Pitchfork

Photo by Dusan Reljin

The conceptual art glam-dance duo Fischerspooner had the simultaneous good and bad fortune to emerge in 2001 with "Emerge", an epic dancefloor throb of a single that came into the world at the center of New York's electroclash scene. Electroclash got a ton of press and then triggered a seismic backlash before anyone quite figured what, exactly, the term might mean.

"Emerge" won the duo a reportedly huge contract from the British label Ministry of Sound and a veritable avalanche of hype, the sort of hype that can color a band for life. With their one big anthem and their self-consciously theatrical (and lip-sync-happy) live shows, Fischerspooner basically had fad written all over them.

So it's interesting, eight years later, to see that Fischerspooner have evolved into the long-running art project they sort of always were. They work slowly, notching up only three albums after a decade of existence, and they do things at their own pace, as their budgets and day-jobs will allow. They've broken with Capitol, the label that released their sophomore album Odyssey. And on May 5, they'll self-release their third album, Entertainment, on their own FS Studios label, which originally released the group's first album. Recently, Warren Fischer, the beat-centric, Chris Lowe half of the group (Casey Spooner is the showy frontman), talked to Pitchfork about what has been going on in the Fischerspooner world over the past four years.

Entertainment album cover: OOPS! That wasn't actually the cover. Stay tuned...

Pitchfork: It's been a long time since we've heard from you guys. What have you been up to?

Warren Fischer: Well, we have been consistently making music. I mean, personally I've been raising a family and doing all that entails, but Fischerspooner has been... We flow, I guess is the word. We started making our first record in '98, it was done in like 2002, and then the next one was done in 2005, and so this is 2009. So it's kind of like a three-to-four year cycle to our process. I've made other kinds of music, and it's kind of a tedious form to work in, at least for me, because it's all mostly about programming and editing that kind of stuff.

Pitchfork: And you're the one who does the lion's share of that, right?

WF: I do the lion's share. One of the things we do is work with outside [people]. I do like to bring other people in to have more ideas to bounce off of. So that does happen. It all goes through my lens, and I have to make the tough decisions about how things work or not. It's meticulous. It's knitting; it's not like action painting. You have to stitch it together, so it just takes time. And then, plus, I have other work that I have to do-- you know, to live. And I have other elements to my life, with family and work and that kind of thing. I can't do 40-hour weeks on it consistently, so it just takes time

Pitchfork: So Fischerspooner is not your main job, then?

WF: It never has been. I love it, if I could do it 100% of the time all the time I would, but I own a film production company; we do advertising and short form content for people, so that's my day job.

Pitchfork: When you say that the programming work and everything is tedious, is it something that you enjoy?

WF: Yes and no. I love the challenge of trying to make songs and to think about what the sound of the record might be and what's interesting and not. And I love just to have the internal debate to chew on all the time with everybody's input. I'm making it sound probably too much like I'm doing everything solo, but the music is kind of my department, specifically, relative to the show.

Lyrics are really Casey [Spooner]'s domain. And melody, you know, he takes the lead on a lot, but we collaborate on it, edit it. Just to be clear that there is a whole team of people working on it and that I'm not singlehandedly manufacturing this stuff. I used to play bass, and I played violin originally, so instruments really have an immediacy to the satisfaction. And working computers is more of a quiet internal process. But I love just always being in the process of making things and listening to new mixes and thinking about the decisions that can be made. You know, just the whole creative mulling process that happens whenever you make anything, that's what I really love. Sitting in a studio for 10 hours editing audio, I mean I wouldn't say that that's my favorite thing to do.

Pitchfork: On the website-- I was looking at it earlier today and there's this grainy footage of-- is it you in the studio?

WF: Yeah that is me there working with an Echoplex, doing some tape-to-live stuff.

Pitchfork: Glamour and theater have always been such a huge part of your group. Are you intentionally presenting yourselves differently right now on this website, putting that footage up?

WF: I think there was a little reaction. I think you're right in sussing out that there was some sort of internal reaction to the aesthetic we've established. Although when you look at the cover art for the new record-- that current website the way it is up now is not the album website-- that was like an interim website that was a lot about our creative process, and about making something that was incredibly cavalier and casual and immediate and not overwrought.

Casey had a phone that could record video and so he would then email the video to the web designer who would put things up sort of not in real time, but pretty close-- like a week later or something. It was just kind of a place for us to play while we were finalizing what the new body of work would be. It did start to form an aesthetic, though, and we still haven't shot a video that we're gonna be doing. We're kind of trying to marry our more polished aesthetic with this rougher... We're sort of drawn to this rougher texture right know for a few different reasons. We haven't seen how it plays out yet, so it's still in flux as to whether or not it's gonna be part of the look and feel of the new stuff.

Pitchfork: So your new aesthetic is not gonna be, like, a full jerk-back-the-curtain kind of thing?

WF: Correct. We've always jerked back the curtain a little bit, but it's always been in kind of a stylized way.

Pitchfork: Like in the "Emerge" video?

WF: Yeah, it's a fake curtain-pull. It's glamorizing. It's a mythical curtain-pull.

Pitchfork: Tell me about this rougher thing that you've been into lately. 

WF: Actually, it's more of a visual thing. It's just in how we wanted to be a little bit more cavalier and work through material more fluidly, and so it informed the way we generated the record in that we generated many more songs than we winnowed down to the final record. We were just opening up our creative process a little bit. One of the things on a technical level that was interesting to play with is on the last record we started working with acoustic instruments. And on this record we did that again. But this time we worked a little bit more on doing editing of them, so they're a little bit made more plastic by how they were handled.

Pitchfork: "The Best Revenge" sounds a lot different from your other stuff. You've got the horn stabs in there, and it's kind of fuller and more orchestrated. It's funky. I don't think I would say Fischerspooner has been funky before.

WF: Yeah, I know. I have a complicated relationship with roots-rock, generally. I'm not drawn to it. So it's interesting that you say funk; I do get what you're saying. I would say it's a really mechanical funk because there's not loose timings anywhere or anything, nobody's behind the beat. So the groove is still pretty metronomic, but there's almost like a Motown-y thing to it, too, in the bass pattern. The horns were  something that we just tried. Robert Aaron, I think he played on a David Bowie record, and I think he might have even played on "Let's Dance". [Indeed he did. -Ed.] He's a really nice guy, and he's really talented. He pulled out a pocket trumpet for the bridge, and he came with a bunch of instruments, and so that was an experiment that worked. That's what that process was about.

Pitchfork: You put that single out on Kitsuné, which is part of this whole new wave of these especially French super stylish house groups like Justice. What do you think of that stuff? And how do you think you fit into that landscape right now?

WF: God, you know, it's tough to orient yourself relative to other artists. It's just a really difficult place to have perspective from, but I like the sound that Kitsuné had. I had DJed a couple of their singles. There's an Alex Gopher single that I was playing out, and I like their graphic language a lot. They just seem to be kind of a nice synchronicity. Also, they have a store and they do things other than music. They make clothes, and there was just something kind of interesting. It seemed like a good fit for us...

As far as our relationship to it, I do see that they are in another kind of era of evolution of the re-envisioning of electro. There's a correlation; it's not like, they're not playing samba or something so [they're] kind of in our ilk. There's kind of an exciting energy in what they do. I really like the Digitalism record and they work with Crookers and other people that have an interesting audio sensibility that we like.

Pitchfork: Like you were saying, you guys have that three-to-four year gap between records. Dance music, the center of it just moves so quickly and fluidly. Is that ever a concern? Figuring out where you belong in that?

WF: The assumption in your question is that we consider ourselves a dance act. But we were adopted by the dance community. I mean our music isn't really dance music. I don't really know what genre it would lie in. I guess it's kind of like indie pop or pop music. In fact, we really never do remixes. We've done like two in ten years, and don't really make music that plays on a dance floor. In fact, it's really important for us to get remixes so that it can be. But we were adopted by that community, for sure. The styles do change seasonally, practically. The musical agenda in the Fischerspooner project is to make songs and to try to learn how to do that, and to see what that is all about. And songs are deceptively difficult to cobble together, I learned doing this project. So I feel more tied to how the quality of the song than really the dance music sub-genres that are constantly shifting.

 Pitchfork: This might not even be your department so much, but the live performances that you guys put on are just so sweepingly huge. Are the logistics behind something like your shows really difficult to pull off?

WF: Yes. I mean, it all comes down to having the time and the people it takes to do it properly, and it's always hard. Casey and I typically imagine things that are above what we can afford, so we're constantly maximized, living right at the limits of what the budgets can take. It's definitely a component of what we do, trying to execute things that are a little bit less traditional and more expensive. But yeah, in fact I'm going to rehearsal later, and we're working hard on that now. We're lining up our American tour and our European tour and all that.