www.fischerspooner.com
BIOGRAPHIE
Their electronically driven songs are served up in an assault of pop theatrics. They’re the subject of magazine features and gossip items around the world. They’ve remixed and collaborated with Kylie Minogue, done a command performance for David Bowie, and have worked with the world's top photographers, including Karl Lagerfeld, Terry Richardson, Jurgen Teller, and Stefane Sednaoui. Their notorious performances are star-studded, elaborately choreographed spectacles with wardrobe pieces by Jeremy Scott, Hedi Slimane and other top designers. They are represented by one of New York's premier art gallerists, Jeffrey Deitch.
WHO THE HELL ARE THEY?
Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner met while attending The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Warren, a film major and a voracious music junkie into everything from classical violin to hardcore punk, studied avant-garde composition and collaborated with arch-experimentalist Jim O'Rourke (Sonic Youth, Wilco). Casey started as a painter but found his niche in performance and video production. Meeting in a film class, they soon created performance art pieces with Casey reciting spoken word and Warren on violin.
Years later, Warren and Casey reconnected in New York and decided to collaborate on a video project. The only thing that worked was the digital soundtrack Warren had composed, so the duo ditched the film and wrote their first song. Inspired by Third-World electronic pop, one of the first elements to shape the duo's unique style, the song was a melodic monologue about the sexual advances of an "Indian Cab Driver." Fischerspooner's one-song performance debut, staged at a showcase inside an East Village Starbucks, was a riotous smash. Casey wore wraparound sunglasses and struck exaggerated poses as Warren dutifully pushed the button on the CD player for the backing track.
For each of their successive compositions, the duo tried to experiment with the borders of electronic music -- "The 15th," a melancholy take on the post-punk-era Wire classic; "Tone Poem," a minimal synth ballad written around lyrics Casey found handwritten inside the cover of an 1895 physics textbook; "Turn On," a sexy romp partially inspired by explorers Lewis and Clark. But don't call it retro, "I hate nostalgia," says Spooner, "it's a lie and a one-dimensional perception of the past."
Show by show, talented friends were invited to join the growing line-up of dancers, singers, filmmakers, and wardrobe, lighting, and set designers. The performance venues were eclectic: Windows on the World at the World Trade Center, a runway on Orchard Street, St. Mark's Church, the Limelight nightclub, inside a recreated apartment installed within an art gallery. At one show, the group performed inside a custom-built, elevated glass box and literally blew all the building’s circuits during the encore.
In 2000, Fischerspooner did a marathon series of performances at Gavin Brown’s Chelsea gallery. Five nights in a row, six times a night for twenty-minute sets, the gallery became a throbbing fantasia of sexy beats, shimmering bodies and smoky illusions. Fans clamored to find the limited edition, eight-song CD (all of it included on #1), while art critics raved that Fischerspooner were generating some of the world’s most exciting work.
Fischerspooner’s pulsing first single, "Emerge," is lyrically based on an early treatment of the group’s mission statement. First released as a white label, the track caught the attention of DJ Hell of International Deejay Gigolo records in Munich, who released a limited version of the CD that quickly became an underground hit in Germany. By Hell's invitation, the group traveled to Berlin for their first European shows during the city's massive Love Parade music festival.
2001 opened with three colossal performances sponsored by the Art Production Fund inside an old bank that was soon to become a Los Angeles hotel. The FS experience had blossomed: 12 dancers, snow falling on the audience, glitter explosions, a tuxedo with ten-foot tails, a topless Courtney Love playing drums at the after-party. The site also doubled as the location for the hypnotic, seven-minute video for "Sweetness", a modern exploration of the myth of Cupid.
The immediate success of "Emerge" in the European club scene fueled a series of dates across the continent: the Sonar festival in Barcelona; a Gigolo Records bash in Munich; another Berlin show; and a wild 4 a.m. appearance at the venerable Transmusicale festival in Rennes, France where Casey proclaimed the death of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Britney Spears to over 4,000 screaming fans.
In 2002 their debut album, #1, was released in the U.K. to a flurry of publicity. NME called FS, "The best thing to happen to music since electricity," and intense media coverage followed, including a performance of "Emerge" on BBC's "Top of the Pops."For three sold-out nights in May at Deitch Projects Gallery in New York, Fischerspooner launched their new show -- incorporating video, new choreography, more snow, more glitter and the premiere of the elegantly sinister "L.A. Song." A week later, the whole ensemble was on a plane to make their U.K. debut. Two weeks after that, by personal request of David Bowie, Fischerspooner jetted back to London to appear in the Bowie-curated Meltdown Festival at London's Royal Festival Hall. The staid, traditional British music venue, usually reserved for philharmonic orchestras was turned upside down—Casey dove off the stage and surfed the crowd, pyrotechnics exploded, and a heckler was dragged onstage and given a good spanking by Casey, to the great delight of front-row fans like Boy George.
Aussie pop princess Kylie Minogue loved Fischerspooner's hit remix of her single "Come Into My World" so much that she invited Casey to perform a special version of it with her on BBC’s "Top of the Pops" in a tawdry performance that set the British tabloids into overdrive. The year wound down with two sold-out shows at New York rock palace Irving Plaza in November, and an exclusive performance in the private home of a noted art collector during the Art Basel Miami Beach international art show.
SO NOW WHAT?
On February 25th, 2003, Capitol Records will release the U.S. version of #1 with bonus remixes and videos, as well as an additional full-length DVD featuring videos for "Emerge," "The 15th" and "Sweetness," group documentary, projections from their live performances, commentary, biographical info, as well as the album in its entirety.
Also in 2003: a feature-length documentary chronicling the duo's evolution, remixes for other big pop stars, new videos and films, a performance at Miami’s Winter Music Conference, an exclusive show at the 2003 Venice Biennale art fair, among many other planned performances, and in conjunction with downtown NYC gallery Deitch Projects, the launch of their Brooklyn-based performance and production space – FS Studios