Steampunking the War on Terror: An Interview with Rasputina

[Morphizm has written on the compelling avantfolkchamperpop outfit Rasputina before -- more on that tongue-twisting genre below -- but this is the first time I had the chance to interview founder Melora Creager, one of music's more interesting characters. The result of that brain mash is below, as is some quality talk on bizarro sonics, Lincoln's insane wife, and why Rasputina's newest effort is primed for the 21st century's endless War on Terror.]

Steampunking the War on Terror:
An Interview with Rasputina
[by Scott Thill]
"I often consider myself a collagist. You really can make something new out of old parts. In researching this project, I read that the Bible is collaged from different sources, and I was like, yeah, that's what I'm saying! For Oh Perilous World, I combined classic American Broadway musical ideas with news writing. I was fascinated by both forms, and tried to figure them out. What devices do they use over and over? What are the rules? I kept an electronic notebook (a program by Circus Pony) that takes pictures, sounds, text, links, anything. Mine is about 40 million pages. Divided by characters, story lines, vocab, subdivided by reality, etc. And it has those colored notebook tabs on the side, really cool. Much like the mentally ill, I felt I was about to discover how Everything fits together. I looked at the life of Meredith Wilson, who wrote The Music Man. I looked at the career of George Orwell, how he went from a BBC radio propagandist to the author of 1984. I would go off on tangents, follow dead ends to nowhere. But I made it through the other side!"

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