Scout Niblett holds her music up to the fire

Scout Niblett carries a torch for self-discovery on her latest collection of songs, "The Calcination of Scout Niblett."

Scout Niblett carries a torch for self-discovery on her latest collection of songs, "The Calcination of Scout Niblett."

Scout Niblett appeared in the 2007 video for her song “Kiss” with her upper lip stuffed to bursting with wads of bread. It made the British-born indie-rock musician look as if she had an odd, cartoon-monkey overbite.

“That’s my party trick that I did as a little kid,” she says with a laugh. “I used to put bread in my mouth and really transform myself, kind of like ‘Planet of the Apes.’ ”

Born Emma Louise Niblett, the singer took her stage name from the main character in the Harper Lee novel “To Kill A Mockingbird.” She studied music and performance art at college in England and now resides in Oregon. She will perform Saturday evening, March 6, at Pilot Light.

Her songs are edgy, stripped-down story-poems, usually with only electric guitar (sometimes bluesy, sometimes with heavy-metal crunch) and drums as accompaniment. She balances the serious, sparse nature of her music with a playful visual approach not far from her childhood “monkey-face” trick. In the past, she has donned a wig and worn a bright orange construction-worker vest for shows and photo shoots.

“There’s something about transforming my appearance, whether it’s through the clothes, or it used to be the wig,” says Niblett. “I’m ‘dressed for the part,’ in a sense. It’s kind of like a shamanic thing, kind of like power dressing.”

Such simple of ideas of transformation echo through her latest album, “The Calcination of Scout Niblett.” The cover art shows her smiling and wielding a blowtorch, a visual reference to the album title. In metal working, calcination is a change brought about by intense heat. In the archaic quasi-science of alchemy, calcination was believed to be one of the processes that would transform one substance into another.

“I was reading a book on alchemy, kind of psychological alchemy rather than a chemistry alchemy,” says Niblett. “Calcination is kind of what I felt like I was going through. The whole analogy is about when you first heat up something, in a psychological way, to focus on what needs to be let go of in your personality.”

Niblett chose the theme because of a shift she felt in her songwriting focus. Her earlier songs addressed relationships, particularly on her last release “This Fool Can Die Now.” But for “Calcination,” she felt an urge to bring more personal things to the surface in cathartic songs like “I.B.D.,” which stands for “inner B.S. detector.”

“The album is basically focused on delving into myself and looking at the shadow part that you don’t necessarily want to,” says Niblett.

As an extension of that, Niblett is also conducting an experiment with the title track. She has set out to record 100 versions of it and sell each to only one person via the Drag City Records Web site. So far, the results fall right in line with the album’s transformational concept.

“If I do more than 10 at a time in one go, the song is kind of mutating a bit,” says Niblett. “If I’m getting tired ... there’s a sense of ‘I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to keep going.’ Kind of a more relentless attitude comes out. It gets a bit more edgy the longer I do it.”

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