Setting It Off
Oct 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy
Peaches is lounging in the semiplush confines of Girlie Action Media's converted loft space somewhere in New York's downtown Flatiron District. She's flipping through the latest issue of Remix while she talks, and she sounds remarkably buoyant — even a bit, uh, frisky — for someone who has only just arrived here for three grueling days of interviews, promotional appearances and photo shoots before she has to turn around and hop a flight back to Berlin. “You know, I can't find any women in this magazine!” she jokes. “Oh, wait, there's one. Well, she's in an ad showing her ass in a thong — I'm not sure if that qualifies.” A short burst of laughter, then: “Okay, I see Ellen Alien's album is reviewed in the back here, so that's a good sign.”
Just like her music, Peaches has a disarming way of getting to the crux of any topic she thinks might tear a hole, so to speak, in the sexual status quo — to the point that she'll assume the burden of controversy herself if it will shock people into awareness. Her provocative and exuberantly lo-fi debut album, The Teaches of Peaches (Kitty-Yo/XL, 2000), was a welcome smack in the face to the elitist faction of the indie-rock, hip-hop and electronic-dance scenes, moving Rolling Stone to delight in her “paste-up-punk, spit-and-spew aesthetic … Trent Reznor, Courtney Love and Foxy Brown should all be very, very afraid.” Her randy live shows, fueled by overtly sexed-up anthems such as “Fuck the Pain Away” and “Diddle My Skittle,” were even more over-the-top, prompting one group of irate soccer moms at Coney Island's 2001 Siren Festival to demand her removal from the stage: “She's masturbating in front of my children, for God's sake!”
These days, Peaches inspires a devoted cult following replete with drag-queen impersonators and celebrity fans such as John Waters, Björk, Elastica and protopunk godfather Iggy Pop (who makes a guest appearance on her new album), and she shows no signs of changing her act. If anything, her approach has become more focused; her rhymes more irreverent but incisive; and her music more confident, combative and all-out liberating. And as one of the few women on the left-field fringe of the electronic genre who builds her own beats and who writes, tracks and produces her own records, she is also, perhaps most important, the sole author of her own rebel persona; she takes no guff from anyone, be they unctuous Svengali types or ultrafeminist reactionaries. Put simply: Peaches is for real.
STRIP IT ALL DOWN
In keeping with her ability to straddle (in the cerebral sense!) opposites and extremes, Peaches may have one-upped even herself by christening her latest release Fatherfucker (Kitty-Yo/XL, 2003) — a flip of the gender script if ever there was one. Clearly, she revels in the dualities of identity politics, but what's equally refreshing this time around is her choice to retain and expand upon much of the gritty, bare-bones techno, jagged rock and fractal hip-hop sounds that made her debut outing such an underground smash.
“I think a good producer should always take away sounds, not add them,” Peaches says. “And that's what I'm after with this new album. I just wanted to make it so minimal that when the sounds come in, it's actually an event. When you have that kind of space, then you start to hear what's cool about a particular sound and what will mix well with another sound. That's actually what I love about the MC-5, because it's not really one sound that you're hearing; it's always in relation to another sound.”
In praising the MC-5, Peaches is referring, in this instance, not to the legendary '60s rock group from Detroit — although she does claim their heavy garage riffs as an influence — but to the ever-versatile Roland MC-505 Groovebox, which has been her main working module since she left her native Toronto for the bohemian environs of Berlin. The unit even figured into her earliest live shows, back when the former Merril Nisker (her real name) had only recently adopted what would later become her not-always-so-sweet alter ego. She joined forces with fellow Canadian MC “Chilly” Gonzales (with whom she now plays in an avant-noise trio called Feedom, which features Peaches on bass, Gonzales on drums and another Canadian expat by the name of Taylor Savvy on lap-steel guitar), and the duo proceeded to busk around Europe in search of pick-up gigs. “I was mostly playing strange sounds on the 505, just filtering and playing stuff completely live, and Gonzales had two CD players that he was making beats with,” she says. “Because of the ease of the technology, we just thought we could plug in to anybody's stereo system in small bars if they would have us. We'd end up doing our knob-twiddling thing for hours.”
It was only a matter of time before they wound up at a space called Gallery Berlin Tokyo, an art-house collective that attracted scores of überhip Berliners such as Alec Empire and his Digital Hardcore crew, as well as Cobra Killer and other way-out local bands. A label rep from the indie imprint Kitty-Yo caught her act, and, suddenly, Peaches was on her way to recording her first album.
“I made Teaches in Canada, but it was always with the intention of going back to Berlin,” she says. “That album was pretty much 100 percent me. It wasn't really rocket science; I just recorded everything straight from the 505 to an ADAT machine. I did this new album a little bit differently.”
CAN I KICK IT?
Aptly enough, Fatherfucker explodes with the aggressive agit-punk rage of the leadoff track, “I Don't Give a …” — a clear tribute not only to Joan Jett (whose classic rocker “Bad Reputation” is sampled here) but also to The Ramones, The Stooges and any other band that has made a career out of a well-placed power chord. With guitars and vocals compressed to the size of a clenched fist, Peaches simultaneously delivers a wake-up call to her fans and a scathing taunt to her critics and category-obsessed detractors. (This isn't electroclash, is it?)
“I think that's a bunch of bullshit,” Peaches intones with derision. “I made the first album the way I did [using electronic beats] because I didn't have a drummer and a bass player. Obviously, I would say that 85 percent of this one, again, is electronic, but I also used a lot of live drums. The toughest part is to get this keyboard, that guitar and those drums all to sound like they're in the same surroundings. I just didn't feel like pressing all the buttons this time because I've gotta write while I'm doing it. So I went to see a good friend of mine in Berlin.”
Peaches recruited studio engineer Cornelius Rapp to assist in recording vocals and some of the live drum tracks and to complete final mixing on a pair of songs. “I would say that most of the programmed stuff on the album is from the 505,” Rapp says. “At first, Peaches just wanted to work a little bit more in a Pro Tools setting because that allows you to get all of the separate sounds off the 505 and then mix them a bit more properly. With the newer songs, though, there are even more elements involved because you're dealing with live drums, and it's not so easy to work with that with just a 505 and an ADAT machine.”
Rapp's streamlined setup pivots on Digidesign Pro Tools 5.2 running on a Mac G4 with Digi 001 hardware. His preferred plug-ins are the Waves Renaissance EQ and compressor. “Sometimes, the compressor is not that surgical, really, but if you can get a little bit of distortion out of it, it can sound very cool,” Rapp says. He also uses an SPL Track One analog channel strip for some EQing and compression. “I used this Microtech Gefell UM 70 condenser microphone for her vocals and sometimes really heavy compression with the SPL, especially on ‘Kick It’ because it made total sense as far as the energy of the track was concerned.”
Indeed, one of the supreme highlights on Fatherfucker is “Kick It” — a duet with none other than Iggy Pop that sounds as though it came straight off a rough-and-tumble rock session from the '70s. “This was really a surreal kind of thing,” Peaches explains about the hookup, “because I met Iggy in L.A. and asked him to come to my show in Miami, and he did. Then, he got my first album and bum-rushed the song ‘Rock Show’ — he wanted to sing over it on his album, so I said, ‘Well then, you have to be on mine.’”
“That's a total live track without any electronics on it,” Rapp continues. “The song was basically written in the studio. Peaches had some ideas for riffs and grooves, and she and Gonzo [Chilly Gonzales] were jamming a bit on these: She was playing guitar, and he was playing drums. I recorded maybe half an hour or so, and then at the end of the day, we started chopping it up in Pro Tools. After that, Peaches taped her vocal and then went to Florida with a Pro Tools session to give to Iggy. He recorded his part at the Hit Factory, and then it came back to me. It's cool because it worked out sounding like they're in the studio doing the whole performance together.”
RAW ENERGY, RAW POWER
Clocking in at a relatively lean-and-mean 38 minutes and change, the 12 tracks on Fatherfucker are a study in raw, unfettered spontaneity laced with what feels like a sense of urgency and, above all, a sexually charged sense of humor. “Operate” is a silky electro-funk foray into trance music, with a hilariously chilling rap (“He is perfect for me / To practice surgery”) and an infectious monosynth line that Peaches plays on a tiny Yamaha CS01 keyboard. “It's just a little silver keyboard about as long as your arm, and it's just got the deepest bass sounds,” she raves. “I did some collaborations with Pan Sonic, and that's the machine I used.” “Rock 'n' Roll,” which features backing tracks by her band, Feedom, is a riled-up guitar-driven paean to the legacy of avant-garde punk music. The song segues brilliantly into another outrageous duet — the downright danceable “Stuff Me Up,” with Feedom bandmate Savvy.
With such an extensive and supportive network of people around her, it's easy to see why Peaches has won over a legion of fans among other musicians, DJs and producers — so much so that Basement Jaxx tapped her last year to Peachify its thump-in-the-trunk single “Get Me Off.” “That was cool because Basement Jaxx is a band you'd want to get to do a remix for you,” she says. “I did that in my room in Berlin and just stripped it down. It always starts with a bass line for me, and that's what I played into the 505. Then, I sped it up and made more of a booty-sounding snare and kick just to make it a little dirtier. I made it my own sound, but I kept just a simple melody line so that there was still a connection to their song. Whenever I hear that on a hip-hop song — you know, that one-note hit that just repeats over and over — that's the sound that actually gets you.”
She might look the part of a disheveled sex-rap starlet, but Peaches knows a lot more about music and production than she often lets on. “People will say things to me like [affects a Euro-poseur accent], ‘I love the way you use, like, a Giorgio Moroder arpeggiated bass line with, like, a kind of Grandmaster Flash snare sound — I would never think of doing those together!’ Statements like that just tell me that a lot of people are thinking way too much before they get started. For me, technology is supposed to make things easier, you know?”
As for her onstage personality and the reactions she elicits, in the end, Peaches is philosophical and unapologetic about her stance. “I don't shy away from objectification,” she says in response to questions about free expression and how far a performer should be willing to go. “In my eyes, I do a hyperobjectification, which is a take-control kind of thing. I like to turn that around and say, of course, women are objectified, but I'm not gonna shy away from that. In the same way that I'm calling my new album Fatherfucker, I'm not shying away from the word motherfucker — I'm just trying to give a magnified look at it.”
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