The Fischerspooner spectacle to make first appearance at Voodoo

Voodoo 2009

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By Kaiya Morrison

The average music fan may fail to think of their favorite band as a part of a business. Nor do most fans seem to realize that a band may be affected by the economy in the same way as any other industry.

This, however, is the reality, and it became a major topic for the dynamic New York-based music group, Fischerspooner. It became apparent when they were working on the stage show concept for the tour to support the group's latest album, Entertainment, which was released on May 5, 2009.

"It's been a crazy time since the collapse of the music business," Casey Spooner, lead vocalist for the electro-rock duo, explained. "We had to design this tour to embrace the recession. It's like the romanticism of poverty in that I had to romanticize our limitations. I really like it because it ties in this classic vaudevillian feel like we're a troupe of gypsies. I see all these clichés of entertainers over the years, but basically the role of the entertainer has stayed the same. This dejected, traveling, trunk rolling, Hamlet players."

Unlike the average touring band, Fischerspooner is as much performance art as they are a rock group. Casey Spooner and Warren Fischer were classmates at the Chicago Art Institute when they first collaborated on a one-performance-only concept that eventually grew into the band we now know today.

"When we first started, we were working on a film piece for a TV show that someone had asked us to direct," Spooner said about the initial project. "The pitch for the show didn't go anywhere, but we had all this footage left over. I suggested to Warren that he should go back to making music, because that's what he truly loved to do, and that we should take this film footage and combine it with music."

"In the process of making the music for it, we got a lot of ideas for doing it live and we were asked to perform at this little group show," he continued. "I performed one of the songs Warren and I had written, and it was at that group show that we thought, oh, there's something here."

Utilizing his background in experimental theatre, Spooner choreographed an elaborate stage performance that has grown over the years to become a full-scale production.

"You can't really play electronic music like you can play rock music, so why even try and pretend," Spooner explained. "Why not embrace it more as pop? We combine performance art with pop spectacle, and then we reconfigure it."

Fischerspooner will bring their unique take on the role of the entertainer to the Voodoo Experience in New Orleans on Friday, Oct. 30 at 8:50 p.m. at Le Carnival in the Bingo! Parlor. This will be the first time the group has performed at the festival, and they are looking forward to making a powerful introduction.

You can learn more about Fischerspooner by visiting them online at www.fischerspooner.com.

Originally Published: Issue 821 - October 28, 2009

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