With song titles like “Goth Chick ‘98,” “Mary Maudlin” and “Buddhist Girl,” one gets an initial sense of Sirens as a song cycle based on a feeling of mockery toward various female stereotypes. But Bisi (pronounced “bee-see”) uses the various, mostly fictitious, characters that inhabit the songs as windows into a much broader perspective.Through them, he simultaneously revisits his own lovelife disasters, invokes the archetypal (and sometimes non-gender-based) personality traits that the women in the songs represent, muses on various social dynamics such as adolescent depression and even takes jabs at the very styles of music he helped midwife into popularity. Underlying it all, however, is Bisi’s playful tone. “These are my peeps,” Bisi chuckles.
“Even when I’m making fun of ‘Buddhist Girl,’ it’s from the inside.These are the people I hang out with. It’s really a self-critique.”
Raised on the Upper East Side, Bisi’s Argentine parents attempted to instill their sense of cultural refinement in their son by enrolling him in music lessons and pushing him to attend classical concerts by the New York Philharmonic.This more or less backfired, and Bisi rebelled by heading uptown to the Bronx, becoming a graffiti artist and developing a healthy disdain for what he calls the academic side of music, though his recording credits might suggest otherwise. It is arguable that his contrarian’s opposition to the erudite aspirations of some of his clients helped bring bals ance and character to the albums he made with them. But being slightly too young to ally himself with punk when it hit, Bisi gravitated to hip-hop. Bisi explains that for years after he and one-time partner Bill Laswell started Bisi’s studio in Park Slope, he still had a reputation as a hip-hop engineer.
All of this factors into Bisi’s complex outlook on gentrification in Park Slope, where he is still based today. “With my studio business, maybe half of it has come from rich kids. So, if it wasn’t for [them] I don’t know if I would’ve even been able to survive. It’s hard because things for me actually are better. Part of the anger and the energy of the underground is that push forward out into society.We wanted access.I always had that sort of ethic, which I found in graffiti: the idea of getting up.The whole idea was to put it out in public and put it into people’s faces. A revolution isn’t any good unless it goes out into society.There’s something about revolutionary, cutting-edge music that demands taking it to the people. So that happened, but now people are complaining about what comes along with that. I can accept it.” What Bisi does not accept is the snobbish notion that experimental music is more challenging than “straight” rock. Over time, Bisi has simplified his music and embraced structure based on his long-held conviction that good rock records can’t be made in a day and a half the way that improv-based jazz and avant-garde albums are made. Still, Sirens isn’t exactly what you’d call an effortless listen. Ditto for the live show. One has to remember that Bisi’s reference point for “straight” falls left of center, to say the least.
“Lots of times,” he says, “I think I make something really straight and people think it’s completely unhinged. So I guess I’m not the best judge of that.”
> Martin Bisi Feb. 19, Death By Audio, 49 S. 2nd St. (betw. Wythe & Kent Aves.), Brooklyn, no phone; 8, $
