AN INTRAUTERINE DEVICE is an exceptionally black metal thing to put in your body. Piercing, grinding and shrieking may occur, followed by heavy bleeding and a nihilistic barrenness of the womb. A fitting metaphor for I.U.D. the band: clanging metal, disembodied female sounds and hellish imagery all help Lizzie Bougatsos (of Gang Gang Dance) and Sadie Laska (of Growing and Extreme Violence) create a playfully menacing vibe with the added bonus that it won’t cause abdominal cramping.
Friends since their days as art students at West Virginia University, Bougatsos and Laska exhibit the kind of knowing back and forth that only best friends can. “Sadie’s an original [West Virginia] mountain person,” Bougatsos says, while she herself is from “Strong Island,” as her accent indicates. Seeing the architects of this evil music drinking wine and giggling to each other only makes me like them more; there’s nothing but joy in what they do.
Though the two have been collaborating since their first forays into performance art (“she would pour wet clay on me,” says Bougatsos), of late they’ve been busy with other projects; Laska plays with Growing and Extreme Violence, while Bougatsos has been touring extensively with Gang Gang Dance on the heel’s of last year’s much-lauded St. Dymphna. Bougatsos was in Japan with GGD when she grew enthralled by a girl group with seven drummers. “I had a revelation,” she says.Wanting to drum more, she asked Laska to start a noise project, which they named with the “body issues” and “woman stuff” inherent in Bougatsos’ performance art in mind.
“Any time I heard the name it provoked this really strong response, like ‘Ugh, no!’” Laska says. Naturally, they used it. “We embrace the grotesque,” Bougatsos says, with a grin. Another name they considered but rejected: Vagina Dentata.The Freudian standby appears in their album art instead. With song titles like “Goat Pussy” and sounds sampled from a porno flick, I wondered momentarily if the songs carried some sort of anti-porn message.
“I think that the fucking music scene and the art world are really uptight right now, and I think people are relieved or slightly shocked just to hear sex noises really loud,” explains Laska. “We’re not trying to make a political statement that we don’t like pornography.”While they respect the struggles of their old-school feminist forebears, it’s not a struggle with which either can identify. “I.U.D. can be associated as a riot grrrl band, but we’re not in that time anymore,” says Laska. “We’re more interested in just playing. I never embraced that as my thing.The whole thing with me was that feminism was already post-feminism. Growing up, my mom was the breadwinner. I never felt that I couldn’t do something. That whole thing to me felt irrelevant, and it was so dogmatic.”
Instead, they
seek to push the boundaries with their performances, throwing out
elements for the audience to process as it will.Though they admire
bands like The Slits, Liars, Throbbing Gristle and Nine Inch Nails,
Bougatsos says they’re “moved more by cinema, or some fucked-up art
piece.”They strive to make each performance a participatory experience,
eliminating those ubiquitous “chin scratchers” from the audience. “We’re trying to get more naked people on stage,” says Laska. “I got
real inspired by this Psychic TV video I was watching...They
used to have this tribe of guys that would follow them around from show
to show and take off their clothes and start dancing, and it just had
this really great vibe.We want it to be uninhibited.”
“We’re pretty particular about who we play with,” adds Bougatsos. “When we get offered shows, we want it to be fun.”
Fans had best catch the band when they can, as playing live is not its first priority. “I don’t know if we’ve been so concerned about the audience with this project,” says Laska. “It’s more about the two of us having our own little world that we’re creating in.” Right now, that means recording a follow-up to the EP The Proper Sex—released this week—the recording of which, Laska says, “was so much fun and we both got so much out of it.” Recorded and mixed in just five days with Matt Boyton at Vacation Island Studios, the album utilizes effects processors borrowed from Gibby Hanes of The Butthole Surfers, and a whole lot of creative sampling. “We put a bunch of metal on the floor in the studio and just whacked on it as loud as we could with big sticks, a dolly, a filing cabinet...that became a drum track,” Laska says. “It was volatile...it was a really abrasive experience in the studio,” says Bougatsos. “The engineer was like, ‘This is the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.’”
It’s this lighthearted spirit of exploration even as the band creates
dark, disorienting sounds that makes The Proper Sex so exciting. “We’re sort of anti-serious,” says Bougatsos. “We’re serious about what we do, we work hard on it; but if we took ourselves seriously, I don’t think we would get anywhere.”
“The
materialism [in NY] is off the hook right now; it’s gotten so extreme
and disgusting,” appends Laska. “It’s fun to just go make some
fucked-up music that sounds freaky and get some naked people to dance around."
