Editor’s note: This interview originally appeared on an earlier version of Chaos Control, with portions presented as separate hypertext pop-ups. Those sections have been incorporated into this archived version, with minor edits for flow and typo corrections.
“There’s a certain feeling, and it seems like a very modern feeling among people I know, to just be in a constant state of quitting,” says Rasputina frontwoman Melora Creager when asked about the title of their new album, How We Quit the Forest.
“It would be the present tense, rather than you have quit and something’s over,” she explains. “But to maintain a state of quitting, to go from quitting one thing to the other, from quitting smoking to quitting a relationship, quitting things in your diet. That’s a strange state, and imagining the forest as your society or your community. Just kind of taking yourself out of a scene or something while being in it.”
The concept of the forest is part of the main theme running through the disc. While Rasputina’s first album, Thanks for the Ether, dealt with historical situations and characters, the new album is based around fairy tales: how they’re created and disseminated, and “the secret meanings” behind them. Like in fairy tales, they wanted to treat animals as characters, something that carries over into the album’s cover art.
“The feeling, when we were shooting the video, was such a good one,” says Melora. “It was like, why can’t this be reality all the time? That you’re playing the cello in the woods with kids. That would be good to recreate. Surrounded by animals, perhaps. When they’re stuffed, they’re always listening.”
Melora created the collage artwork for How We Quit the Forest herself, a process that took about a month and a half. Getting permission to use all of its individual elements proved considerably more difficult.
“Copyright clearances took forever,” she says. “It was a nightmare.”
She hadn’t anticipated that part of the process being such a problem.
“I didn’t think about it at all because I feel like so much in music and art is actually copies. You know, Puff Daddy, whatever. And I feel like I take from things but am creating something new, or it’s not relying on somebody else’s ideas. So having to find the source for each flower I cut out came as a shock!”
To create the artwork, Melora drew from a collection of images and other materials she had accumulated.
“For that, I had a lot of things I collected over time and I went through a lot of sources and cut things out. A lot of Victorian decorating magazines, Antique Purse Collector and stuff like that. And I lightly glued them on big pieces of board so I could see everything I had. And then it’s just making combinations, then it grows. And I did some drawing parts. It’s very similar to doing sample loops; you have some elements and then make a new thing, hoping that nothing is identifiable that you have to clear.”
Musically, Melora says that the members of Rasputina have “a lot more knowledge and confidence” this time around.
“With the first one, I would say that we were all kind of passive, not having done it before and not being very able to voice what we did know how to do,” she explains. “On my own, I worked with lots of ways to record the cello, different systems of combining acoustic with distorted and stuff like that.”
The end result is an album that is much more varied sounding than Thanks for the Ether. Though it’s nothing like the Marilyn Manson-remixed Transylvanian Regurgitations EP, the use of different types of effects and arrangements truly breaks new ground for cello-based music.
Melora describes Manson’s remix of “Transylvanian Concubine” as almost a cover version rather than a remix.
“Even though I sang it, that felt to me like a Marilyn Manson cover of our song,” she says. “Because I didn’t feel very involved, it was more of a curiosity for me. It sold all right and exposed us to new people. I think it especially showed business-type people that might have limited us that we can be whatever we want to be; we’re not a certain kind of music.”
The finished remix was so far removed from Rasputina’s original that the group sometimes had trouble recognizing it.
“There’s next to no cellos on there, that’s what makes it seem like a cover to me. They would play ‘Transylvanian Concubine’ at soundcheck to make us laugh, and we were never able to recognize what they were playing!”
Touring with Marilyn Manson also meant performing Rasputina’s music in front of much larger and very different audiences.
“It was scary at the start,” Melora says. “I think that those big crowds become kind of like one person, and they’re like animals; if you have fear, they can smell it and respond to that. For us to be able to pull off even our most fragile little song in an arena with that kind of audience was an accomplishment.”
The experience illustrates how difficult Rasputina can be to classify. They don’t like being thought of as a goth band because, as Melora puts it, “we don’t wear black, we wear white.”
For Melora, some of the differences between Rasputina’s audiences have as much to do with age as musical categories.
“I feel that mainly it’s about different age groups,” she adds. “We played club shows in New York for a long time. And the NY audience tends to be older, more sophisticated. We assumed that’s what a music audience is. But I think it’s only just NY; with all the touring, the bigger the audience, the younger the audience was. I really, really loved that. It seems like a very open audience, and an audience that you can affect, rather than being judgmental and bitter. So maybe if we did a nursery school tour…”
