#flag era

From the Archives (23/?) ↳ Bloody Crumpets, FLAG Concerts

Original Link Last accessed 9/21/2024

The 59th Sound recently had a very revealing, yet incredibly rewarding chat with Harvest alumni Emilie Autumn,  who is returning to Australia in March for a headline tour of the East Coast, courtesy of Soundwave Touring.

Hi Emilie! I'm Olivia from The 59th Sound. Thanks for talking with us today. How are you? Hi, I'm excellent! Olivia's my favourite name on the face of the planet, by the way. How are you?

Oh really? I'm very well thank you. What have you been up to recently? Well right now I'm stuck. Well not really. I'm emotionally stuck, but I'm physically snuggled up in bed in a hotel in North Carolina and it's absolutely hurricaning outside. We've been told that we're going to have a hard time getting back on our bus in the morning. Right now though the girls and I are just going to have a romantic evening in our hotel room just being stupid and drinking wine. That's probably going to happen for the rest of the night because we can't do much else anyway!

Sounds like fun! One of your performance trademarks is the violin which you've been learning since you were young. What was your childhood like? Was it a very musical upbringing? It was, but not because I was surrounded by musical parents or family or anything. It was [musical] just because that's what I did. The violin was something I asked for when I was really small and I just had this insane affinity for it. I was shy and inward like most kids and afraid of people and speaking. It instantaneously became my way to speak and communicate. That's the way I grew up and gained confidence to the point where I just had to break out of the very conservative classical world because I didn't want to only be doing cover songs my whole life - I wanted to write my own music. When you're played a Beethoven concerto you're still covering a song. It could be the most genius song ever but it's still a cover because you've only learnt it and it's a song that many other people are playing. I still play that music, I'll always play that music, and I'll always make classical violin recordings forever but I had to start telling my own story at some point. It was the violin that gave me the tools to be able to do that and to be able to communicate and have any confidence at all. Once I had a sense of who I was I could take over and start speaking and singing and using my own words with this beautiful piece of wood that I would stick under my chin every day.

You've previously said that you had auditory hallucinations brought on by bipolar disorder and sleep when you were younger. Can you tell us more about that? For a lack of other words, the "voices in my head" situation?  There's not really much to tell other than what I wrote about in my autobiography. Truthfully, I've spent a lifetime going to psychiatrists asking what they thought it was and nobody's been able to tell me anything. When people from other worlds stop talking to you there isn't a doctor alive that can say that's what that is. All they can say is "Is that happening to you now?" To which I say a very wisely thought-out no, because if you say it's happening to you now they'll say that's 100% schizophrenia and you'll have to be locked up or heavily medicated. But if that kind of things happens to you as a child, that isn't necessarily what that means at all. I have my own thoughts now as a grown-up on what that whole thing was about.

Wow, this is kind of odd because I've never talked about this in an interview before ever! I'm not exactly sure how far to take this.

What I believe now is that I think those voices were of an entity watching over me and taking care of me spiritually in order to keep out some very dark things. I think what started happening was that there was a dark entity and a light entity and they were sort of going to war within me. I think that's something that is related to a bipolar situation because you had these two sides and I think when I was really small [the entities] were just figuring out what was going on and just getting to know each other. It was actually the voices of these two sides making this arrangement and trying to keep me safe. It was terrifying at the time because I didn't know how to deal with it.

Do you think those kind of voices or hallucinations have influenced your music? Yes, in the greatest way possible. I was overwhelmed with these voices in my head on a daily basis. It became a constant part of my life that I'd share my life with these things, I'd have them talk to me, and I would try get them to go away. The only way that I could deal with it and to stop going mad was to play music in my head. So my ability to write actually came from that – I’d write full symphonies in my head and that’s how my albums are created. Everything [musical] was created in my head because I had to be able to manifest complete detailed pieces of music that I had heard in order to have something that was loud enough to quite the voices that were talking to me all the time. Because of that ability to recreate music and manifest it when I needed it, it’s now my ultimate and primary communication device. If I need to tell a story I just go into my head and manifest this thing and all of a sudden I would have an album or a string quartet or whatever the hell it needs to be. It completely programs my brain to work the way that it does. It sounds really cliché but I needed this thing – I needed music to basically save me. It sounds very melodramatic but it’s also true. [When I was young] I was beside myself, I didn’t know what to do, I was absolutely terrified all the time screaming or crying or going absolutely out of my mind. It was the only thing that could calm me down and it wasn’t listening to it being played, it was actually playing it in my head.

So yes, it has influenced me, definitely. The only reason I work the way that I do is because I had to and now I just can. So really it’s another thing I can be grateful for because I can only regret – I can’t resent a lot of things that have happened to me because they’ve made me somebody that I’m now learning to like! That might make me sound silly but I’m really grateful to be able to do that. It gives me the tools to pretty much do my job.

Definitely. When you became a teenager your musical tastes started to shift where you focused more on the rock rather than the classical side. What do you think your influences were as a teenager and as a young adult? Outside the world of classical music my influences have always primarily been theatre – Broadway and the like. From there, gravitating towards rock music, I was getting into things like Queen and David Bowie. I would look at them and think that that’s what I wanted to get in to. They weren’t just playing the same three chords. They had actual skill and were fearless. They were theatrical and acted the way they wanted. They sung about real things and they didn’t apologise for what they stood for. I wanted to put all that into a really entertaining package and Bowie and Freddie Mercury were great examples to me. From there it wasn’t any particular artist; it was really a style of sound.

I got really in to industrial music because it was the style of percussion – it was just noises. The reason I got into industrial programming in my own music was because it alerted me to a landscape that was already out there and then I wanted to make my own percussive kits that were made up of samples and things from the Victorian era – things from a hundred years ago, which was more like, “this is the sound of a steam engine, this is the sound of a factory”. So my own music – it was kind of a joke in the past but it’s become serious – is in the Victorian-industrial genre. And that’s specifically because I was using that style of modern percussion as a way to illustrate the landscape of the time. When they went through the Industrial Revolution – the real one – you had the dissolving of the class system, factories were going up and other people were losing their jobs. It was chaos but it was also the emerging of technology and everything was moving so quickly. That was the sound I wanted to be going on behind these new modern stories that I wanted to tell.

I know I kind of went off-track there but that’s how I got into the modern thing. It was me realizing, “okay there’s all this stuff going on out there,” then realizing, “whoa, there are A LOT of tools" which, along with the skill and discipline and the work ethic I had built up since I was small, I can use as a storyteller and that’s what it’s really all about. It’s about how to become the best storyteller that I can possibly be.  

Breaking into the music scene must have been pretty hard seeing as your sound is so unique. How did you do it? I’ve always felt that in my life I’ve always been breaking away from things. To this day I haven’t really broken in to anything. I think the reason I have any degree of success now is because I didn’t stop doing what it is I wanted to do and I didn’t wait for anyone to choose me and to say, “you are the next big thing”. I’m not the next big thing; I’m never going to be the next big thing; I don’t WANT to be the next big thing!

If you’re the next big thing that means from then you’re not the next big thing and then what are you? So I think it’s been more about getting rid of people, influences, [record] labels, everything. I had to get out of my last label to put my new record out on my own, which I have released on my own label.

I’m constantly discovering myself by not being discovered by other people and I think that’s exactly what happened. Nobody did care what I had to say but the moment I stopped giving a fuck what anybody cared about, that’s when everybody started caring about what I had to say! It’s backwards. That’s what happened when I put out the Opheliac record. I wasn’t on a label; I wasn’t on anything. I had been on labels in the past that I’ve gotten off at the last possible minute when I felt my soul being taken away from me. So I broke away from everything, made that record, and because it was so honest about not giving a fuck about anything or doing it in any style or genre, that’s when it was pretty much instantaneously heard. Within a couple of weeks I was on the cover of one of the major German gothic-industrial magazines and I didn’t even know that was the style I was!

At that time in Europe – around the five- or six-year-ago mark – they needed something new and different and there was nobody doing something that was really genre defying at that moment, especially a girl. So that happened and it was still a matter of not listening or paying attention to anybody, to keep a laser-focus on constantly developing your sound, and keeping the drive not for anybody else: not to money or fame or the semblance of any other. Just keep remembering why you’re doing this. You’re doing this to tell a story; you’re doing this to learn about yourself and thereby learning about other people. When it ultimately became about the whole mental health issue, then it became about doing this to help myself by whom I’d also help other people. Then it came into this whole thing that is now unstoppable. You can’t take it away now; it’s already there. It’s not just a song, it’s several records, it’s a book, it’s a show, it’s a musical. Now I’m in that beautiful position where I no longer have to care about what anyone thinks because if I just keep on doing what I’m doing, the people that need to be there will be there and the people that don’t need to be there are the people that I don’t care if they’re there or not.

It’s one of those situations where the less you care what other people think, the more they care about you. It’s kind of beautiful in that way, to finally see something happen for only the right reasons. It’s not like there’s a label with money, there’s no massive PR campaign. If anybody knows about me and likes it, it’s because they sincerely do. It’s not because they heard it on the radio so many times that they’re like, “well I guess I like it because I’ve heard it fifty times.” It just seems very sincere at this moment and that’s why I think I’ll always have this audience because they’re loyal and because they came here on their own.

That’s very insightful of you. Unfortunately we’ve run out of time but it’s been a pleasure talking to you. I hate it when that happens!

Happy Birthday EA! ♥ 

Exclusive merch at #asylumexperience on @warpedtour will feature these lovely ladies...

- EA on Instagram || May 24, 2014

Posted: April 13, 2019 Live Link - Facebook || Last accessed: 4/26/2022