Marianne Nowottny has been performing at New York City gallery and avant-garde performance venues since the age of 15. An autodidact and child prodigy, Nowottny captured the attention of playwright Lauri Bortz in 1998 with a hand full of homemade cassette tapes and high-school notebooks filled with prose. This material surfaced in 1999 as the CD "Afraid of Me" on the Abaton Book Company imprint. This debut CD was warmly received in publications such as The New York Times, New York Press, Wire Magazine and Magnet. Since then Marianne has released other recordings, including the 2001 double CD "Manmade Girl". 

A constantly evolving songwriter and performer, her compositions exist in a state of flux, which allows her to articulate musical ideas and phrasing in an improvisational manner. Her individualistic keyboard work on radio shack keyboards, harmonium, and piano is unique with its moments of surprising harmonic complexity. Her haunting and unsettling vocals maneuver into bizarre uncharted areas producing deep, evocative textures, and revealing complex internal narratives.

Marianne Nowottny is now 20 years old and a sophomore at William Paterson University in the United States where she is studying art and politics. She continues to explore and develop her visionary mode of songwriting and performance independent of anything else going on in music right now.

"Illusions of the Sun" is Camera Obscura's first multimedia CD, containing seven audio tracks and a twelve minute three song video. The audio portion of the CD contains five new, more developed recordings of some of Marianne's favorite songs from the "Afraid of Me" and "Manmade Girl" releases, as well as two new and previously unrecorded songs. The video portion of the release contains an August 2000 performance of the songs "Panopticon", "Sapphire" and "Barely Nearly" recorded at Signal 66, a performance space in Washington D.C. The release also contains an eight page lyric booklet and a self-portrait by the artist, which is featured on its cover. 

"Marianne Nowottny redefines the medium, with melodies that swoop and dip like butterflies to underscore her enigmatic reflections." - Bernard Stollman of ESP-DISK, New York City, 2002