Lesbians on Ecstasy
Of the band’s We Know You Know album, Bernie Bankrupt says she’s delighted that people are ‘so into weird techno remixes of lesbian music’
By Bess Korey
Published: May 23rd, 2007 | 10:33am
Montreal’s Lesbians on Ecstasy (Bernie Bankrupt on machines, Veronique Mystique on bass, Jackie “the JackHammer” on Octapad, and Fruity Frankie on vocals) have been together since 2004, releasing three albums — two studio albums and an album of remixes — and touring with their American counterparts, Le Tigre, both in North America and Europe for some time.
But it’s their newest release, We Know You Know, (released April 10, 2007, on Alien8 Recordings) that’s encouraging an increase to in their already substantial fan base. We Know You Know is homage to lesbian musicians from the '70s womyn's music scene and features their signature lesbian-themed electronic dance party beats, but with an extra dose of danceable disco, enough to shake the tightest of booties and inspire hip-shaking from Montreal to Detroit.
We caught up with Lesbians on Ecstasy’s (a.k.a. Lezzies on X) Bernie Bankrupt on the phone in late April 2007, shortly after We Know You Know’s release and right in the middle of the media frenzy sweeping over their local music community for fellow Montrealers Arcade Fire. Bankrupt discusses the group’s cultural and musical influences, their politics, and her own experiences of being an electro musician in the age of “disco still sucks” T-shirts.
How did the band get together?
A couple of us were invited to play an electronic music festival — it was a feminist arts festival, and they were looking to include female electronic musicians in the evening. They couldn’t really find enough women to fill up the program, because there just aren’t that many ladies that make electronic music these days — at least at that point there wasn’t. So they invited us to participate, even though we didn’t really have a band. It was just sort of a joke project in my head. We performed one show, and the response was so good. Everyone was so excited about it. It ended up taking off from there.
Things like that always seem like they’re meant to be. They’re so unplanned, yet seemingly fall in place.
We were just going do that one show and walk away. Then we got so many offers. We’ve been in other bands and other projects. You spend all this time knocking on doors, trying to get things happening. When people are begging you to come and play, it’s pretty hard to say no. You’re obviously going to do it. It just sort of took off. I never would’ve thought that people would be so into weird techno remixes of lesbian music, who would’ve ever thought, right? _
With the ’90s riot grrl scene you had a lot of weird experimentalism. It wasn’t electronic music, per se, but you can definitely see that as a foundation for what you’re doing as well.
The thing that I take away from riot grrl is that people were doing their own thing and weren’t afraid to mess around with instruments and try different combinations of sounds. I think it ended up with some really cool results. It can be really fun to be like, “What if we plug this in backwards, what kind of noise will it make then?” It can be really creative, as long as you give yourself the room to play around.
The first noticeable thing about the album cover for We Know You Know is how reminiscent of the early ’70s it is. Do you see ’70s womyn’s music artists as a musical influence on the group, or are they more so influential from a political and aesthetic standpoint?
With the first album [Lesbians On Ecstasy s/t], and this album [We Know You Know], we are working with lesbians from different moments in time. We touched on acoustic music, but also had a Tribe 8 song on the first album. We were sampling and re-visualizing work that was produced in different moments.
For We Know You Know, we decided we were going to limit ourselves to one time period. At first we were going to only limit ourselves to Olivia Records. But we decided to open it up a little bit. They were certainly not cited as the only feminists of the period, so we decided to look at the whole time and choose from a few different places. Then there are a few other things in there, like the Betty song is not from the ’70s.
What I find interesting in particular is — with Olivia Records, and the later stuff, and some of the other artists — that those labels were super independent and into creating an alternative music market for themselves. They’d found that there wasn’t a place to create that kind of music in the main music scene/industry. So they built a whole other world for themselves: they generated their own money, they made their own recording consoles, they had crazy networks for people to play shows. Most of the Olivia artists were sustained through their music, through their shows, and by having places to stay all over America. In this day and age, it was a really interesting thing for us to look at. It’s hard for us to imagine bands making their living off their music anymore. They were on to something a little bit avant-garde.
In terms of the music and the artists, it’s kind of a different story. The music style on most of those records isn’t really my thing. It’s a little too gentle and new age-ish in a lot of ways. But there are some good songs on the Cris Williamson albums. I like some of the funnier stuff, like Meg Christiansen’s "Ode to a Gym Teacher" — those songs that have a tongue-in-cheek, sassy sense of humor about them — those are the ones that kind of jump out at me.
You covered Tribe 8 on your first record. They’re a great example of a group that really shook up the definition of what womyn’s and lesbian music is supposed to be, especially when they first played the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival back in the ’90s. Some of the more traditional womyn’s music fans seemed to be put off by that, because they rocked so hard. They’ve definitely been groundbreaking in changing the roles that female musicians are supposed to adhere to. Their style suggests that you can make music for womyn and it doesn’t have to be gentle or folky.
I think a lot of what we are about is that women can make and like music that is electronic, and computer-based, and filled with synthesizers. It doesn’t have to be natural-sounding instruments. It can be machine-sounding instruments. That can be womyn’s music too. It seems to be often at odds with what is considered womyn’s music.
There are a lot of different influences on your record, and womyn’s music seemed to be more of a lyrical and stylistic influence than a musical one. Although, there is a tinge of psychedelica mixed in on “Sisters in the Struggle” and an acoustic guitar present on “Mortified.” In terms of ’70s music, ’70s disco also seems to be an influence on your sound.
[’70s disco] is definitely one of Frankie’s, our lead singer’s, main influences. In our world, disco is a really big thing. But I think in the States, disco is seen as bad news.
Anything that’s tied in with mainstream pop music is often seen as irrelevant to alternative culture.
But disco was so alternative in the beginning, especially Sylvester, who sang “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real.” He was an early disco pioneer. I just finished reading his biography. It was obvious a lot of gender queers and gay men were participating in disco culture. It was such a pivotal point and a super alternative culture. It got scooped up by the mainstream.
The pioneers of electronic music are men like Kraftwerk and Gary Numan; to have women take it over as an art form they can use to express themselves with definitely puts a new spin on it.
I like computers. It’s the way I express myself best. It makes the most sense to me and is my thing. It doesn’t mean that I can’t be feminist, or that I can’t be into other aspects of making music, or that it’s not supposed to be womyn’s music, or truly expressive because it’s so mechanical. There’s something weird that people have about it, but I think it’s changing now.
Politics have been attached to electronic music from the start. Kraftwerk is an example of this. How much of an influence was Kraftwerk on your music?
They are amazing. They were practically engineers: building their own gear and taking it to such an extreme. The whole man-machine thing, which makes me think of the whole woman-machine thing, is such an interesting thing to play with.
How we are political is that we are kind of making party music, and people feel like that’s not the place to think about politics. But for me it can be fun, funny, and meaningful, and make you think, and laugh, and want to dance. It can be all those things. There’s no reason why those things can’t go together. In order for something to be smart, it doesn’t need to be serious.
I look at stuff like the TV show Strangers With Candy, which is dark, and funny, but super fun, super political, and super disturbing. It pushes buttons in ways that’s hard to get around, hard to ignore. I like things like that, where you can see that someone very clever is thinking about things, but not doing it in a way that you expect. I hope that we put a little bit of that into our music. On the first listen, it’s not always that obvious. But if you look a little deeper, there are a lot of things that are embedded in some of the tracks.
It seems like you’re trying to give credit where it’s due when it comes to the different cultural elements that influence you and how you make them into your own thing.
That’s something we think about a lot, because you can consider what we do through sampling as stealing. But if you look at our liner notes, we list every influence and inspiration for all of the songs. If people are interested, they can look it up and see who we’re referencing.
Your group is from Montreal. What’s going on with the music scene there?
It’s really been exploding the past few years, especially since Arcade Fire is from here. There are other bands, of course, but they broke through really fast. There have been lots of articles and crazy things about the Montreal music scene. It’s been really weird to have international journalists at small shows. Stuff that used to be more underground is suddenly getting more talked about. I’m excited to see what’s going to happen in the next few years, because there are a lot of really young bands starting out now. I’m seeing more and more kids in the scene that are coming up and making their own stuff happen. It’s really good. When a scene gets attention, people in the town stand up and take notice. People are super excited about it here, which makes it even more exciting.
Where have you toured so far? We’ve toured all over North America and Europe. We’ve actually toured Europe more than North America. People like electronic music a lot more there. We’ve played everywhere in Europe, it’s been pretty exciting. In North America we toured with Le Tigre for a year. That was our last big tour. We got to play lots of nice venues with them, and we toured with them in Europe, which was really cool. They have such a cool crowd that comes to their shows. We’ve toured all over Canada, as well. And we’re going to Michigan’s Womyn Festival this year for the first time.
Do you think that it’s a different climate at that festival now then it was for Tribe 8 back when they were paving the way for different kinds of performers there?
I’m excited to find out. I’ve never been there myself, and I don’t know what to expect. I hope they are more open-minded than they were before Tribe 8 went. I hope they’re into having a bit of an electronic party.
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Additional stories by Bess Korey
Team Gina Interview
Kerry Davis Interview
Nina Antonia Interview
Issue #24
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