The Treasure Hunt - CocoRosie

It’s difficult to think of a group able to elicit more strident responses than avant-pop duo CocoRosie.  Since their personal reunion after a decade of estrangement, sisters Bianca and Sierra Casady have divided listeners with four albums of ferociously individualistic music.  Although many have been captivated by their visually intense live shows and adamantly eccentric explorations of sonic texture, others have been put off by Bianca’s curdled vocals or the suspicion that very little lies beneath the duo’s Bohemian posing.

Taking a break from work on her upcoming art exhibition in Japan, Bianca isn’t fazed by the pair’s critics, pointing towards the benefits of a gripe often tossed her way.  “I think it takes a lot of self-indulgence to be an artist,” she comments through a blocked nose (Southern France not being the warmest of places to spend the winter).  “Really, for us it’s a sort of ecstasy … We are the ones who are getting a lot of pleasure out of it first, I don’t think we’d be doing it otherwise, and that’s really our compass for our work, it’s based on our bliss.”

In practice, this wide-eyed willingness to throw out any rulebooks and to follow their own impulses is what defines the CocoRosie modus operandi, elements from a vast range of sources including classical (Sierra is a trained opera singer), blues, hip-hop, dub-step and electronica being assembled with results that are unerringly their own.  “There is a sort of treasure hunt feeling that we have when we’re making music,” muses Bianca.  “It’s kind of like creating a sort of alchemy of distinct parts that don’t necessarily belong together.”

This willingness to pull aspects of distinct genres into their own self-contained world while transfiguring them in the process, perhaps accounts for the instantly striking quality of their music.  While their ultra-low-fi exercise in francophilia La Maison de Mon Reve in 2004 attracted no small degree of attention (prompting Touch and Go to take the uncommon step of seeking out the sister’s signatures), it was with their 2005 follow-up Noah’s Ark that they made their mark.  While guest spots from Antony Hegarty (and subsequent touring slot with the angel-voiced androgene) certainly didn’t hurt the cause, the album is a stunning musical confrontation of the residual warping effects of childhood traumas and externally imposed religious faith, a high mark that record number three, The Adventures Ghosthorse and Stillborn (2007), failed to reach.

The twilight world of last year’s Grey Oceans presented a return to form, albeit one wrapped in foreboding, largely acoustic, clothing.  As musically diverse as ever (see the collision of honky-tonk piano, hand-claps and jungle beats of ‘Hopscotch’ for example, or the sombre piano and lush strings of ‘Lemonade’), Grey Oceans is marked by a meditative atmosphere, Bianca’s lyrics reflecting her preoccupation with the natural world, or as she puts it “the perfection of imperfection.”

Although the album is easily the duo’s most cohesive and accessible collection to date, for Bianca the process of music-making remains a laborious one, each song representing a plunge into the unknown.  “We [start with] less of a map than in the beginning actually, which is partly what took the record so long to come together … We started out with a lot of dancey, more poppy music just as a kind of a naughty exercise in a really different direction, but after a couple of years … the record became a lot more melancholic and acoustic and more stripped down – much to our surprise.  So we really improvised more than ever with this record.”

While their previous work has featured guest artists such as Antony and Devendra Banhart, with Grey Oceans the pair took the unusual step of allowing a third party into the writing process, the contributions of pianist Gael Rakotondrabe providing some extra glue.  “[It was] very luxurious to work with a musician who’s really capable of improvising in any genre of music,” says Bianca of the experience.  “I think it allowed us to travel even more quickly, more vastly into these different genres … he brought a certain fluidity to the music which made the record more musical in a sense, more melodic.”

To foster the sort of bubble in which their creative processes flourish, the sisters maintain their isolation from the rest of the world for as much of the time as they can get away with, even while on tour.  “Real life for me can be more stressful,” says Bianca.  “All we do [on tour is] focus on preparing ourselves for performing.  There’s nothing else to think about and we don’t keep telephones with us or anything, so the outside world can’t even really contact us … just being near nature in a personless landscape is what really propels my poetry and my ideas these days.”

Remaining apart certainly seems to provide the kind of uninhibited space necessary for the ongoing reinvention of the fabulous beast that is CocoRosie, with things set to be shaken up completely following upcoming Australian appearances.  “After we have our Asian Australian tour, we’re going to really completely reshape our band and kind of start from scratch, and we’re pretty excited about that.  We’re gonna really just have the two of us working together again.”

First published in The Brag, Iss. 395, January 17th 2011