Review: Silverqueen Lights Up Velvet Lounge

The name came in a childhood dream that endured for years ­– an abstract vision of a figure on a stage, accompanied by a compelling sense of peace and purpose at once both clear and inscrutable. It's only been more recently that Anna Tsangaris-Johnson has transformed the memory of Silverqueen, her latest musical project, into a reality.

The self-taught multi-instrumentalist, armed with an acoustic guitar and several effects pedals, played at the Velvet Lounge in East Setauket on Sunday night, where her performances are finding appreciative audiences at regular gigs the last Sunday each month. Crystalline acoustic guitar chords and quietly commanding mezzo-soprano vocals filled the venue during Sunday's set, along with a handful of covers, including "Creep" by Radiohead, "Wing" by Patty Smyth, and a wonderfully ethereal treatment of "Amazing Grace," peppering a repertoire of largely original material.

"I don't feel like a guitarist," she said of her approach as she relaxed between sets. "I don't have any real technique, but you do discover a lot of chords that work, or may not work."

Soaring melodies and insistent strums both were bathed in limpid echoes and languid swirls, and those sonic filigrees themselves were often manipulated mid-song to compelling effect. To wit: the opening song, "Prayer From The Womb of Subterranea," employed a vocal loop pitch-shifted to produce a resonant, cello-like tone behind her live vocals.

"I wish I had another set of arms," she joked. "I love my pedals."

Overlaying all this were her lyrics, alternately surreal and seething in content but deceptively effortless in their delivery, as suggested by the quatrain "The years come and pass/But one things stays the same/The innocent die with bloodshed/All in Jesus' name," from her song "Turtle Island," a rumination on the treatment of Native American tribes.

The daughter of Greek Cypriot refugees, whose native country was invaded in the summer of 1974 by Turkey, ostensibly in response to a coup staged by the then-ruling military junta of Greece, Tsangaris-Johnson momentarily reflected on the legacy of the invasion there (the island nation remains bisected, with the de facto but formally unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus occupying its top half) the mix of emotions she feels when she travels there and how these have informed her music.

"Nicosia [Cyprus' capital city] is the last divided city in the world," she said of the so-called Green Line splitting the city and the country in two to this day.

Both offstage and on, Tsangaris-Johnson is immersed in sharing the joy of music. Having studied music therapy at the Boston-based Berklee College of Music from 2004 to 2006, she works full-time at a Long Island school district in an early intervention program for children with special needs.

"My music comes from a place of survival," she said. "I need to express something."

Silverqueen is currently recording an album to be released independently this summer, and will perform her next gig at Bar East in Manhattan July 1 at 8:30 p.m. A single, entitled "November Child," is available for download via iTunes.