Chat: Fischerspooner
Posted May 27th, 2010 at 12:46 pm by JUICE
Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner make music, dance, fashion, film and photography under the moniker, Fischerspooner and do it like sex on legs. Fusing fine art and pop culture into one tasty blend, these geniuses present their craft in different spaces around the world, from art galleries to concert halls to seedy clubs and once made the genre of electroclash (wonder what happened to that?) a big thing. With sold-out shows around the globe, it was a nice to have Casey down for a DJ set at Zouk for its 19th Anniversary party and also for a chat with us.
Why the four year gap between your last album and your latest one, Entertainment?
It just takes us a long time, two years to get a record out, typically. We finished Odyssey and then I worked with The Wooster Group on their production for Hamlet and was really busy with that. And I only could just start writing for Entertainment right after I was done with all that. There was also a delay due to the turmoil in the music business. It was like two years of business - that’s what takes up a lot of time. I would like to work faster.
Does Entertainment have an underlying theme? And if so, can we consider it a concept album?
Warren thinks its one of the most consistent lyrical writing I have ever done and how it worked was that I generated lots of snippets and gave it to him and he’d pick and choose the ideas he wanted. He’d curate everything I was working on and he was the one who was seeing all this thematic things coming together. On this record Shakespeare taught me that it’s really exciting when you can have rhythm and form and rhyme and get across an idea. And if you can combine the formal and the conceptual together, it works.
For the benefit of our untrained eyes, could you give us a description of your new live show (titled Between Worlds) and how it ties in with the album?
For this show, I wanted to make something more enigmatic – mysterious in a way that even I wouldn’t understand what it meant. It has lots of dance and lots of videos. We videotaped every rehearsal since day one and that material is in the show. So you see us going through the process of building the show, in the show. I wanted to do a performance that could work for a depressed economy so we embraced a raw and stripped down aesthetic.
After 12 years of working together, has your working dynamic changed?
It’s different because we’re busier. When we first started, we didn’t have anything to do and we’d just hang out and talk and work. Now we are very busy and we have completely separate lives so we don’t have the kind of time we used to have. In a way, we don’t need the time that we used to have because it’s like a relationship where once you know somebody that well (creatively), you don’t need to have lengthy discussions. We can work more quickly with less communication.
Read the full interview in your free June issue of JUICE, now out at these spots.
Text: Wayne Lee
Image and interview courtesy of: Zouk








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