Madison Grieco / November 12, 2011
Fischerspooner is THE band that jump started my electronic-music obsession almost ten years ago. When I was offered the chance to sit down and chat with Casey Spooner (half of the Fischerspooner duo), I gasped and squealed like an over-enthused 13-year-old girl and immediately accepted the offer. Though I tortured my brain for days on end to come up with ‘the best’ interview questions, as soon as I sat down with Casey and cracked upon a Stella, my preparation dissolved into thin air. Casey was (and is) a kind, gentle soul and easy to talk to. He looked dashing in his classic tuxedo topped off with long flowing coattails and a top hat. As soon as he removed his top hat, a head of purple hair glistened in back-stage-light and I thought, “Damn. This man is one elegant rock star.”
He was eager to share his experiences and our scheduled ten-minute interview turned into an hour-long conversation. His tone was genuine, sarcastic, and informative. It was the perfect conclusion to my BEMF experience and a night I will forever remember. Below are some highlights from our conversation.
HiFi: This is your first time at BEMF in the 4 years it’s existed. What do you think of it so far?
Casey: Well, I can’t be the best judge of it since I showed up 15 minutes before my set and now it’s 4 in the morning, but I’ve always wanted to be a part of it. I’ve always thought, well “I live in Brooklyn, why can’t I be a part of it [BEMF]? I AM Brooklyn electro. I invented it!”
HiFi: Your set tonight was very disco heavy. Are you gravitating towards a deep disco sound in your solo career?
Casey: It’s really hard to get away from disco. The more you DJ, it gets so exhausting, so tiring how psychotic modern dance music is. At first it’s fun, it’s two-tonic and aggressive, all these weird screeching, screaming, noodling, computer sounds, but that’s kind of like tonight. I was doing that and then all of a sudden I wanted to play something else. Lauren and I are about to embark on a world tour next week and I wanted to play this track that we had just created. That track was very euro, very cheesy, so I did it. I played it, and then realized I couldn’t stop there. So then I started playing these electro ragas, and realized I couldn’t end there, but people were dancing so I went back to disco. It was kind of a weird set, and not what I was expecting to play, but that’s the beauty of live music.
HiFi: Are you currently creating music?
Casey: I actually started the set with a remix I produced that I literally had to go home and download the final version before I got here; it was the Patti Smith track. That was the premier; I was testing it to see how the final mix sounded. I actually wanted to play it again!
HiFi: You should have! Have you ever repeated tracks in a DJ set?
Casey: I’m so bad like that. I love to have one song and just play it over and over and over again. I DJed a friends house party and I just didn’t want to stop but I didn’t want to play anything other than these two songs so I did it, and the audience was like. “Ohhh Kay, can you please stop?”
HiFi: What tour are you about to embark on with Lauren?
Casey: Lauren and I are about to go on a DJ tour. We’re heading to Paris, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Milan, Florence, then and Athens, Greece.
HiFi: Have you performed live in South East Asia before?
Casey: No we haven’t. And everyone has always told us to go to Japan, I feel like they are my people! When we released the album on EMI, I tried very hard to get us to go over to Japan, but they only wanted us to do press in the UK and LA. I had never gone to Asia until last year and I wanted to open the market up for us over there. We DJed last year in Bangkok, Singapore, Bali, and Fuji-Rock (a big music festival in Japan). So now we’re going back and I can’t wait.
HiFi: Do you incorporate any of your solo work that you did on “Adult Contemporary” into your DJ sets?
Casey: Gosh, that’s so funny, you know I probably should. There is one remix of Faye Dunaway that could work. I’ve tried but it’s really tough. People come to the Fischerspooner DJ set wanting hard electro. So I feel obligated to stick within certain genre, obviously I’m playing ragas and Larry Levine, but that’s just because we’re at home and it’s comfortable. But when you’re headlining and playing for 2,000 people, you HAVE to play Emerge.
HiFi: Do you like your track Emerge?
Casey: I like it, but I don’t have to hear it. It’s such a cliché. But, there are songs that I love that I never get sick of. But I never would’ve imaged that I would make one of those “Underground-Cult-Hits”, but I did. So I am thankful that I got to make something like that.
HiFi: Do you prefer performing live or curating the music through a DJ set?
Casey: I am not a technical person. I hate computers, I don’t program music, I don’t know how to do anything. I never wanted to be a DJ because I grew up in Chicago and was immersed in the most amazing scene with all of these incredible DJs. I don’t feel like I transfer myself through machinery- it’s just not my thing and it makes me sleepy. The other thing is, if the music is really good and going well, the last place in the fucking world I want to be is standing behind a computer. I want to be enjoying it and dancing. I feel that right when the music gets good, I have to cue something and it makes me feel like I miss the party because I’m working. It is fun but to me it’s not as powerful as performing a live show. That is the great thing about performing with Warren [Fischer, the other half of Fischerspooner) because he’s manning the machines while I’m in-front and together we’re creating art and that art is our own world within our music.
HiFi: What is it like to tour with this world you created?
Casey: AWESOME. I fight and struggle to stay in that world. For our last record we spent two years developing the show and three years touring it, so for five years I was living in that world. But at the end of this past summer I sat down and realized, “I have performed this show and perfected it to its finest degree, and now it’s time to move on.”
HiFi: How did Fischerspooner start? Was there this small-scale alternative world that just happened when the two of you first performed together?
Casey: When we first started there was no big plan. It started with Warren Fischer, Karen Fischer and I working on a film project. The film project was a pitch for a TV show that a production company asked us to do. It was kind of lame, Warren was frustrated with being a commercial director, he wasn’t making music, and he had this amazing band in Chicago called Table that made beautiful, complicated rock music. So I said to him, “You really should be making music. Why don’t we take some of this film footage, you can score original music to it, and try it as a new way to incorporate music.” That’s what we did. After a series of events, we created this song and were asked to perform it at Starbucks on Astor Place. It was me doing this experimental theater, electro, dancing act while I was speaking in an Indian accent taking personal experience and putting it into song. It was mildly offensive, sort of filthy, and the punch line was “Do you want to see it? If you like it, you try. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to try.” And we looked at each other after the performance and said, “Oh Shit! This is interesting! Let’s do this again.” From there record companies started chasing us. But I was not naive. I was thirty when we started this whole process and knew that if we were going to do this, we had to be in total control. And it was like, “No.” We signed with EMI and all of those cliché things you hear are so true. It got out of control and I thought, “What the fuck happened? I was supposed to be an artist and now I’m dealing with corporate bullshit.”
HiFi: So do you think you will put out a 4th Fischerspooner album?
Casey: We’re talking about it now. I’m not opposed to it, but I’m so bored with the format. It’s so formulaic. So I think we will put out an album, I’m just not positive.
