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Ecstatic Lesbians

If there is such a musical genre as lesbian classics, the Montreal-based electronica outfit Lesbians on Ecstasy is well on its way to referencing the whole lot of it. The band has already gained recognition for reimagining hits from the likes of the Indigo Girls, k.d. lang and Melissa Etheridge on its self-titled debut album, and Lesbians on Ecstasy’s remix album, Giggles in the Dark, featured contributions from Le Tigre, Scream Club, 1-Speed Bike, Kids on TV, and Tracy and the Plastics.

Their latest release, We Know You Know – a reference to an early ’70s Meg Christian album – delves further back into the lesbian musical canon and was released on April 10 on Alien8 Records. The band worked with some material from Olivia Records, one of the earliest women’s music labels, and what band leader Bernie Bankrupt described as “more women-with-a-Y music from the ’70s.”

It was less familiar terrain than the lesbian music icons of the ’90s, but the band members enjoyed their journey, perhaps more captivated by the culture than the music itself. “It’s sort of interesting listening to what those ladies were talking about,” Bernie said. “And also they had really extensive liner notes and really wanted to make what they were doing obvious to people. They really wanted to make their process available to anyone who consumed their music.”

The cultural references and sampling in the band’s material can make for some complicated copyright issues, so you probably won’t see them performing on The L Word anytime soon. They were approached by the show, but plans fell through when Showtime was unable to get clearance for the songs they wanted to use.

Bernie wasn’t surprised. “We take our own copyright risks,” she said, “but of course Showtime would be much more on the line. They have much deeper pockets than we do.” But Bernie proudly notes that Lesbians on Ecstasy’s music “has been used in an exceptional amount of independent lesbian pornography.”

The band recently toured California, performed at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, headed over to England in March, and then will follow up some mid-Atlantic gigs with a rock opera at the International Contemporary Art Biennale in Montreal in May 2007.

Asked to describe Lesbians on Ecstasy’s approach to lesbian classics, Bernie said: “There are some that we love and some that we hate, and some that we love to hate, and some that we’ve grown to love. I mean, I don’t really like that song ‘Constant Craving,’ but when you work with a song so much, you develop a new appreciation for it. Sometimes we’ve tried to work with something because we like the idea of it, but if we don’t have a strong emotional reaction to it, it’s hard to get into it. You get bored really quick.”

Bernie handles the synths while Fruity Frankie does the vocals, Jackie the Jackhammer is on drums, and Veronique Mystique plays bass. Jackie and Frankie hail from Montreal, Veronique comes from Quebec, and Bernie grew up in British Columbia. All are in their early 30s.

The women – except for Veronique, who hadn’t yet joined the band – first came together in 2003 to play one show at a Montreal women’s electronic art event called Maids in Cyberspace. There weren’t a lot of women playing electronic music at the time, and the event organizers were scrambling for acts.

“They were looking for more women so they asked us if we had something we’d like to perform, knowing we were people who were messing around with computers and stuff anyway,” Bernie recalled. “It was sort of in that spirit that we thought, ‘OK, let’s just do something. We have this opportunity. It would be really fun to do electronic lesbian music.'”

The three women weren’t expecting anything lasting to come of the one-time gig, but the response from it was overwhelmingly positive, and the band got more show offers that very night.

“It just kind of took off on its own, which is an exciting thing,” Bernie said. “I’ve been in the arts and performance; I studied theater and the arts; and you work really hard for a long time, and when something happens like that — where it just kind of takes off on its own — it’s hard to deny that impulse because you spend a lot of time knocking on doors and trying to make something happen. So that was how we all felt: I guess we’re onto something here. People really like it; let’s run with it and see where it goes. And then now we’re sort of still doing it.”

Nearly four years after that first gig, the genre, as well as the industry as a whole, is still overwhelmingly male-focused. “I was trying to put together a mixed CD last night and use mostly lady-run labels and musicians,” Bernie said, “and it’s actually just really hard to come up with five women-run or women-focused labels globally. Not even speaking just to electronic music.”

Lesbians on Ecstasy is far from your typical electronic band. Everything the band samples they play live, sampling the ideas rather than actual recordings, so you won’t hear CD playback or sequencing at their shows.

It was a conscious decision the band made from the beginning. “When we first started, we wanted to play electronic music but we wanted to play it live,” Bernie said. “We don’t want to get up there and have playback. We want to be performing the music, and obviously with electronic music it’s a bit of a weird challenge to try and do that.”

Apparently Montreal is home to a large minimal-techno-and-laptop music scene, “where there’s a lot of dudes sitting onstage behind laptops making music — which is often really good music, but in terms of a performance or a show, it’s really incredibly boring to watch,” Bernie said. “So we just decided that that was something that we didn’t want to do. So it forced us from the beginning to be creative with how we were going to work with the material we chose to work with.”

The band members take an archivist or researcher’s approach to gathering new material. “We start by collecting records,” Bernie explained. “We all have really big record collections. We start trying to find new things and reading liner notes and figuring out what musician played here and trying to collect everything in that same vein. And then we just sit and listen, listen, listen and try and pick out is there a note or a riff or some words that inspire us about this song? It could be in a positive way or a negative way, but we try and find those nuggets that really appeal to us.”

Bernie uses a vintage Ensoniq ASR10 sampler that loads off floppy discs. “It has an amazing sound,” she said, “but, oh my God, it is so unreliable, it’s insane. And when it crashes, you have to reload the entire operating system from scratch off of Zip disk. And in shows we have to [in a sing-song voice] keep talking. I’m still loading. …”

After a recent upgrade to her Mac, Bernie had to resample and rebuild the band’s entire repertoire from scratch because her software was no longer compatible with her new operating system.

Even though they initially decided to play live, Lesbians on Ecstasy is getting ready to break their own rules. “I think it’s interesting that we restricted ourselves to how we perform, but I think it also meant that we restricted the music a bit,” Bernie explained. “So, we’re interested in letting go of our own rules and playing with more samples and more loops and gear that would allow us more flexibility onstage and enable us to build more complex songs.” For more on Lesbians on Ecstasy, visit their official website or download We Know You Know from Alien8 Recordings.

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