Fischerspooner: from Hamlet to sweat pants

Fischerspooner's Casey Spooner: obviously, their new shows won't be done entirely in sweat pants

Electronic music isn’t generally well-known for its dazzling stage shows, but that’s not true in the case of Fischerspooner. The brainchild of Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner began with low-budget performance art and white-label vinyl singles, but they’ve since released three albums and built the most vibrant, extravagantly visual stage show in the genre, with an extended cast of characters presenting a retro-futuristic cabaret. The group came to signify the heights of creativity of a musical strain then dubbed “electroclash,” finding colleagues in artists like Peaches, Felix Da Housecat, Tiga and Larry Tee (who all have new albums out this year, too—see the "Electroclash redux" sidebar).

In a telephone interview from New York just before the release of “Entertainment,” the duo’s third album (and first in four years), frontman Casey Spooner talked about training as a Shakespearean actor, how he shed his image entirely by accident, and why sweat pants are the hot new look.

You have spent the last few years acting in “Hamlet” with the Wooster Group in New York; why make such a strange leap from music?
I always wanted to do a show with the Wooster Group. I started as a painter and then I went to art school and all my teachers told me that the best thing about my paintings was when I talked about them. And so they pushed me into the performance department. I was on this trajectory where I thought I was going to be Willem Dafoe or Laurie Anderson. But by the time we got to [the last album] “Odyssey,” I was on a trajectory that I didn’t really understand. When our tour support fell through and I couldn’t actually perform, I was really disappointed. The two years recording “Odyssey” was the longest I was ever not performing, which was not healthy for me. So I contacted the Wooster Group and told them I always wanted to work with them. I went in and they said they were doing a production of “Hamlet,” and I said, “Literally, whatever [role], I don’t care, I just want to be in the show.”

Were you a Shakespeare buff or anything then?
I had never read any Shakespeare; the whole thing was just complete gibberish to me. The process was pretty amazing because I had to learn the text and a physical score, and I wasn’t allowed to speak my part for six months. I had to spend the first six months just moving. And after I learned all the physical language, then I could start to speak. I was thoroughly and completely immersed in Shakespeare for two years, and it was amazing because I gained an appreciation for a classic text that I couldn’t hear before or relate to or decipher on any level. All of a sudden, it wasn’t like some bad historical recreation where everyone wears tights and a puffy outfit.

How did that influence the writing of the new songs?
I wrote this record in a completely different way. [Before] I’d have an image in my head and I’d be describing it. On this record, I was working with language and not image. It was more about the words themselves. It inverted my process because I had to come up with the image after a lot of the language was developed. We kept doing shows in the summer in order to keep developing ideas. We had written the choreography for 10 songs and we had started on the wardrobe and almost had the whole new show written. And then we went to Portugal and we lost all of our wardrobe cases.

Oh no!
People were coming to the shows and expecting the grand and the flamboyant, so we were in a crazy dilemma about how we were going to move forward.

So what did you end up doing?
I did all of these performances in the summer of 2007 in a T-shirt and a pair of running shorts from American Apparel. It was so liberating; it felt like this heavy armor or skin had been over me for so long and just by chance I lost all of it and I had no choice but to go on stage pretty much naked. But it was crazy; I felt like I was in my body more. I wasn’t restricted by anything, it was just my body in this kind of incredible, powerful way. So that’s one thing that influenced the development of the new show in how it looks and feels. It was a big accident.

A first I’d be making excuses on stage. I’d be like, “Hey, 30 thousand people in Valencia! Guess what? We lost all our clothes!” But I realized that, if I told people that there was a problem then they felt like they were missing something, but if I didn’t say anything, they felt like it was an idea. Most people didn’t care, though some people were like, “Wow, that was weird.” This is the new, raw, sweat pant era I’ve embraced. It’s the new mystical sweat pant body of work.

Sweat pants have been waiting in the wings to get their due!
Sweat pant era!

Maybe people will stop making fun of me for my flip-flops now?
God, you know that’s a great idea: I should do a whole number in flip-flops! I’m working a laundry line into the set piece. We have so much [stuff] and we have to wash it all the time that I’m basically just putting it in the set piece.