Casey Spooner & Lauren Flax
Interview conducted by Baily Rose
photos by Casey Spooner and Lauren Flax
Casey Spooner is part one of the "electroclash duo and performance troupe" that makes Fischerspooner . Warren Fischer is part two, and Lauren Flax is part three. Warren Fischer is the so called Charlie of these two little angels, Spooner and Flax. Spoonerflax (as I have come to call the fabulous two) are similar to angels, jetting all over the world sprinkling beats to make us dance.
Who are your favorite fashion designers to work with?
Casey Spooner: Oh, I see you have Stefano Pilati down there. Tonight I’m wearing all Stefano Pilati couture. This is all YSL, custom. He made all of this stuff for me.
You are so lucky.
CS:I know! It’s awful. It’s actually kind of a curse. Because once you have someone make Parisian couture clothing for you... I tried to go to the mall the other day just to see what America - you know, what everybody’s up to, where it’s coming from. It was horrifying, it was a nightmare!
Middle America?
CS: No, I went to Macy’s in Harold Square and it was a hellish experience - and I was like, you know what? I would look like shit, too, because it’s such a painful, awful, excruciating, overwhelming - you get exhausted. Eventually, you just take whatever you can and get the hell outta there. Tonight I’m wearing all Stefano. And I did fuck up this shirt because I wore it in the Best Revenge cover with all the paint. I got coated in paint....
Acrylic?
CS: Yeah, it was Acrylic. This is Jeremy Scott, and these are Dr. Martens, which took two years to break in, but now they’re great. So, um, what was the question?
Who are your favorite fashion designers to work with?
CS: So, yeah, Stefano made all this stuff for me. And right now I just worked with a designer, Romain Kremer. He is incredible.I met Nicola Formichetti who is the fashion director or creative director of Dazed & Confused magazine. We met, and he’s been helping me connect with different designers, and he suggested Romain. He made all of these incredible fashion outfits that we just did a fashion show in Sao Paulo Brazil last Sunday night. It’s very weird, kind of athletic, kind of futuristic, kind of neo-classical, just very peculiar. But, really cool. So, Romaine is the person I’m working with this week. And this other guy whose name is Nasir Mazhar who is making a hat for me in London that’s going to have neon in it. We’re racing to get the hat made and shipped to New York for the cover shoot album.
Which will be out in April?
CS: April-ish. Turning in the album mix master sequence, artwork and all graphic design.
BAR What kind of role does fashion play in performance for you?
I have always, always loved clothes. I don’t know when or how it began, but I feel like it’s something genetic. I was always interested in clothing. This project has given me incredible access to work with the best fashion designers in the world. For me it’s all about character, persona, transformation, spectacle, it’s about another tool to communicate the core ideas of the music.
Even non-visually, it helps you play out that...
CS: Yeah, it’s interesting because .... like, this hat that I’m making - it’s going to become a big deal. The hat is a very weird imitation. I made this hat out of a hat box lid and a straw boater. I’ve been wanting to work with a straw boater for some reason, and the title of the record is “Entertainment,” and I like using the straw boater because it’s so vaudeville, and classic show business, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly.....
___________________________ .............................that are looking for a way out, or a way in.
It’s a Social outrage. Like meals on wheels. Like meals on wheels for a... like a ...
(Giggling shyly, Bailey flips back on the recording device realizing it has been off for about 7 minutes...)
CS: Like meals on wheels for performance art addicted - uh, children that like to dress up and go to the disco ?
Picture by Casey Spooner of Lauren Flax in a Dallas hotel October 31, 2008,
the night before they came to Denver to play a DJ set at Beta)
How did you get involved with Lauren?
CS:Lauren came to us highly recommended by lots of fantastic and amazing people she’s a very amazing DJ and plays great music.
LF: They were just looking for somebody, and they put the word out. There was a test period, though. There was a month of “Okay, you got recommended - Make a mix.” So I made a mix, and we just went from there.
Who was that mix made by - you two? (In reference to the night’s set that was advertised as FISCHERSPOONER DJ SET at Beta)
CS: The way it works is Warren likes to pick the music. He calls himself the Charlie of Charlie’s Angels.
LF: I’ve never met him
CS: No one ever meets him in person. He sends us information, he gives us direction from far away over his communication network . And then Lauren takes the material and interperates it, and puts her own take on it, and then we ignore all that stuff and do whatever we want in the moment.
LF: Yeah, you’ve gotta pay attention to the crowd. But I mean, Warren has amazing taste of music so I feel lucky.
What’s your history? What have you been doing?
LF: I’m ... I...
CS: She has a great song coming out with Sia called “You’ve Changed,” it’s incredible.
LF: I’m just a dj.
I had no idea - just the way the show was promoted - there was another DJ. I was super impressed and excited to see you up there in your Christmas sweater.
LF: Thank you! I totally punked out and I’m not wearing my fuckin’ outfit tonight.
Do you have any fashion lines in the works?
CS: You know, we developed a line of clothing on the last release and I didn’t understand how to actually put it into production. It’s very complicated. We had worked with a major designer and created and sampled a whole line of clothes that was beautiful, basically everything I wore on stage. The idea was to create merchandise that wasn’t like “ we wear this incredible stuff on stage and you get a shitty t.shirt.” The idea was that we were going to make something amazing to wear on stage, and you can too. Kind of creating this world army - but - I didn’t understand how the factories worked, and it’s very political the way fashion is manufactured. It turned into this very complicated, logistical manufacturing issue - not a creative issue. We’re trying to figure out now how to attempt it again. It’s something we’ll get to at some point because it’s almost like when we make show, we already make a whole collection of clothing, so it seems silly not to go that extra step and put it into production and make it available to people.
We worked with this designer named Christoph Chiron Who was a student of Walter Vonbeeter-bot... I can’t remember .. He’s someone who I want to work with because Nicolo Formachetti had suggested him.
We worked with this amazing designer, Christoph, and he went to these fabric houses in Belgium, and printed on these different grades of cotton, and all kinds of .... we did all kinds of different fabric tests. I have the fabric, it looks amazing ... The idea was to create a graphic for the record cover that could be applied in all different ways and so it printed beautifully.
(One of the dancing Nells walks up)
CS: Hi
Nell: Where are you guys from?
CS: We live in Brooklyn.
Nell: You’re probably never there, though, huh.
CS: No, I’m there a fair amount. I have two cats.
Nell: Oh, Ok, Nice to meet you! Goodnight!
CS: Ok, goodnight. Goodnight little Nells! What were we talking about again? Oh yes, manufacturing. Yah, that’s the thing about fashion. It’s not just creative. It’s a very political manufacturing issue. It’s all about the amount of orders you put in, when you put them in, factories, the this , the that...
We’re a submission based magazine, so we have themes...
CS: You’re what based?
Submission.
LF: Oh, I thought you said submissive!
No, submission based. So, we put out themes for artists to respond back to and our next issue is Love to Hate, Hate to Love. What kinds of things come up in your mind?
CS: When you say love to hate, I think of my friend Angela DiCarlo, a make.up artist who we’ve worked with for years, a lot of our premium make.up designs - and she loooves to hate, and she is proud of it. I just worked on a song with my boyfriend Adam called “Enemies List” that was inspired by this famous politician that kept an enemies list, and our friend Angela Dicarlo also keeps an enemies list, literally on her refrigerator. It is known publicly, it is a very sensitive and dangerous topic, because if you get on the enemies list you will not get off. So, we wrote this crazy song about the enemies list and I recorded Ang, and one of the quotes she says “You know, I love to hate.”
.jpg "Ryan Riss | November 4 - October 28, 2011")
