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interviews
Philadelphia City Paper 
Friends are the most frequent target of Sharp's barbs. "The bags under her eyes are bigger than what I used the last time I moved," she deadpans on "You Look Like Hell Tonight." She's skilled at witty put-downs, but Sharp says she's willing to share the shame. "Sometimes its sort of like objectifying yourself.... Sometimes you notice your own faults and weaknesses in other people," she says on a cell phone halfway between Chicago and St. Louis. "I think that mutual thing is what ends up making it a meaningful observation." The mutual thing, as she calls it, is evident in her ability to play both sides. Peppered with specifics, even her most absurd lyrics are about "personal experiences," she says, "but seen through other people's perspectives, or other people's experiences seen through my perspective." She can maintain some distance from her subjects, but she hardly sings with the moral authority -- much less the dulcet tones -- of an angel on high. Take the opening crack of "Winter in Hell": "I've got a system/I'm always quitting/I used to just work here/But now I work here and I'm sleeping with the baw-baw-boss." It's a common enough scenario, but Sharp's slack delivery and knack for detail endow her alter ego -- however sleazy -- with an endearing authenticity. She might be a shady lady, but she sure draws you in. Skanky characters, bad situations, poor judgment: This is the stuff of memorable parties. And of America itself. Since signing to the London-based Too Pure label, Sharp hasn't spent much time playing in her homeland. Now touring the United States as a two-piece with erstwhile Lilys guitarist Torben Pastore, she has spent much of the last couple of years in front of European audiences. If anything, that's sharpened her powers of observation. "On the one hand, we're obviously like the largest imperial power in the world," Sharp says, "but at the same time, if you drive around America, its like burned-out, post-industrial cities." Its a point she drowns in Peaches-meets-Sonic Youth fuzz on "Jersey-O-Matic," The Exorcist's lead track. "Atlantic City is one of those areas that's just got such a huge mix between rich and poor," says Sharp, who recorded 2001's Live at the Holiday Sin in a shore motel. "You're in the casinos, and it's this insanely rich, like, money, money, money. And then you walk three blocks away and its a total ghetto." Sharp spent five years drumming for New Radiant Storm King before walking away to do her own thing. Frustrated with trying to communicate her ideas to her band mates, she started building songs from the ground up. Up until now, she'd lay down a beat and then add layers of guitars and keyboards until she had enough of a structure to hang lyrics on. On some songs, she never got around to keeping her vocals in tune. "The Skank" has a charming, half-assed melody; "Winter in Hell" builds to a chorus so off-key it'll make you cringe and grin at the same time. Being a self-contained band has given Sharp the impetus to try new things. "I'm sort of changing my approach to it a little bit and like starting to base things more with guitar," she says. And in a way, that approach has helped her clarify things. Taking the lead has been a big boost for her communication skills. "It's still really noisy," she says, "but I feel like I've become more refined, if anything." She's even started writing with Pastore, with whom she shared guitar and drum duties. "Given that we're doing this all as a two-piece, I think it opens up a lot more possibilities," she says. "We're doing a couple of things with loop stations, which works pretty well for Ill Ease, 'cause its very loopy." Like a party's first few rounds, The Exorcist buzzes with the freedom of letting loose. Or maybe that's just the lo-fi production.
Chicago Tribune
This purportedly explains why Sharp, who brings the seductive, low-fi, post-indie-rock of Ill Ease to the Abbey Pub on Monday, learns instruments--drums, bass, guitar, keyboards and more--as easily as she does. (If that weren't enough, Sharp's also a gifted photographer, with a collection of corrosive, perversely beautiful urban landscapes in New York's Museum of Modern Art.) But it turns out that this disorder doesn't exist . . . not exactly, anyway. "That whole thing started off as kind of a joke," says Sharp, 32, chuckling on her cell phone as she heads for a Nyack, N.Y., rehearsal with touring partner Torben Pastore. "Someone asked me, `Why do you play music?' `Uh, well, because I like it . . . '" Sensing that that wasn't a terribly scintillating reply, Sharp says she subsequently began to clarify the basic effect music has on her by describing it as "a brain condition where I sensed music as pleasure." Still, Sharp acknowledges that while this isn't entirely accurate, neither is it entirely inaccurate--a situation she finds challenging to articulate. "I do think of [nonmusical] things in musical terms. Numbers, for instance, have a musical and harmonic connotation for me," she says. "And my hearing--I don't even know how to describe it. It's probably not worth going into ... ." Sure it is. "Well," Sharp ventures gamely, "most people hear things in a linear way. Near things sound near, and far things sound far. But I don't necessarily recognize distance that way. So when I'm mixing a song in the studio, I don't follow the traditional hierarchy of sound: drums and bass on the bottom, guitar above that, then vocals above that, because I've never really heard music that way. "I tend to keep the percussion loud and vocals quiet. It all comes back to drums for me," says Sharp, who, before Ill Ease, hit the skins for noise-pop act New Radiant Storm King, among others. "It all comes back to rhythm." "Sharp thinks like a drummer," says Pastore, who trades instruments with Sharp throughout Ill Ease's live performances. "Her songs are really percussion ensembles with harmonic content. She's made up her own language, but she makes it understood." That music sounds familiar, yet off-kilter, exemplified by the heady, hypnotic brew of primal beats, furry vocals and caustic lyrics heard on Ill Ease's most recent album, "The Exorcist" (Beggars Banquet). The punk sensibility of song titles such as "You Know You Make Me Wanna Hate You," "You Look Like Hell Tonight" and "Walking Catastrophe" is borne out by Sharp's verses, which are peopled with hard-partying losers, callous and cynical singles trolling for meaningless physical encounters and enough hopeless cases to paralyze St. Jude. She also has a way with elegant, spare descriptions that conjure up a host of images, as in this bit from "The Skank," describing a bleak college kegger: "There's a line of trees surrounded the house/The lights won't make it to the edge./Most of the boys and most of the girls/Won't make it in their makeshift beds." "I like to keep things down to their bare essentials, in music and photography," says Sharp. "I like conveying a wide span of emotions though economy of words, and economy of images." Sharp, who comes across in interviews as the polar opposite of her derisive songwriting persona, acknowledges: "A lot of the songs are negative, dark characters or alter egos that I'm exorcising. Music is just a cathartic experience."
Time Out New York According to the 30-year old Sharp, that's the intention. "I wanted it to be a record you can hang out and listen to at a party but at the same time have it feel kind of personal- something you play on headphones." she says over drinks at a midtown tiki bar. But Holiday Sin can sound unsettling at times, as on "Dear Krazy," a plea ("Was it something I said? / Come on Krazy / Please don't hate me") that could be directed at either a lover or someone potentially more harmful. Fortunately, Sharp's sensibility is also wickedly funny. "The Static's Beat" feels like both a downcast morning-after and a blithe-singsong dismissal: "You're so easy to pick up / You're so easy to put down / I don't really care if you go home / Or if you want to stick around/" Then there's the outlandish, sexually charged "Me & My Babysitter": "Let's play babysitter / I'll sit on your face / Let's play babysitter / You can put me in my place." Sharp admits, "The lyrics are pretty self-indulgent. I don't really like vague lyricism; I try and be really direct. But I don't think people appreciate the humor sometimes: ["Me & My Babysitter"] is supposed to be a mix of totally serious and totally loopy." If the new album has a certain cabin-fever feel, it probably has something to do with the circumstances under which it was created. Sharp holed up in an Atlantic City motel room for two weeks, creating Holiday Sin from scratch. "Basically, I just sit down and play the drums for four minutes," she says, "and then I play the guitar, bass, whatever sounds complement [the beat], and then just build everything up around it. The lyrics are always the last thing I write." Atlantic City's weathered, vaguely seedy atmosphere is all over the album, both figuratively and literally. The disc's striking cover art features faded, pastel-heavy photographs of motels, cocktail lounges and amusement parks that seem blurry at first but reveal surprising details the more you inspect them — not unlike the music itself. As it turns out, Sharp is better known as a photographer than a musician: Five self-published volumes of her work, including 27 Silos of the Rich and Famous and Nothing Short of Monumental, are ensconced in MoMA's library (viewable at moma.org). Sharp seems even more enthusiastic about her CD's artwork than she is about its music. "I'd never used the matte paper for the CD [booklet] before," she gushes. "I totally love it. Its so much nicer than glossy." Spoken like a true lo-fi champion."
Tape Op I wanted to get away from the city and my friend Thom Monahan, who I recorded with before, had a practice space there. We had a pretty basic mic setup and not much outboard gear, just maybe one or two compressors, and I think a preamp. I'd done a lot of bare-bones 4-tracking before, so that was actually a step up. I did some of the recording at home, too, with Pro Tools and an analog tape machine, a 1" 16-track, Tascam MS-16. What did you use in addition to the 1" 16 track? I did some of the mixing in Pro Tools and I used a couple of SM57s and a couple of EV 635a mics - which are really small trashy mics that make everything sound good - an AKG C3000 and a couple of answering machine microphones - which I threw in there for ambiance. I've liked your stuff all along, but the latest record, The Exorcist, seems even better. It's really infectious and hypnotic. Thanks. Those are two things that I strive for. I recorded it a while ago, and my favorite thing about it is that it was mastered at Abbey Road. I got a tour of the studio while I was over there and I saw the rooms where the Beatles recorded. They have all these original EMI compressors. They do most things analog, but back it up to hard drive, so there's a huge server room. While I was there they were working on backing up all their different formats to digital. I hung out and drank some pints in the courtyard with the engineers for a while afterwards. They have a lathe cutter, so you can literally cut the album right there. It was cool to see it - it's a 1960's-looking contraption. The album itself was mostly recorded with David Barbe in his studio in Athens, Georgia, called Chase Park [Transduction]. It's a really great studio - I worked there before and I like it a lot. We had a fun time - we started off with drums with just four mics on the kit, and we're both into weird things - we got some cool sounds, I think. He has all vintage gear. I was using all his amps - he has all these Ampegs, the old style, pop up ones. So we got great guitar sounds and the bass was really good. He has old tube preamps. Everything was recorded straight through those with a little bit of compression, and the preamps sound really nice. As I said, a lot of his stuff is vintage, so you never really know how much of it is, "Wow, that machine looks really cool!" is what influences you to say, "Wow, it sounds great!" Yeah, let's be honest, I think the way it looks has something to do with it! He loves to tell stories about recording with somebody and they'll be like, "That sounds like crap. Would you put some stuff on it?" and he'll flip on a bunch of lights and they'll be like, "Oh yeah, it sounds much better!" The psychology of recording... Yeah, pretty much David and Thom are the main people I've worked with, so just having a good working relationship is great - because when I used to record with people where you go in and work with them for a week or two and don't really have any history or references, even if you're coming from the same place, it takes a while to establish... Being able to describe music is such an abstract thing and just knowing you have a common language, and you know what you're referring to is very helpful - it just save a lot of time. Did you bring your own drums to Chase Park? No. Actually he has a set. I don't even think they have a name - it's like a mix. The only thing I brought was the cymbals, because I'm really picky about cymbal sounds. I've always been stripped down - snare, kick, cymbals without any toms. Maybe on one song or something I'll put in a floor tom, but generally I'm a big advocate of using as little as possible. I went to school in Western Mass, where Max Roach was a professor for a while, and in one of his performances, he played for an hour and a half on just a hi-hat. Yeah I saw him do that too - it was really amazing. Sometimes you see drummers with a double bass kit and miles of gear and they don't even groove. And I definitely think if you have more than three cymbals, you've lost control. One or two, maybe three, but those people who have four or more... it's ridiculous. Were the drums your first instrument? Yeah, that's what I've been playing pretty much my whole life, since I was twelve. But I also play guitar, bass and keyboards - and I always throw in some weird percussion, xylophones, things like that. When did you start getting into recording? Well I'd been using a 4-track since 1990 or something. Then I shared a studio with a friend who had an 8-track and I started getting into it then out of frustration over recording at studios and always being depressed when it was done, just wondering, "Why doesn't it sound the way it does when you play it?" I've actually gone full circle, because I started recording with bands and wanting the recording to sound as much like that as possible, but now I pretty much start with the recording and then try to get the live stuff to emulate that in some way. Are you still using the 16-track? I have the 1" 16-track, but I've moved out of that studio and I'm moving into a new place, so I haven't been recording on that much. I've just been shorthand recording things to computer in the meantime while I'm getting set up. For the last album, I did some tracks back and forth between my place and David's place. He has a 2" machine down there. How about Pro Tools? That's what I use when I have to use digital. I still prefer the analog, but I'm in between studios so I've been using Pro Tools for a little shorthand recording. I have some better plug-ins, so it's okay, but I still prefer analog. There's one album that I did pretty much completely in Pro Tools because I wanted to try it out for the first time. Being someone who doesn't use a lot of outboard gear, it's interesting to see the visual representation of things in Pro Tools. Looking at the computer screen transforms your understanding of the music when you see it all broken down in waveforms, and it really helps me understand what's going on with all the different gear. So that's been interesting to work with, but as far as the overall fidelity of stuff, I like to have it at least touch tape, so it has that tape sound. And then having many more tracks was nice, even if I didn't always use them. It's nice to have them there for like, unlimited numbers of tambourines. [laughs] The tambourine orchestra? Yeah, exactly. What's your favorite piece of gear? I'm lusting after EMI compressors and preamps. You didn't steal anything from Abbey Road, did you? No. [laughs] I'm not like a total gear head or anything. I use a few of those little RNCs. But I love the sound of my board - I have a Studiomaster Series III. It's got a five band EQ and its from the late 70s/early 80s. It has a really fat upper mid range. I actually just got a backup [machine]. I was excited to be able to find it because it took a lot of searching on eBay. So you're setting up a new studio? A friend of mine is opening a place in Williamsburg [Brooklyn] that's going to be half venue and half practice spaces. He;s already had a couple of shows there, but its temporarily on hold while he gets all the city legal stuff worked out, There are four spaces and some good bands down there. !!! is there, and the drummer from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I'm really excited to record because the room is two or three times as big as where I was before, and we built it out right -- the ceilings are all angled and the floors doubled with wood -- so it'll be a much better place to record the raw tracks. So you will be recording basic tracks there and going going and recording with David again? I think so. I have two different records I want to do. One is more along the lines of previous ones, but I've also been working acoustic, re-recording some previous songs and also doing some new songs just acoustic. On previous albums, there's a real thickness and a lot of different instrumentation, so I like the idea of doing the total opposite -- trying nothing but guitar and seeing where I end up with that. Thom Monahan;s done Beachwood Sparks records and stuff like that -- he's moved to LA and has a studio and I might do some of it there. So, I'm pretty much doing the basic tracks and writing the songs, and then I'll figure out what I'm going to do with it. You've beeen spending a lot of time in England. How did that come about? The last record and EP I put out were on To Pure, which is an Engli labl, and they brought us ovThe ficou olbm, Ill Ease was pretty mujsttuo nd, but I've ben din much more live s latly. We went over to England four times anplayed a week or two of shows there and in France each time. We went to Xfm, which was cool, and we went to Radio France. They have this huge room that's used mostly for classical stuff, but we were one of the first rock bands they recorded. Since then they've done some other bands. I think Interpol was there a little later. I noticed you played with te Fall. Yeah, that was like a dream come true. We did one gig in London opening for them. Whatever you've bouMark E Smith is all true. He took over the band room for himself and wouldnt even share it with his won band. But he's still a great performer. His band is just a bunch of blokes
Careless Talk Costs Lives Liz used to drum for New Radiant Storm King and her playing is incredible. She talks of growing up in the DC suburbs, getting into harDCore, watching great drummers from Soulside, Kingface, Swiz and Scream -- and Fugazi of course -- all fused with a love of Mitch Mitchell. She tells me its one thing to hear great drummers on record but its another thing to see them pull it off. Observing is how she learned her style. She calls it "spazzy and full". Its certainly unique. If New Order's Stephen Morris played "faster but slower," Liz plays tighter yet looser, but very repetitive. She imitates her mistakes: if she screws-up, she plays the screw-up over and over. Over the top of the beats she layers minimal guitar or a shivering bass line, maybe a touch of Rhodes piano (supplied by collaborator Liz Bustamante). All this filters through a self-diagnosed neurological disorder that makes Liz get high on certain frequencies. She does grooves obsessively until you imagine she's found her pitch and her brain is getting tight, like the dogs in that experiment that were taught to administer morphine via a foot pedal; they just kept doing it over and over until they died, no matter what distractions they were offered (food, bitches in heat). Liz has explored addiction before, including "Macon" (on "Circle Line Tours") about a smacked out Ray Charles, a major hero. If Charles is Brother Ray then Liz is Sister Ray. Aside from her stamina, there's a narco'd, frail quality to her vocals as though she's eternally distracted by a rush of Class A's. An epic demonstration of her mantra is "nick Groove". It puts you in that trance you get on long motorways. One could compare it to motorik but its not clean and precise like Neu!, it has a slightly detuned, literally sick sound. Its a risk making 10-minute songs but Liz totally fell for the beat on "Sick Groove" and couldn't stop. "For Ill Ease, the goal is to defy expectations," she says. "You naturally assume it's gotta have peaks and valleys but it doesn't". The way The Monks or The Fall do expiations is acknowledged too. I asked Liz about her "industry whores" lyrics. She told me how Sesame Street used to conclude by saying "Today's show is brought to you by the letter Q and the number 7," whereas now it ends saying "Today's show is brought to you by the letter Z, for for pharmaceuticals Zithromax and Zyrtec". Liz's reaction to this is, "Your corporate sponsor sucks dick, gives good head, is pussy-whipped," sung to a slow-mo tremolo groove. She thinks now is an embarrassing time to be an American, remembering the way Tony Blair looked at George Bush when they first met, like a car crash he couldn't stop staring at. This is apt because there's a definite road trip going on in her records. She's always up for a drive, it relates to her rhythm: "Distance equals space over time," she says. "Zero Down Jericho Turnpike" even contains a honking car horn, skanking like a mechanical dub melodica. Not content with musical innovation, Liz is also a great photographer, taking many of cars, street signs and roads. She is the Robert Frank of Polaroid's unpretentious, populist format and Ill Ease records are adorned with her urban, hyper-coloured creations. For all her art suss though, Liz's final analysis is simple. "I want to make people fucking move around".
Magnet: Magnified Bold ay Sin (recorded with Pernice Brothers producer Thom Monahan), is a state of mind, a playground where Sharp toys with desire, drink and the aftermath. There's no better vehicle for such themes than these addictive, rhythm-heavy compositions infused with slippery vocals and weaving guitars; when embellished with her outbursts of 'yeah' and 'uh-huh', Sharp's songs achieve maximum bump and grind. "This was the first time that I had a place like (Springsteen's) The River does," says Sharp of her album's debt to its locale. "Its about a feeling you get from a certain place and keeps going back to that". For Holiday Sin's cover, Sharp (a photographer whose books were acquired by the MoMA in New York; look for her work in an upcoming issue of MAGNET) assembled a series of her shots of old signs around Atlantic City touting "Fun For All", "Carousel Motel" and "Electronic Ammunition". "People are like, 'Music. Art. Two worlds,'" says Sharp. "I kind of hate that, but I like music that's doing something new. So many bands now do the retro thing. 'This band is so cool -- they sound just like Joy Division or Gang of Four.' I love those bands but why remake their music? I was trying to make a self-contained world." Still, Ill Ease is a band too. Sharp's live combo just toured England with Errase Errata and recorded a BBC session to celebrate Greatest Tits (Too Pure), a vinyl-only EP that compiles material from her first two albums along with two unreleased tracks. The British should appreciate the Wire-like bass thud of 'Yr. Corporate Sponsor' ("sucks dick", goes the lyrical punchline) and Sharp's unabashed use of the word 'fuck'. Or maybe they'll take to 'Jack and Ginger', a drinking-metaphor song on which she declares, "I'm self-destructive and anti-social/Bet you can't wait to try me/Go home and do the kamikaze." "People don't always hear the humor," says Sharp. "I wish that on the fifth listen, the lyrics could automatically appear. Then people would have time to formulate their own warped interpretation of what a song is about first".
Venus Magazine Why and when did you start playing music? I started playing drums when I was 14. I started playing bass when I was about 17. I don't know when I started playing guitar and other stuff. I play music because I have a nervous disorder, so my brain senses music as pleasure. Do you like to travel and tour? I love to travel and tour. I like to travel because my sun is in Sagittarius and so is my Mercury, so I like to travel, but I'm not a good communicator. In fact, I'm sort of astrologically doomed to a life of wandering. I like to tour because I like playing music every night, drinking free beer, seeing bands for free, and because it's a good way to see a place and meet cooler people than you would otherwise. Plus, our van has a good stereo. I noticed in your press photo that you have a sticker of Spider Man on your guitar case. Do you like Spider Man or any other comics? I didn't know I had a press photo or a guitar case or a photo of Spider Man on the guitar case. Oh, OK, now I know, sorry for the confusion -- my mistake. That's a picture taken by my friend Alex Holden, whom I mention by full name only because he's coincidentally a great comic book maker, and his roommate is Caleb Seavey, who not-so-coincidentally plays guitar in the band. He has a guitar case that I guess has a sticker of Spider Man on it. You must have a high-voltage magnifying glass there, or a really keen spider sense. Since you asked, though, my favorite comic, hands down, is Krazy Kat. Second runner-up: McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland or Dream of the Welsh Rarebit Fiend. What instrument do you enjoy playing most? Drums. When and how did you decide to create Ill Ease?
A lot of people know you as the dope drummer of New Radiant Storm King. Did you enjoy playing in that band? I definitely enjoyed it a lot, but you know, to everything there is a season -- turn, turn, turn. What are the challenges and advantages of creating music alone instead of with a band? The big advantages would be that you don't have to schedule practices. And I'm always right (joke). There aren't too many challenges I can think of. Not to sound like a jerk, but I've definitely spent time playing with different people and I really enjoy it, but at some point, it always starts to feel like a relationship or a marriage or some type of commitment thing. It has its good points and its bad points, but it's just not where I'm at right now.. When I get a therapist, I'll ask her/him why. How did you recruit the musicians you play with live with the Ill Ease band? Well, Andy is my friend from way back (the same Andy I mentioned earlier). Caleb is a friend I knew in Massachusetts, and we reunited in New York. I met Naomi here a couple years ago, and we've been friends for a while. We all thought it'd be fun to be stuck inside a tiny, sweaty van for a while. We all like music and we all enjoy the same recreational activities, if you know what I mean. Your songs, especially "Sick Groove," remind me of being on one of those rides at the carnival that spin a lot, except maybe not as fast. Do you like these kinds of rides? A little. But if I'm at Coney Island or something like that I'd rather play whack-a-mole or skeeball. And I never go to those proto-fascist amusement parks like Disney World because that's where they stick the pro-government chips in your brain. Not to mention they have inhumane labor practices, colonial/imperialistic worker relations and are part of the world's stinkiest media monopoly. But, anyway, I think the music sounds that way because most of the songs are in a weird time. I like the songs to sound like they're tripping over themselves but they still have a good groove. Maybe I like it because I can't dance. Do you think living in New York City is like being in a big rat race? It is for the big rats that want the big cheese. Did you grow up there? No. I grew up in Maryland. Do you have any advice for young people -- particularly artists and musicians -- who want to move to New York? If you were to make a mixed tape titled "Music For People Who Are Never At Ease," what 10 songs by what bands would you put on it? They're not at ease and they don't want to be, or they do? Or they're not at ease and they'll just like these 10 songs because they'll feel so cosmically in tune with the never-at-ease universe? See, I dunno because I'm pretty into the art of mix tapes -- it's not just about slapping together any ol' 10 great songs. You have to allow some breathing room, peaks and valleys, time to come down etc., etc. What if I just named the ten tapes I have that I'd never leave home without if I were planning on going on a never-at-ease road trip. Let's see, not in any order: 1. CCR "Cosmos Factory" / Memphis
Minnie "Travellin Blues" I read in an interview on the Drummer Girl site that your favorite record is the Plastic Ono Band. That is quite a frantic and more spastic type of record than the cool sort of grooves that you create. Actually, I'm quite a spaz myself. I'm always spilling things on people. But I love that record mostly because it's all about the bass and drums. Then there's some cool piano thrown on too, and I like the spazzy grooves, like on "Well, Well, Well." Plus the whole record just seems really honest and naked in a totally unique way. The production is killer and it flows in a really nice way too. Would you ever want to make a record like that? Storm King's first record is pretty goddamn spazzy, I think. But sure, I'd love to make a really, really spazzy record. I kind of grew up on hardcore. How old are you? I was born December 14, 1971 at 7:15 p.m. (CST) in St. Louis. But I've saved all my hair and fingernail clippings in a Ziploc bag, so voodoo is out of the question. How did you get the name Ill Ease? It's from a song on the first record that has 'ill ease' in the lyrics, and my initials are E.A.S. I wish there were a good story about it, but there isn't. There are lots of interesting sounds on Circle Line Tours. It says on the record that you don't use samplers. I put that on the record just because I think samplers are the cheap way out a lot of the time. And anyway, it's always more interesting to play some repetitive riff for six and a half minutes than to just loop it because if you're actually playing it the whole time, there's subtle variation and you start to hear different things in it. Are some of the sounds on the record taken from a radio? There's radio stuff between songs. Mostly short wave, my favorite of the major wave types. Turntables? No, I tried scratching a couple of times and succeeded in fucking up a bunch of my favorite records. What else? Mostly just regular instruments, plus a lot of piano. The only kind of weird instrument is a toy xylophone I've had forever. Plus the car horn and the jacket scratching -- that's what sounds like scratching. Then there's just a whole mess of vibrato and a healthy splash of natural reverb 'cause the old practice space was huge and I've never been very impressed by pedals and pedal pushers. There's some backward stuff too. What sound is playing in the background at the end of the song "False Start, Night Driver?" It's a chewed-up old four-track tape with the sound of a pot filling up with water played at fast speed, my favorite of the two major speed types. There's some pot banging going on too. I'm definitely into found sounds instead of just "Sounds Made From Instruments In An Eight Octave Scale." Do you have a day job? A bunch of random stuff. My best recent job was working for Michael Moore's production team for his new cable show "The Awful Truth," which is, by the way, really, really funny. I wasn't doing anything especially cool or anything, I was just running around doing stupid shit. That's mostly what I do. The thing is that in New York you can get paid $125 a day to run around and do stupid shit for different people. Which is great because I happen to be great at running around doing stupid shit for different people. How long have you been into photography? Fo-ever. I read that you have some stuff on display at the Museum of Modern Art. How did you get hooked up with that? Well, it's not on display but it's in their library, which is also online. I'd brought some photo books I made with color Xeroxes to Printed Matter to a SoHo art store that's pretty cool for SoHo. I guess a woman from MOMA came in and bought them because I got a letter saying I was in the collection of emerging artists or something like that, and asking a bunch of questions about my influences and what-not. Do you have a favorite camera? I only use Polaroids because I don't got no teknikal no-how. What sorts of things do you like to take pictures of? Like the stuff on the covers. Things that don't have any scale around them but have a lot of color (usually taken close to sunset). The books in MOMA are called "27 silos of the rich and famous," which are all photos of silos, some of which are rich and famous; "the tragic rise and fall of the number 32," which are pictures of the number 32 on parking lots and in different places (kind of about O.J. and what not); "the disappearing act," which is a sort of story about this little metal object; "nothing short of monumental," and one other I can't remember the title of right now. How do you describe your music? Crisp and clean and no caffeine. Taste great, less filling. Built to stay that way. Engineered to destroy. All the fine tuning you'll ever need. On Circle Line Tours, you write about places and not feeling well. Where do you get inspiration to write your songs? I've lived in a lot of places. I don't think that I don't feel well too much of the time, but I guess maybe so. A lot of the songs are stories with characters in them just told in the first person. My favorite lyricists are Slick Rick and Mark E. Smith, but I don't think I have as good a sense of humor of either of them unfortunately. If there's anything else you'd like to add, feel free. Since you asked, let's see ... I think the world is becoming one huge corporate monopoly. In the next 100 years, governments will disappear and there will only be multi-national corporations like AT&T, Seagram's, and Time/Warner controlling all means of communication and transportation. MTV is a corporate monopoly just by itself, not to mention Viacom. The U.S. government has given up on regulating companies, and decided to become part of the showbiz spectacle. Our biggest commodity is culture, the entertainment industry is the new imperialism. Stand up and be part of the spectacle. Yeah.
The Onion Baby Sue
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There's a quasi-myth floating around Elizabeth Sharp, a.k.a. Ill Ease, that
the New York-based one-woman band has a neurological disorder that causes
the creation of music to send abnormal pleasure signals to her brain.
Today's
technology may allow fledgling musicians to create professional-quality
recordings in their bedrooms, but many people still prefer the fuzzy,
hand-tooled quality of music made with lower-end equipment. Few
recent artists have proven this more arrestingly than Ill Ease,
aka Brooklyn photographer and former New Radian Storm King and Skinner
Pilot drummer Elizabeth Sharp. Over three albums—Circle
Line Tours, Live at the Gate and the brand-new Live
at the Holiday Sin—Sharp has created an unnerving, vaguely
claustrophobic signature sound, jumbling together obsessively circular
melodies, weirdly arresting dynamics, id-ful lyrical jottings and
a haunted, warbling voice similar to the young Moe Tucker's. But
there's also a giddy sense of fun, thanks to the strutting, sometimes
woozy rhythms. The results sound like a cross between a long, dark
night of the soul and a drunken slumber party.
First
of all, I think it's really intriguing that you recorded 2001's
Live at the Holiday Sin in a rented motel room in Atlantic City.
How did that come about?
I
heard Ill Ease's second album "Circle Line Tours" in 1999 and was
infatuated. I Heard Ill Ease's third album "Live at the Holiday
Sin" this year and with lyrics like "industry whores go straight
to hell" alongside "doo be boo bop" choruses, I was
in love. Ill Ease is Elizabeth Sharp ("Can I call you Liz?" I asked).
I have yet to hear her first album, but I'm holding off in case
I suddenly fly to America and become a slavering stalker. The retrospective
"Greatest Tits" EP is now out on Too Pure, it will be her first
record in the UK.
"I
am a loner," answers Elizabeth Sharp when accused. For her
third album, Live at the Holiday Sin (Smilex), Sharp holed up in
a seedy motel room outside Atlantic City with her guitars, keyboards,
bass, and, of course, drums. The former thumper for underrated guitar
troopers New Radiant Storm King, gives such a repetitive, dizzy
feel to her music that its assumed she uses samples and loops. Not
true. Though Sharp's sound has been likened to dub remixes of the
Stones -- not an entirely inaccurate description -- its neither
dub nor remixes. Like Amsterdam's Elizabeth Esselink (aka Solex),
Sharp creates her own world, but hers is more hungover and dingy,
like New Jersey, than cheerful and tulip-bright.
Elizabeth
Sharp is a real sickie. She claims to suffer from a neurological
disorder in which the right sort of aural input stimulates an endorphin
rush to the pleasure centers of her brain. The result: dope records.
Like a trip to New York's Coney Island, it's got plenty of fun rides
if you can put up with feeling nauseous and dirty. This album swings
-- smooth grooves permeated with plenty of New York cool. One of
the most amazing things about E. Sharp is that she is a one-woman
band. She plays all the instruments herself. Hopefully, you're wondering
how the hell she manages to play all those instruments when she
tours. Well, when she's on the road, she employs a band, so in other
words, she's a one-woman band in the recording studio.
When
I moved back to New York City, I started sharing a practice space
with my friend Andy Monteleone who had an eight-track tape machine
and we happened to luck into a great, cheap mixing board. I started
writing songs by myself all the time because I wasn't working much,
occasionally lived at the practice space and have this nervous disorder
I referred to earlier. I realized I really liked playing and recording
by myself and not having to deal with all the stuff that always
comes up when recording and writing music with other people. Time
goes by and the first record comes out and I decided to, you know,
"get the band together," so I asked a couple of friends if they
wanted to tour, and lo and behold they did.
It's
all right. I guess the editor of this fine magazine is moving here,
so it must not be that bad. My advice would be to avoid living in
Manhattan because you probably can't afford it anyway. Try Queens
or the Boogie Down, the Island of Staten, the B.K., etc. Oh, and
read The Power Broker first; it's the best book I've read in years.
It's way too heavy, but it's about Robert Moses, who designed the
highways, the parks and a lot of city housing from the '30s to the
'70s. It's basically about what a playa he was -- and about all
the big-time players in city politics for the last 50 years.|
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