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Fischerspooner > Keeping It Fake

Words by Chris Mace
Image courtesy of EMI
December 2003

According to Warren Fischer, he and Casey Spooner work well together: "I tell him what to do and he says, 'Thank you sir may I have another.'" Former classmates from the Art Institute of Chicago, they hooked up in Manhattan a few years ago and got to work on a video. They scrapped the video but the score was promising, so they tried performing live at the Astor Place Starbucks in Manhattan. Casey, voguing on a slight rise and wearing wrap-around sunglasses, sang lyrics about a randy Indian cab driver over a harsh synth beat that Warren composed on his iBook (he edits with "Reason and Logic" and keynoted the recent MacWorld Expo, for which he was "scared shitless").

Their performances grew as they began to incorporate wardrobe, lighting and set designers, dancers (clad in underwear, helmets, feathers and baroque cricket gear), explosions of glitter and sometimes a glitter-and-syrup-vomiting stagehand. The early venues they played orbited the downtown fashion, art and music scene: a runway on Orchard Street, St. Mark's Church, Gavin Brown's Chelsea Gallery where they played five nights in a row, six times a night, while withholding the release of their album, #1.

Eventually, they released a batch of albums in Germany under DJ Hell's Gigolo Records and were invited to perform all over Europe before the 2002 re-release of #1 in the U.K., to an explosion of publicity.

They are artists posing rock-stars. In fact, they are represented by the New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch, and performed a double-header at his Brooklyn gallery to a swarm of art critics, music press and scenesters.

"I think it's great that people have such a hard time describing us and what we do," says Warren. "We work hard to maintain that."

Fischerspooner is part of the hyped-up electro revival reaching back to the early 80s, when speech synthesizers and dissonant beats characterized the detached, edgy sound of technology. Along with a punk ethos, the appropriation of 80s musical culture and sound are the hallmarks of electro, or electroclash (after Larry Tee's Electroclash festival in 2001 identified acts central to the movement), though a wide range of styles feed into it.

But in the electro movement, appropriation also is a way to have some stupid fun on the front lines of cool. And it is a common strategy for innovation in an age when there is no central movement to depart from.

But Warren says they are more interested in making a punk statement than in ripping off the 80s and that people mischaracterize electro as an 80s revival just because there is a sonic likeness, but "extreme wardrobe and make up," is common throughout the past 40 years.

 


Fischerspooner However, the video for their hit "Emerge" is full of the melodramatic preening and over-the-top self-indulgence characteristic of 70s and 80s glam rock. Casey seductively gazes into the camera and lip-synchs the hedonistic refrain, "Feels good, looks good, sounds good," and even though it's done ironically, it still produces a range of emotions that would make Boy George blush. And that's part of the appeal: license to believe without feeling naive. Boy George threw his sunglasses at Casey during a show in London.

Another way to innovate is to create what Warren refers to as a "real" experience for an audience. That means playing up mistakes that happen during a show, and even rigging a performance to fall apart. Their shows collapse into their true choreography. "Realness" is their shtick because they exhibit their fallibility, and with Fischerspooner, the ends justify the means.

On NBC's Last Call with Carson Daily, a stagehand repeatedly tried to rip off Casey's suit, leaving him wearing just a rhinestone-studded bikini. After several takes, the jacket still wouldn't budge, and Casey, jacketed and bikinied, resorted to working the crowd. During a show in London, he pulled a heckler on stage and spanked him while the choreography continued without its centerpiece. Other instances include the previously-mentioned glitter-vomiting on stage; stopping an experimental new song halfway through during a full house performance, starting over after a few minutes, then stopping it again because it wasn't working out; a massive power failure at another show, though that was probably unplanned.

"There's a moment where the show falls apart, and you feel like you're getting the honest Casey on stage... people feel like they're seeing the actual show because there are problems actually happening, so it's a way to suspend the audience's disbelief, and I think that's the hardest thing to do with a contemporary audience," says Warren.

By contrast, another electronic act, "Prodigy," the techno version of stadium rock, caught on with a purely aggressive agenda entirely accessible without an appreciation of camp.

When Warren says that their agenda might be "keeping it fake," he is referring to coming out of an era of 90s grunge, and emotive performers such as Kurt Cobain, when the motto was "keep it real." But their agenda is also keeping it fake in the sense that they are artists tearing apart the effigy of a rock star, and then sewing it back together with big obvious yarn - a likeness you might find on-exhibit in Deitch Projects. www.fischerspooner.com