Julie Hair is drawn to repetition, sometimes to “an obnoxious degree of repetition,” as she puts it. She often starts with a simple, repetitive part and builds changes and dynamics around it. On last year’s Jagged and Fractured, that approach gives Female Genius room to move between melody and noise, shaping arrangements that don’t rely on familiar verse-and-chorus patterns.
Hair came to music after moving to New York in 1980, becoming part of the city’s art and music scenes. She played in 3 Teens Kill 4 with David Wojnarowicz and was a founding member of Live Skull; later, she sang and played bass in Isolation Society. Her visual-art background still shapes how she thinks about arrangements. She approaches a song as she would a painting, placing sounds where they feel right in the overall composition, even when they don’t fit conventional musical expectations.
Hair founded Female Genius with longtime friend Marnie Jaffe. Since welcoming new member Jules “Mossy” Ross, the band has been working on new material. In this interview, Hair talks about the group’s increasingly electronic sound, how its arrangements take shape through experimentation, and how samples from popular culture can shift meaning when placed in a new context.
Did your approach to making “Jagged and Fractured” differ from your previous work?
Julie Hair: The approach was pretty much the same, but I think that we had just grown in our desire to use more synthesizers and have more electronic input into it, whereas at the beginning it was really, really pared down.
The overall mood and sounds themselves are such a big part of how your music comes across. So I’m curious about the balance in terms of your writing process; the interplay between focusing on the mood and other musical aspects.
Julie Hair: I’m definitely very interested in creating a mood. And sometimes I can just be playing by myself and just be playing the simplest thing repetitively, to an obnoxious degree of repetition. There’s something about repetition and droning that just strikes a chord with me. So I like having a pad for our songs that’s just very linear and then trying to create changes and dynamics on top of it.
Do you think it tends to evolve pretty organically? Is it a struggle to take these ideas and build them into completed tracks?
Julie Hair: It’s not as easy as being in a straight up guitar, bass, drums rock band. And I have done that and I love what I have done in those kinds of bands, but I will say it is easier when you’re working in that structure, to figure out what you’re going to play. And I think that what we’re trying to do is create different kinds of arrangements that aren’t like verse chorus verse chorus or A/B, A/B/C. We’re not the MOST experimental band in the world, but we’re trying to do something more outside of the rock and roll box.
Given the experimental aspect of the music, do you think much about your audience? The music is experimental, but it’s also very accessible, whereas some experimental music can be difficult to get into.
Julie Hair: I think ultimately I’m basically just trying to please myself. It’s a very selfish endeavor. And I think as a band, we just want to create something that we’re proud of and that we enjoy playing. And if it is an arrangement that’s got a lot of moving parts, to me, part of the fun of it is once you have it all arranged and then things come in and out at the right time. It’s really fun.
There definitely seems to be a sense of space, with the various elements allowed to come through. Is that something you think about as you’re building tracks, or do you take things away later in the process?
Julie Hair: I absolutely have to take things away sometimes. When I moved to New York in my early 20s, I started playing music. I hadn’t played music before, and one of the people I played with was Mark C from Live Skull. I was in the early version of Live Skull, along with Marnie, who’s on the first and second records of Female Genius. And that was something that he talked about a lot, was leaving space. And the more time goes on, the more I realize how much I appreciate space, because it creates dynamics. I don’t want to be going a thousand miles an hour from beginning to end. I want there to be ebb and flow and space and noise and harmony and melody and then some noise, or just a bunch of different stuff.
Could you talk about the lineup changes that have happened over the years and what you feel each member brings into the project?
Julie Hair: So the band was started by me and Marnie Jaffe. And like I said, we were in Live Skull in the early days together, so she’s an old friend of mine that I lost touch with. And then I met her again in the past 10 years. And she got invited by a musician named David Linton to play at a series that he was curating, and she asked me to collaborate with her on a performance. So we just threw some songs together and played this show. And then after we played that show, this friend of mine that’s in the band now, Nikki D’Agostino, she’s a sax player, she came to the show and she liked us and I was like, “Oh, you should play a song with us.” And then she ended up being in the band. And then we asked Janice Sloane to play a show with us on guitar because to that point we didn’t have any guitar.
And then she ended up being in the band with us, and then that was that. We made a record, and then we made another record, and then Marnie decided she wanted to bag it. So we have a new member now, Jules “Mossy” Ross, who is a multi-instrumentalist and has her own band called Nuclear Family Fantasy. And she plays drums, she plays bass, she sings. And so yeah, it’s a new element and I like the randomness of chance. She didn’t audition. I knew I liked her as a person, so it’s like you’re in, whatever you bring, bring it.
What is your creative process like among the members? Do you feel like you’re the main writer? How do you work together within the band?
Julie Hair: I am the main writer just in terms of I come in with an idea, usually a vocal part or some kind of musical pad, some kind of underlayment for the song. And then I might, in the process of playing with everyone else, experiment with the vocals and write a melody that way. And it takes me a really long time. It’s a very slow process, but Janice Sloane and I, we play more on our own sometimes than with the whole band because we both like to explore and try different ideas and stuff. And I also have to try and remember that this is part of the reason why I’m doing it. I like the process of actually playing music with my friends, and so the more we do that, the better it is.
Do you feel that your background as a visual artist has an impact on your music?
Julie Hair: Absolutely. I feel like sometimes people have said to me, “Well, I don’t know what you want” or “I don’t know what to do.” And I sort of feel like it might as well be a painting. If you need to put a little red over here in that part right there, then do that musically. It doesn’t have to be finding the root note and playing the root of the chords and following the chord progression. Sometimes in other projects, in a guitar and drum-based band called Isolation Society, the guitar player, Ian Wilson, would come in with something on guitar and vocals perhaps, and then I might just have some bassline that I have but haven’t used for anything and just randomly try and put that on top of what he’s doing without knowing if it’s going to work or not. And a lot of times it does work.
I really like patterns being laid on top of each other, with one thing staying the same while something else changes underneath it.
To what degree has the evolution of musical technology impacted your process and the way you work?
Julie Hair: So I was in a band called 3 Teens Kill 4 in the ’80s, and we used a tape recorder, a cassette tape recorder, and it was held up to the microphone and it would be manipulated with the buttons, either making it go forward or backwards, but just making it be glitchy in real time. And I’ve continued to… That was mostly David Wojnarowicz doing that at that time, but I really do like the use of samples, and I’ve used them a lot in Isolation Society, and I’ve used them a little bit in Female Genius, but I’m starting to use them more. And by samples, I mean samples from popular culture, like from the radio or whatever. So it’s gone a long way from being a little handheld tape recorder to now I put it in my Roland SP-404 sampler and just hit a button and it comes on.
But I do a few things that way of putting stuff into the sampler because if I’m not playing bass, if I make a bass loop and put it in the sampler, then I can play keyboard and I can sing and I can play percussion and do other stuff on top of it. So I used to be really averse to what I would call bands playing with tracks, and so I was like, “Okay, there’s a rule. We can only have one thing on the sampler. ” Like “it can only be the bassline.” I’ve gotten a little softer about that, and sometimes I will put a couple of elements on, but I don’t want to put too many elements on because I don’t want it to be like we’re playing with tracks. But I also realized that what I really abhor is seeing a computer on stage. I think it helps. I feel better, I don’t know why, but I do feel a lot better playing a sampler than having a computer. That drives me insane. And I have these friends that are in this band called Genre as Death, and they play with tracks, and they’re a noise band. They’re a duo, and their drums are on a track that they trigger, but it works fantastically, and they’re a noise band, so never say never.
You started out manipulating tapes. Has that experience affected your approach to using technology now? Do you think working with more difficult tools early on had an impact?
Julie Hair: I think my approach to samples is… I mean, I think when most people hear people talk about using samples, they think about in pop music how samples are used, like in rap when they use an old Motown sample or whatever. And so that’s not really my interest. I don’t want to be pedantic or dogmatic or preachy, but I do like to have a little bit of food for thought in there somehow. And so I like having content from popular culture, and I think if you take a sample from popular culture and pull it out and then put it somewhere else in the musical setting, that that makes it able to be perceived in a whole different way. So I’m hoping that people will maybe catch the drift of some of the information. It’s all information.
Jagged and Fractured came out late last year. Have you been working on new music?
Julie Hair: We absolutely are. So we got a new member. The last show that we played with Marnie was in January of this year at WFMU. So since then, we’ve been working with Mossy and just teaching her the songs and writing some new songs.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Julie Hair: I would just say that the music scene in New York is very different from when I first moved to New York. Back then, a lot of people lived on the Lower East Side because it was cheap, and there was very much more a sense of community. You would walk down the street and see people that you knew, and the rehearsal spaces were probably in the neighborhood and you could walk to them. And as time has gone on, where people move that are coming to New York, even now, you have to be more creative about what neighborhood you’re going to live in and just try and live wherever you can. So I feel like the scene is very spread out, but I also feel like there is a good community of like-minded people that support each other, and I’m really grateful for that.
For more information about Julie Hair and Female Genius, visit juliehair.art.
