) is a beautifully ethereal affair, featuring original compositions performed by a mixed ensemble of jazz improvisers and members of the New York gamelan ensemble Dharma Swara." – JazzSpeaks
“[Nerissa Campbell] explores a tricky, dark emotional landscape, lit with fleeting flashes of joy. You can get caught up in the late night jazz club ambience, but there’s always some hint of lost love and loneliness lurking around the corner; the New York City streets she sings about are deserted and poorly lit." – Little Village Magazine
“Moving. [Musings of a Telescopic Tree] is a personal, interesting and intimate album.” – audio magazyn
“She is in that Billie Holiday mold – her voice is mysterious, elegant, and moody” – the Daily Iowan
“Her songwriting recalls Tom Waits, but her voice is sweet and clear. She finds her own way around a melody, eschewing the cheap flourishes of lesser singers.” – -little village
Nerissa Campbell is a singer-songwriter and composer living in New York City. Inspired by the way our brains recall and process music, memory and dreams, she builds upon an initial exploration of sounds and melodies until they start to conjure memories that then beget other memories, that bring to mind a dream, that recall a novel once read or a story once told; imaginations and ruminations, a feeling - all thoughtfully woven together to create a final exquisite corpse of a song whose surprising beauty as a whole is in the sum of its unique parts.
Nerissa Campbell’s music weaves its way through somber pop-ballads, bluesy folk songs, moody instrumentals, and a lyricism full of thought and space. She has developed a unique and deeply personal writing and performing voice - immersed in the jazz tradition, but strongly forging her own direction. The blues is in her wistful and melancholy voice, but it plays hide and seek with space and sound, creating a depth of feeling beyond the obvious. She creates a fine blend of styles dipped in a smoky batter of late night living.
A graduate of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, she has called New York home since 2001, performing in the city regularly at well known haunts such as 55 Bar, The Jazz Gallery, Fat Cat, Le Poisson Rouge, Zinc, & Rockwood Music Hall. A long term member of NY’s Balinese Gamelan Dharma Swara, she has also been the feature vocalist in post-metal band, A Storm of Light, and was the recipient of an Australian Arts Council New Works grant for her album, After The Magic, a project that explores the use of Balinese Gamelan, a jazz trio, fleeting guitars and moody instrumentals. She is also a composing member of Random Access Music, a NYC-based new music presenter and ensemble with a core collective of composers and performers, and in 2021 participated in Composing In The Wilderness, a wilderness experience for adventurous composers, which culminated in her piece ‘I Am A Braided River’ (for flute, bass clarinet, alto saxophone & cello) being performed at the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival.
Nerissa has performed at Basilica Soundscape (Hudson NY), Festival Centro (Bogota Colombia), Roadburn Music Festival (Tilburg, NL), Singapore Arts Festival, Stanford Jazz Festival (Stanford, USA), Perth International Arts Festival (Perth, AUS), Asymmetry Festival (Wroclaw, PO), as well as at clubs throughout Europe, USA, Canada, & Australia. Her music was featured in ‘Freddy’s - the Documentary’ (screened at Brooklyn International Film Festival), ‘Stranger Love’ (original music performed as part of Eva Minemar & Tony Lepore’s play). She has been a part of performative literary readings, modern dance pieces, off-Broadway plays, and a 32-piece orchestra.
Campbell has released five albums under her own label, Crooked Mouth Music: Paint Me Orange (2003), Musings of a Telescopic Tree (2009), Blue Shadows (2012), After The Magic (2016), and Cricket (2020).