The classical trio you wish you saw when you were a kid. (Photo: Rasputina.com)

[by Scott Thill]

The arts cred of Rasputina runs deep. Founder and chief braniac Melora Creager played with Nirvana, was a fave of Marilyn Manson and their newest video is directed by Fantagraphics cartoonist Dame Darcy. And you know how much Morphizm loves Fantagraphics. But enough of their badass resume: Creager's bizarro music -- a mash of yesteryear's strings and today's digital playbook sprinkled with imaginative allusion and alternative timelines -- is the star of Rasputina. It is jarring, strange and alluring, and so is Creager and crew, especially when they're rocking the tight bodices. Sorry, they are simply hard to ignore.

But Creager's mind is an attractive mine of riches, even though she has only recently awakened to the postmodern horrors of the Bush administration and its cash-grab War on Terror, which served as a point of departure for Rasputina's sixth full-length Oh Perilous World, have wrought upon the 21st century.

" I had never cared about any of it, was totally self-centric, and prided myself on that, like so many people," she tells Morphizm below. Whatever. We're just glad she's here at last, putting her intellect, as well as the large instrument she plays between her legs, to the personal-is-political test. And what a test it is: Oh Perilous World! reimagines everything from Bush and 9/11 to Mary Todd Lincoln and blimp wars to create one of the oddest concept albums ever. It's a weird, weird World.

Morphizm: Avant folk. Chamber pop. Do either of these describe you?
Melora Creager:  Maybe avantpopchamberfolk? Have I said that before? Deja vu.

Morphizm: It's getting harder and harder to paint Rasputina into a corner with terminology.
MC: Even though it's made a cultish career for me, I'm glad we're hard to pigeonhole. That says something good about my integrity. I'm not limited by my instrument. I don't limit my creative ideas. That wouldn't be very creative at all! I am loathe to imitate. I strive to grow, make something new.

Morphizm: Talk about your cello. It's a captivating instrument, but how did it capture you?
MC: Getting started as a child, the big size appealed to me. My teacher was very intriguing. I was out in blah Kansas, and he was an old man, very East Coast Boston. Not a warm man at all, and I have always tried hard to please the unpleasable.  As an adult, I just get off on the sound. It feels good physically to play it. It communicates so much emotion. It's so evocative, like telling stories without words.

Morphizm: What do you think Rasputina is doing to broaden its use in pop, indie and perhaps even classical music?
MC: I don't think we touch classical music. That's a closed world. I think we've had a big influence in pop and indie music. We're often referenced in publications that never mention us in our own right. I think for young string students in the past, there were no options, no choices. I think we've given that to people. I think I show people that they can make things their own way, whatever that might be. 

Morphizm: In an online world filled with virtual instruments, how do you think the cello will fare -- to say nothing of guitars, horns, etc. -- in the coming decades?
MC: I think as e-everything has grown, souls and consciousness have shrunk. Seriously, it probably started with the photograph. That makes me sad for everyone. Innocent victims of technology. But when we no longer have electricity, we'll still need beauty.

Morphizm: This disc is notably political, compared to your past work.
MC:  I just realized the dire state of everything a couple of years ago, all at once. I had never cared about any of it, was totally
self-centric, and prided myself on that, like so many people. I was in shock and then in mourning. I thought, there's somebody we gotta call, Ghostbusters, somebody. Coming out of self-centricism, I thought it was up to me to save us. Then I set about making some art about it. I got that done, but I'm not trying to save anyone, just communicate. I made a plan for my own little family, how best can we live considering these quite ominous facts. Then I made that happen. We moved out of NYC and my daughter goes to a school where they learn how to raise food. 

Morphizm: How far back do you think Bush has set the clock on not just civil liberties and democracy, but on culture, the arts and the climate?
MC: It's fascinating the way the "Bush group" has cultivated an extremely passive, anti-intellectual, anesthetized populace. It's been accomplished through PR. Consumerism is really the religion here. People are so hungry in their souls, but they don't know it. So they get really fat and buy a lot of plasma screens.

Morphizm: You come at our War-on-Terrorized world from a variety of angles. The war in Iraq, Osama's speech, conflict in Africa. And your method seems pretty postmodern: Remixing media and history to offer alternative political, if not fantastical, scenarios.
MC:  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, sub-divided reality, etc., and it has those colored notebook tabs on the side, really cool. Much like the mentally ill do, 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!

Morphizm: I think Philip K. Dick would get a kick out of you.
MC: Philip K. Dick is on my to-do reading list in the big notebook.

Morphizm: What drew you to Mary Todd Lincoln. She is a polarizing character. I've heard everything from rumors that she used to literally beat the shit out of her husband to anecdotes that her sons had her committed to an insane asylum to gain control of the family wealth, what there was left of it after she spent most of it.
MC: I wanted a corollary heroine, a combination of George Bush and me. She was a mentally ill rich woman, so there's your George Bush. She was a romantic, overly emotional glove-lover. That's me, get it? She is compelling, complex and tragic. Toward the end, she said a dead Indian chief was controlling her through wires in her teeth. Why is it always the teeth? Mary Todd is the manic, and Lincoln himself was the depressive. I think he was very protective of her and would not really like what I have done. But surely, he'd like the tunes!

July 5, 2007