Fischerspooner, the hate-it-or-love-it art pop duo, is back just in time to respond to yet another potential apocalypse. After coming of age as a decadent counterpoint to Y2K and achieving fame in the midst of our post-9/11 “party cause we’re gonna die” paranoia, Fischerspooner releases its third record, Entertainment, May 4. Back-to-back shows follow at Music Hall of Williamsburg on May 7 and Webster Hall on May 8. But with these lavish new entries into its canon, the ultimate question becomes: Does anyone give a shit about a group that made its living on the Electroclash movement nearly a decade ago? Let’s retrace the duo’s steps to find out.
After initial collaborations at the Art Institute of Chicago,Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner got together in New York for a new performance art project. Fischer created some crude electronic tracks, and Spooner made the costumes, wrote lyrics and sang. Initial performances at the Astor Place Starbucks bordered on Situationism, and quickly grew to unforeseen heights. The band signed to Capitol and became the face of the flavor-of-the-month Electroclash scene. The band’s debut record (2001’s #1) was a success and the follow-up (2005’s Odyssey) followed suit, adding an epic quality to its oeuvre. Odyssey demonstrated the band’s unique mixture of pop and art through collaborations with Linda Perry (the queen of hit songwriting) and Susan Sontag (the queen of activism, literary theory and philosophy). Now, after a four-year break, Fischerspooner is back and once again trying to fill the role of glitzy entertainment saviors in the midst of crisis.
“I wrote most of these new songs two years ago in one burst,” explains Casey Spooner, the public face of the band. “The rest of the world has caught up to my personal financial crisis. On our first record, we didn’t know we were making an album and really wanted our final performance to be the turn of the millennium. It was a mind-set against the paranoia of Y2K. If we were going to die, we were going out in a cloud of glitter and sweat. Now, we’re more mature and not so focused on a hedonistic celebration of excess.”
Spooner’s intentions are well reflected on Entertainment, the band’s first effort with outside producer Jeff Saltzman of The Killers and Black Keys fame.The gurgling, glossy synths are still front and center, but the songs leave most of the ridiculousness behind.Tracks like “Money Can’t Dance” and “Supply and Demand” are slices of economical pop with competent lyrics and lush groves.The ecstasy punk of “To The Moon,” sounds as if the group slowed down Wire, added a pinch of electronics and prepared for a more contemplative dance floor.The record successfully builds on the tried-and-true entertainment clichés (theater, camp, house music, costumes) that made the project such a hot-button issue in the early millennium.
“This project is kind of an exploration of clichés,” Spooner reflects. “Clichés are fascinating because they hold a lot of truth. It’s sort of this unusual task of trying to find ways to reinvent and give them relevance.The thing that’s interesting is that we’ve had the rare opportunity to be incredibly experimental while also being pop. Both have problems. If you work in the avant-garde and are truly experimental, you kind of feel like you’re not connecting to people because you’re so obtuse.With pop, you go so far into clichés that you aren’t doing anything.”
This time, Fischerspooner’s potential success rides on choosing interesting tropes to combine for its live show.Titled “Between Worlds,” the duo and longtime choreographer Vanessa Walters plan to mix the space program, Japanese Kabuki Theater, financial ruin, personal rebirth and Mark Twain into a memorable theatrical experience. It’s still a visual tribute to escapism, but the influences are much more difficult to decipher.
“Warren [Fischer] has an interest in the space program, so we started playing with that for the performance,” explains Spooner. “We were looking for a framework to connect all the pieces so it wasn’t just a concert with song after song after song. One of the things Kate Valk from the Wooster Group brought in was Kabuki dance.Those performances sort of have restrained movement in a way that’s like astronauts. In a documentary we were using, one of the astronauts was reading Mark Twain— a book called Roughing It that has Twain traveling in the Wild West.The performance comes together in a collage or exquisite corpse that presents a very American sort of story about ambition and pioneering.You can’t tell if it’s the 19th century, the 1960s or the present.”
I
attended a rehearsal of Fischerspooner’s new show at the Performance
Garage to see if the duo’s experimental intentions would succeed on
stage.The verdict: yes and no. Outer space and futurism are indeed at
the forefront as four interpretive dancers writhe, shout and jitter
around Spooner in puffy silver suits that seem equal parts 2025 space
station and 1997 Puff Daddy.The silver costumes evolve into near nudity
topped with bulbous, polka-dotted helmets and lots of smoke machine
action. Spooner returns to his faux pop-star role, wailing
into a golden microphone and locking in for glitchy choreography with
his surroundings. Four mirrors replicate the dancers’ images and continuously spin in odd shapes to create new reflections. It’s an
interesting effect, but when you boil down the show, it’s a combination
of the usual smoke, mirrors and glitter matched with a healthy dose of
androgyny.
For Larry Tee, the famed party promoter, DJ and father of Electroclash—whose own new record, Club Badd, out May 5—the group hasn’t lost any relevance.
“Fischerspooner
is continually daring and trying new things,” he says. “It may not sell
a million copies, but that’s not how you tell if something is
relevant.Think about bands like Crystal Castles that are hot now. No
one rags on them, even though they’ve taken a lot from
Fischerspooner.You know the difference? Those bands are better
looking. They’re absolutely gorgeous! Really, hating on Electroclash is
very 2005.”
Evidence that Fischerspooner will continue to inspire both
strong fandom and polemical
hatred came in the more personal moments of the rehearsal. At one
point, Spooner cut a song off and ordered Fischer to “Hit the spacebar
and start over.” I think authenticity rolled in its grave. He also
joked that a three-minute break after the set was when “6,000 screaming
fans will be losing it while we change costumes for the requisite
encore.”
Promoters think the duo remains a sure bet, but
tickets are still on sale for the band’s upcoming New York shows. Its
breed of dance music seems even more retro than it did in 2001. The new
songs translate well live, but the old material seems reminiscent of a SNL sketch.
Nonetheless, the fans in the crowd were enthusiastic throughout the
show and treated Spooner like a superhero that had returned at just the
right moment. For them, musicianship couldn’t matter less. It’s all about the spectacle.
“For
our performances, it’s never been about recreating the studio music
onstage. It’s never been about virtuosity,” reflects Spooner. “There’s
no reason to enter into this attempt to execute music in front of
people.We use performance to draw upon themes and ideas in the music
and find ways to illustrate those.”
In this context, both the
new record and performance are sure to excite Fischerspooner’s fans and
win a few new followers along the way.The haters will still be there,
but perhaps this time they’ll move aside and finally let the duo
entertain like it wants to.
> Fischerspooner
May 7, Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 N. 6th St. (betw. Wythe & Kent Aves.), Brooklyn, 718-486- 5400; 8, $27.50/32. Also, May 8 at Webster Hall
