Love is Noise Pop

By Teresa Jusino

Music geeks, this one’s for you!

I met Jessie Fredlund, drummer for the indie band, Audn, a couple of months ago, and she immediately impressed me not only with her drumming skill, but with her passion for indie rock, shoegaze, and noise pop.  While I consider myself to have a wide breadth of musical knowledge, she taught me that there’s so much more I have to learn!  Like more about Joy Division, for instance.

Fredlund loves noise pop so much, in fact, that she’s taken it upon herself to organize the first annual Love Is Noise Pop festival in New York City, which begins tomorrow night and runs every Saturday in October through the 18th.  I spoke with Jessie about her band, the festival, and what it means to be a woman in the indie rock scene.

Teresa Jusino:  Tell me a little about yourself!  Age, where are you from, basic stats?

Jessie Fredlund: I’m from Milwaukee and I’m 23.  What other stats could you want?  My batting average is .001.  Actually I don’t know, but it would probably be around that.

TJ:  What’s your music background?  Where does your interest in music come from?

JF: I come from a musical family.  My mom was very involved in music as a singer and played a number of instruments when she was growing up.  Her whole family was very musical — even her Swedish grandparents played music, and a twelve string guitar was one of the few things they brought with them when they came to the US.  My mom made me learn piano when I was young, and I hated having to practice.  She told me I’d thank her for it eventually, and you know, she was right!  I always wanted to be a drummer though.  I don’t know why, but when I’d see any kind of band or orchestra, I’d just focus in on the drummer and think, that will be me one day!

When I turned 10, I was old enough to join the school band, and of course, I decided to play drums.  I ran into some odd and unexpected resistance because I was a girl, even from the band teacher.  But I didn’t care, I was doing what I always knew I would.  Then when I was about 12 or so, my parents salvaged an old drumset from a friend’s attic and set it up in our basement for me.  So I started learning rock and jazz drumming on that kit.

I was in a lot of student bands and orchestras over the years, so I had some training in orchestral percussion.  I couldn’t take lessons very regularly, so I would just try to learn from everyone around me.  But things really changed for me when I was 15 and some friends recruited me for an indie rock band they were forming.  We were all girls and we were doing some really cool alternative stuff, and that’s when I really put my head down and learned rock drumming.  And I’ve been learning, by listening and playing, ever since then.

TJ: You’re a member of a band called Audn.  Tell me a bit about them.  How’d you come together?  How would you describe your sound? What are your goals for the band?

JF: Audn started about year ago.  My bandmates Stephan and Christina started working on some songs in the summer of 2007.  In about September, I had been in New York a few months and decided it was time for me to look for a way to play music.  I opened Craigslist and one the first ads I saw was for a shoegaze band seeking a drummer.  I thought it was too good to be true, but I responded and they invited me to play with them.  I guess it seemed to be a good fit, because they invited me back again.

The band has a very layered sound, with a lot of blending of guitar, synthesizer and vocals.  It’s sort of psychedelic music, very spacey, but we try to keep it moving with some dance-inspired beats from me and the bass player.  On thing that sets us apart is that there are often overlapping melodies from vocals and guitar instead of just having one melodic line at a time.  It’s experimental in some ways, but definitely with a pop sensibility.

TJ: You decided to start a new music festival in NYC called Love Is Noise Pop, which is devoted to musicians “whose style explores the territory between indie pop and shoegaze.”  Why did you decide to take this on?  What niche do you think this festival fills?

JF: I don’t really feel like I decided to take this on.  It just sort of happened of its own accord.  I noticed a number of shows where there would be a bunch of dark, heavy shoegaze-inspired bands, and one band that was equally layered and loud but was really playing pop music.  There were a handful of these pop bands, but they seemed to always be thrown in with other scenes and a lot of them had never heard of one another.  I wanted to point out to everyone that these bands were doing something different, something new and exciting, and I wanted the musicians to connect and share ideas and really work together to push this sort of music forward.  When I talked about putting together a show, the enthusiasm from the bands was so overwhelming the event grew to a three-night festival.

TJ: For those of us who aren’t quite so indie – can you explain “noise pop?”  What does noise pop sound like?  What are some prime examples of noise pop that Pink Raygunners can go and download?  (aside from the bands playing at LINP, of course!)

JF: Like any genre name, the term “noise pop” is really open to interpretation.  What we looked for when we selected bands to play this festival is for bands who have really catchy, fun melodies and concise, well-structured songs, but who back that up with more experimental sounds.  A lot of our bands use distortion, feedback, dissonance and noise but it’s all tied together by these brilliant, sing-along melodies.  A few of the classic “noise pop” bands that come to mind are Yo La Tengo, the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Mercury Rev.

TJ: What do you hope comes out of Love Is Noise Pop?  What are your goals for the festival?

JF: I’d really just like to see the bands connect with new listeners and also to connect with each other to create a community where we can all draw off one another’s ideas and support each other.  These sorts of scenes exist for a lot of styles of music, but the bands playing at my festival have sometimes been left the odd one out.  I’d like to just build connections between them and help their fans discover more bands they’ll enjoy.

TJ: How do you feel as a woman in the indie music scene?  Do you think it’s a community in which women get their due?  As musicians, songwriters, producers, or music writers covering and developing the scene?  Where do you think there could be an improvement in how women are involved in indie music?  Where do you think they HAVE excelled and achieved a lot?

JF: Being a female drummer, I’ve certainly been very aware of the role of women in the music scene around me.  And it’s still a very male-focused, male-run industry.  One thing that has impressed me about “noise pop” and related styles of music like shoegaze and indie pop is that these genres seem to have been among the most “gender-blind.”  In a lot of rock music, working with women is still very stigmatized, and some circles, women are added to bands intentionally as eye-candy or to make the band seem diverse in some way.  But in the bands I’m working with, I see women playing lead guitar, women playing drums, all these things that were so off-limits for so long, and no one even thinks twice.

That said, of course there are still way more men than women playing, even this particular brand of rock music, and it’s still an uphill battle.  But this is a genre where we can really start to make progress.

In terms of producing, I’d love to see more women involved in events.  There are a lot of female talent buyers and promoters, but it’s not enough yet.  But I hope girls and women will see what I am doing and what other women in this scene are doing and be encouraged.  I know there are people who have taken me less seriously as a musician and festival producer because I’m female.  But I hope those same people will see how successful I’ve been and think twice about doubting the next woman who comes along.

For more information on Love Is Noise Pop 2008, visit www.loveisnoisepop.com or their MySpace page at www.myspace.com/nycnoisepop. For more information on Audn, visit www.myspace.com/audnmusic.

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TERESA JUSINO was born on the same day that Skylab fell. Coincidence? She doesn’t think so.  As a writer, her work has appeared in Elmont Life newspaper, and on the sadly defunct website, CentralBooking.com. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories. As a geek, Teresa loves Star Trek, Lost, comics, and anything Joss Whedon ever touched. She has a fangirl *squee-ing* crush on Brian K. Vaughan, which beat up her Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man crush in a fight proving once again that writing skill trumps gadget skill even when that gadget skill is attached to bulging biceps.  Teresa is also an aspiring fangbanger.

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